Focal Passage: Genesis 28:10-22
Memorials are everywhere. When you cross over a bridge, you often find a name attached to the bridge and you can’t help but wonder about the story of that person.
Perhaps when you pass a stadium and see a statue of a revered athlete, you remember a specific moment or championship. Or, when walking in a park you find a monument honoring a leader or war hero, you try to imagine what happened. Or, when you go to an awards event recognizing someone receiving a scholarship awarded in the name of someone else, you think what that person was like.
The commonality is that we create memorials for events, or things or people and these memorials allow us to remember. Over 10 years ago, my wife Debbie died.
Our church and community set up a scholarship fund in her name. Nearly $10,000 has gone out to help with college expenses and every year, I and our children get to say her name out loud one more time. Memorials.
Lloyd
Jacob’s “stairway to heaven” was the dividing line ending the stories of Isaac and now the beginning of Jacob as a patriarch.
Running from both his father and brother, as he had betrayed both, God stopped him, spoke His affirmation to Jacob and His continued plan. In Jacob’s dream, the Lord announced again a promised land just as He had with his grandfather Abraham and his father Isaac.
Jacob found that God was present in this place and that it was “awesome” and it was the “gate of heaven.” He experienced the presence of God. As a result, he worshiped God, set up a “marker,” and renamed the place Bethel. He then made a vow that the Lord would be His God and he would give a tenth back to God. He set up a “marker” to mark the place.
Joshua established 12 stones from the Jordan River to remind the future children of Israel what God had done when Israel crossed the Jordan River into the new Promise Land. God had kept His promises.
When Jesus set the final meal for His disciples and taught them of the memorial meal “for as often as you eat this bread and drink this cup, you proclaim the Lord’s death until He comes.”
In an act of remembering, we proclaim what we believe and anticipate the hope of the future.
Memorials are not just for remembering but also for anticipating the future. They serve both as inspirations and reminders. For Jacob, Bethel was not just a place of God’s presence in his life then but also of His continued presence. He “marked” it and “named” it. That is what memorials do — remind us of the past and the hope in the reality of the present.
In just a few short weeks, I will once again hand out my late wife Debbie’s scholarship. The room full of high school seniors and their families will celebrate the recipient. As will I.
And I will smile, shake his or her hand and in my heart of hearts again acknowledge that if the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob and the Father of our Lord Jesus Christ was present with me during my darkest days following her death, He will also be present with me today as well. That is what memorials do. B&R
