Therefore, brothers and sisters, be eager to confirm your call and election. Do this and you will never ever be lost. 11 In this way you will receive a rich welcome into the everlasting kingdom of our Lord and savior Jesus Christ.
12 So I’ll keep reminding you about these things, although you already know them and stand secure in the truth you have. 13 I think it’s right that I keep stirring up your memory, as long as I’m alive. (Common English Bible)
Armenian Genocide Remembrance Day 2022
A flickering eternal flame acts as a widely understood symbol of memory and remembrance. One such flame stands guard over the grave of John F. Kennedy, the last US president to be assassinated. His assassination was one of those events that my parents’ generation remembers where they were when they learned the news. Another eternal flame keeps vigil over the grave of Elvis Presley not too far northwest of us at Graceland. In my hometown of Kansas City, steam is used to create a flame from the 265-foot Liberty Tower that is part of the National World War I Memorial and Museum. Remembering, memorial, memory, we root ourselves through memory to these spots in our lives.
And here, in Alabama, in 1836, the Muscogee/Creek nation, when they were expelled from these lands by federal troops and forcibly sent to Oklahoma, they took with them an eternal flame that became the dedication point of the lands in Oklahoma that now bear the Muscogee name.
Just this month, over 185 years later, a homecoming that has been a decade in the making was finally experienced as members of the Muscogee nation organized a homecoming—the translation of their term is literally, “we have come back” in nearby Oxford, Alabama in partnership with the city. They hope that this is the start of a deeper and stronger cultural Muscogee presence in the land that had been their home.
Because wherever you are on this planet orbiting the sun at high speed, home is everything. And memory of that home is deep and abiding. Just imagine your own home, or whatever home you have lived in the longest, or that you lived in during your most formative years. Your memories of it are apt to be strong, and unlikely to go anywhere soon.
I say that on a day, April 24, that remembers the genocide that took my family’s homeland from them, that forced them to ransom everything and leaved murdered loved ones behind in the dust to flee first to Russia, then after the Bolsheviks took over, across the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans to the United States, as well as to Lebanon and Syria. Armenians remember today because it began the genocide as Armenian community leaders began to be rounded up, incarcerated, and summarily executed. Just over a week later, my great-great uncle Mardiros, his son Mourad, and my great-great grandfather Sarkis would all be dead. A year later, my great-great grandmothers Mariam and Altoon both died. And a year after her, Mardiros’s widow Yester and brother-in-law Bedros would die as well. And the place that had been my family’s home for…I don’t even know how long…was gone to us forever. The rest of my family had to flee or die. It was that simple.
My family landed here in 1919, but just five years later, partly in reaction to the influx of Armenian Genocide refugees, the United States banned Armenians—among several other nationalities—from immigrating to the United States for the next thirty years. And so even a place that became home by necessity over the span of generations communicated very clearly that it did not want to be home to my people. I have been asked here at Valley why I am so “obsessed” with my ethnic identity when the reality is that if I did not carry the stories of my ancestors nobody else would because the place in which we would do so was forcibly taken from us in a way that it has not for you unless you are also descended from survivors of genocide or chattel slavery. Memory is what we have left.
So, again I say: home is everything. And what we choose to remember of home is deep and abiding.
For most of you, Valley has been your spiritual home for many years, and I want to spend my penultimate sermon with you as your minister talking about what we can choose to remember of our time together: memories and lessons learned, highs and lows, special occasions and day-to-day labor. All of it is on the table.
For our time together is about to become a memory, and how we treat our memories is a profound expression of our values. What we choose to remember, what we choose to forget, all of it is like what we choose to spend money on or how we spend our time. We reveal our priorities in what we, individually and communally, devote our memorials and monuments to.
We celebrated the Resurrection of the Lord one week ago, on Easter Sunday. We choose to remember that as an expression of our values. We choose to remember our Lord every Sunday at the table, where He explicitly commands us to remember Him, as an expression of our values. Every December in worship, we remember Christmas. Every Lent, we remember the temptation in the wilderness. Our order of worship and our church calendar are, in no small part, acts of memory, of remembering the life and public ministry of our Lord.
We choose to remember that. We do not have to do so. Look around, nobody is forcing us to be here. We are here by choice, participating in the remembrance of God in Christ by choice.
And in those almost two years of us doing so together, there are many things I hope we will each choose to remember: that when covid unleashed itself upon humanity, we saw through together what I pray will have been the worst and deadliest days. From behind computer screens and masks we worshiped in safety the author of life as a rebuke to the wrath of death’s own pestilence. Thank God we have been successful. Some of you have contracted covid, some of you have had friends or relatives die from it. But among our number, none have been hospitalized and none have died. I said from the beginning that our goal was to commit to nobody missing, nobody claimed by the grave. And like the Risen Christ of Easter Sunday, we have so far been victorious.
I cannot tell you how much that means to me, but doubly so on a day I and my people set aside to honor the ancestors we lost to the killing deserts. Death authors many a human tragedy and calamity, very often with humanity holding the writing pen, but once death has had its say, we respond. And I hope that the faithfulness that we have shown in our response to covid is neither forgotten nor jettisoned after I am gone.
If you disagree, you will have to forgive me such wishes, but I believe them to be entirely Biblical. It is why I chose this passage from 2 Peter 1, in which the writer says that they may not be present for much longer, but that they still stir up the memory of the faithful community so that the brethren, for their sake. And it meant a lot to me when I first read those words because that expresses a lot of my relationship with the church—stirring up memory so that the truth might be honored. Or in less poetic terms, I sometimes show my love for the church by poking it with a stick.
The writer of 2 Peter pokes with a stick for a purely noble reason, that the church might remember the singular power of truth. Truth, too, is something we can choose to remember, or to forget. In a time in which disinformation and misinformation, convenient euphemisms for lies and false witness, reign over our minds, truth has been driven from the public square like a refugee from genocide—beaten and hunted, wretched and desperate.
And yet Jesus famously teaches in John 8 that this hounded and mistreated truth is what we must know, and what will set us free.
Memory, if it retains truth, is a powerful gift from God. And it is my hope that we can share in the depth of that truth as we remember our time together—of church milestones and anniversaries shared, of sisters in Christ buried, of new additions and expansions to our lovely campus, but also of hopes and dreams that have gone unfulfilled.
I hope that will be an important exercise going forward during the upcoming interim period, because I want Valley to respect the memory of what we said we wanted to do together: to reimagine evangelism, reconnect with the community around us, and reengage with younger generations for whom we as Disciples of Christ have something important to offer.
Because even if that is not what we got to do together—and even if it is not what everyone in fact wanted to do together—those hopes still lived, and they may live still. The pandemic surely played a part in scotching those hopes, but I hope and pray that after I am gone, you will ask yourselves about those hopes…whether they still live, if so then how deeply, and what that might mean for this, your spiritual home.
Valley has been my spiritual home too for this season, and my final hopes for you will have to wait until next Sunday, for my very last sermon. But for now, I will say that I do hope that you will each, as it were, continue poking each other with sticks to remind one another of the truths we share, the truths we hold dear. A home that is built on truth is a home built upon rock. The home that is built on half-truths, or worse, misinformation or disinformation, is the home built upon sand, that will ultimately wash away with the tides. Remember that.
And remember that home stretches beyond today, or tomorrow, or the next. Home stretches across centuries. It is why I remember where my family came from, and why. I remember who we left behind, and what we had to leave behind in order to live. So too, I imagine, have the Muscogee peoples who at long last saw Alabama again after 185 years, if only to say, “I have come back.” Because when it is home you are talking about, being able to return to it is vital to our humanity.
Home is everything. But it is not only physical. It is spiritual, ethereal, living in multiple planes of existence, in ways both rooted here, in earth and dirt, but also in our minds, in our memories. Valley as a spiritual home for me, and Carrie and Sadie, will soon be one of those memories. And so memory, too, is everything.
Memory is everything. And know that whatever else may come, and whatever else has, in what I choose to remember, I will choose to remember well these days of when your pastor was me.
By the grace of God, may it be so. Amen.
Rev. Dr. Eric Atcheson
Birmingham, Alabama
April 24, 2022, Armenian Genocide Remembrance Day