I....Forgot!

For those of you of a certain age, there was once a time when Saturday Night Live was a TV show worth watching. No, seriously, stop laughing, it really WAS a good show, but then the next thing we knew, it was 1979...Anyway, one of the times when Steve Martin was on, his punchline for a long joke he was telling was "I FORGOT!," spoken in the unique voice that he has. I tried to find a clip of it, but came up short.

We read in 2 Kings 22 where the people of Judah forgot. After sending the secretary to pay the people repairing the temple, the Book of the Law was found. Now, if you're a God-fearing king like Josiah apparently is, it had to be rather disconcerting to find the document that describes how you were to live, the sacrifices, festivals, etc. No one likes documentation of our shortcomings, and we'll see how Josiah reacted in the next day or so.

I gradated from Trinity in 1976, the bicentennial year of the U.S. As part of our commemoration of that, we planted a tree at the end of the parking lot and buried a time capsule. What we DIDN'T do was leave any notes behind as to where this time capsule was located. We might have extended the parking lot, so where it is could easily be under asphalt, the tree is certainly no longer there. None of it matters--until someone very accidentally does some digging and comes across it, that time capsule is lost. To put it in other words, that piece of history has BECOME history.

Believe it or not, this isn't unusual for time capsules. All it takes is for one generation to forget, and they're lost and will only be found by accident. We're told at the beginning of today's reading that the Law was found in 622 B.C. The last mention of Passover I can find occurred in Joshua 5, and something we're going to read in a couple of days very strongly implies that the Passover hadn't been celebrated in quite some time.

We have two responses when confronted with evidence of our shortcomings--admission, repentance and a promise to change our ways, or a shrug of the shoulders and a "so what" attitude. Josiah clearly made the correct choice, and we commemorate that choice every Sunday when we begin our service with our confession. We are presented with the evidence of our shortcomings, and if our heart is in the right place, we act just as Josiah did, figuratively tearing our robes and promising to change our ways. "I forgot!" works as a punch line to a joke, but fails miserably as an excuse for why we don't  adhere to God's law.

Scott