"Remembering"

Pastor Laura Guy

May 24, 2009

Here's an instant replay of what happened in worship:

We heard Pastor Laura say that as she was doing research this week about Memorial Day, she discovered all kinds of interesting facts about it that she wanted to share with us. Since the topic of the message was "remembering", it was important to understand how we have organized our remembrance into a holiday.
She told us some of the stories about how the holiday - originally called Decoration Day - got its start. One story says that freed slaves in Charleston in 1865 found a mass grave for Union soldiers at a former site of a Confederate prison camp. They disinterred the bodies and gave them each an individual grave, creating a cemetery for Union soldiers. They came back a few years later to scatter flowers, or decorate, the graves.
We read excerpts from the original Memorial Day Order of 1868, a tribute to why it is important to remember the soldiers who gave their lives. From that historic beginning, Memorial Day has now become little more than a 3-day holiday for people, signaling the beginning of summer. Americans are asked to spend 1 minute in silence at 3 pm to remember the men and women who made the ultimate sacrifice. Just 1 minute to remember all the lives lost in war.
We heard about the long list of heroes in Hebrews 11 - people who lived by faith, unsure of what God had in store, but looking forward and passing on what they knew about God. In Hebrews 12, they are called a "great cloud of witnesses." We thought about all those who had gone before us in faith - not only the heroes of the Bible, heroes of Church history, but the heroes in our own lives, those who passed on the faith to us.
We remembered that we, too, would be a part of this great cloud someday, that we would continue to surround the people of Living Water Christian Church for as long as they continue to gather and worship. We prayed that we would pause to look back at all those who lived looking forward in faith.
We listened to the song "Cloud of Witnesses" as we filled out lists of the people who had looked forward and passed the faith on to us. We put those sheets of paper around the room to be reminded that we are indeed surrounded by so great a cloud of witnesses. We celebrated communion in their presence.