Biography
After pastoring United Methodist Churches in Georgia and South Carolina, William Willimon joined the faculty of Duke University in 1976, where he is now professor of Christian Ministry and Chaplain of their famous Chapel. Chaplain Willimon is an Editor at Large for two outstanding Christian publications, "Christian Century" and "Wittenburg Door." A prolific author, he has written fifteen books. [Biographical information is correct as of the broadcast date noted above.]

"Remember Not... Remember Me" 
I preach in a university Chapel, before a crowd of 19 through 21 year olds. As you can imagine, that's not always easy, particularly if the preacher believes that it's important to preach from the Bible. It's tough to make these college students interested in affairs on Mount Mizar or in the activities of the Jebusites.

As I wrestle with what to say to my congregation, only rarely does some word leap from the biblical text, grab me by the throat, and demand to be preached. In looking over the assigned lessons for this Sunday, nothing accosted me until, glancing over the Psalm, I read this phrase: "Remember not the sins of my youth, or my transgressions; according to thy steadfast love remember me,..."

I was hooked. It's too good a text to let pass in a university chapel or on the Sunday Evening Club. "Remember not the sins of my youth." What an evocative phrase! "Remember not the sins of my youth." What are these "sins of youth" for which the psalmist begs divine amnesia?

Sins of my youth! I see smoke-filled, sleazy dives known as "Sam's Bar and Grill." All night binges followed by aching head. Road trips, descents into the hell of God-knows-where. "Animal House" remade in Durham. Encounters in back seats of Chevrolets. About the age of a Duke Sophomore, Augustine, who spent the rest of his life repaying God for debts incurred during youthful degradation, prayed, "O Lord, make me chaste, but not yet!" For this prayer he became patron saint of college students. Sins of youth!

Every year, in the Chapel Choir's presentation of Handel's "Messiah," there is that time when the little boy steps forward and sings in soprano about corruption. "He suffered not corruption. He suffered not corruption." Corruption? What right has an eleven year old to sing of corruption? Does he know of such a thing? Come back when you're a sophomore at Duke and you can sing of corruption with conviction.

Sins of my youth! Speaking at a little college in Iowa, located in a town too small to be a dot on the map. "What on earth do students do here for entertainment?" I wondered aloud. My host replied, "O preacher, don't ask."

Every person over ten or twelve has some secret room somewhere, or a trunk hidden away in the attic, a closed casket buried deep in the basement of the soul, closed, dusty, cluttered with dark moments, memories we would as soon forget. And the older you get the more memory you forget to put in that room, that trunk, that grave. The older you grow, the more to forget. What is remorse but bitter memory? What is guilt but accusing memory?

In my counseling with people, the most frequent sort of suffering I encounter is suffering brought on by memory. What is this nervousness, this sleeplessness, nail biting, tossing and turning, drug-taking except from the feelings of fear, suspicion, anxiety resulting from memory too painful to bear? We fill our rooms with the trophies, diplomas, rings, photographs, and blue ribbons of good memories. But deeply hidden from public view in the center of the soul being is where we stuff the memories too painful to remember.

We handle undesirable memories by trying to forget them. "Let's agree to forget about it. Let's both act as if this just never happened."

"Why dwell on the past? What's done is done. Let's talk about something more pleasant."

Remember not the sins of my youth. But bad memory unremembered, pushed back into the secret place of ourselves, can do much harm. The unconscious has no digestive tract. It's not as if we can swallow hard and have our painful past pass from our consciousness and be done with it. We've tried to do that as a nation about past national traumas. We've tried to do it as individuals. When we try to forget the painful memories, we become strangers to ourselves, having cut down our history to pleasant, comfortable size, the stuff of our daydreams rather than our nightmares. Burying our past, says Henri Nouwen, is turning our back on our best teacher.

We wish that our past were over and done with, but it's not done with us, not yet. We're not the escape artists that we wish we were. We chatter, make jokes, turn on the radio, take a drink, try to live only for today. But then there's that face, the casual gesture, the wisp of an old tune, and we remember. We would to God that we could forget.

Awhile back I was accosted by an alumnus of my college. We were students together there. Knowing that I was now a trustee of the place he said, "Today's students are a disgrace. Are you aware of what is going on in the dorms? You trustees should tighten the rules, stick by your guns, make them shape up or ship out."

Unfortunately for him, my memory had not been dulled by the years. Apparently, I remembered his student days better than he. "Tighten the rules? Shape up or ship out? As I recall, when we were students, there were rather rigid rules against dorm visitation by members of the opposite sex."

"Right," he said. "And there still ought to be." "But aren't you glad they were not enforced on a certain night in early April, 1967, I believe? Or was it April of '68? When a certain person smuggled into the dorm a certain other person of the opposite....."
He wished to God that I had forgot.

In seminary, it never failed. The chief theological radical on our floor, the person who was always ranting and raving about "rabid fundamentalists" or "stupid conservatives" was himself, almost without fail, a former fundamentalist. He was ranting and raving against his own past, wishing to God to be over and done with his own roots.

At my high school reunion, with a band belting out oldies but goodies in the background, she asked, "You weren't always planning on being a preacher, were you? You weren't thinking about that when we were in high school, were you?"

"No," I said, "I wasn't."

"Good," she said. "That at least makes me feel better."

Remember not the sins of my youth.

Remember not, not just the things we did on Saturday night, but also what we did all week. The way we treated our parents. The people, people whose names we can't even recall, whom we hurt in thought, word, and deed, by things done or left undone. Dare we to remember even for a moment, and admit the truth of the ancient, honest words of confession, "We have followed too much the desires and devices of our own hearts. There is no health in us. We are not worthy to be called thy children."

"Remember not the sins of my youth, or my transgressions; according to thy steadfast love remember me, for thy goodness' sake, O Lord!"

We wish to God we could forget.

And wishing to forget is not over and done with when you're twenty-one. You've just begun to want to forget. If children must yearn for their parents' forgiveness and forgetfulness, how much more ought we parents to seek the forgiveness of our children. Someday every parent looks at his or her grown children and thinks not, "Look at all I have done for them," but "Look at all I have done to them." How can there ever be enough forgetfulness to go around?

A student said of his younger sister, in her second year of psychotherapy, chemically dependent, in misery, "If she could only learn to forgive our parents for what they did or didn't do to her. If she could only learn to forgive herself for what she did or didn't do to them." He hoped that the therapist could help her to remember and then to forget.

And if we yearn for the forgetfulness of other people, our parents, our children, how much more ought we to beg for the forgetfulness of God. As another Psalm asks, "O Lord, if thou should count our iniquities, Lord, who could stand?"

If God is omniscient, omnipresent, all knowing and all wise, think of the pain God suffers because of us. At least we are human. We are prone to let some things pass. Eventually, many of our wounds heal. Amnesia sets in, and we achieve relative peace. I can't even remember what I had for lunch yesterday, much less whom I offended. But God? If God remembers everything, God must suffer terribly. How can God endure the silence of the universe if God remembers, as vividly as if yesterday, the cries of Hiroshima, Auschwitz, the Battle of Hastings, Waterloo, and last moment's unkind thought or deed of meanness?

Does God have the alleged memory of an elephant? "Smith? Is that E. Smith? Yes, let's see. Gabriel, bring me the file on E. Smith." Lord, who could stand?

Jesus and the woman at the well: She says, "My husband," and Jesus, with divine memory, reminds her, "You've had five husbands, and the man you're living with now, as I remember, is not your husband." She ran to her friends crying, "Come see a man who told me everything I ever did."

So the Psalmist cries, "Remember not the sins of my youth, or my transgressions." Forget it. We wish to God that God would forget.

Some day each of us stands before our father, our mother, and looks into their eyes, and sees reflected back our youth, the demands we made, the words we spoke, the ways we disappointed and hurt without even trying, and we silently ask for their forgiveness, their forgetfulness.

Some day, each of us will ask the same forgetfulness of God. Remember not. Will God forget?

Observe our delight in remembering, recalling, recollecting someone else's sordid past. "Smith, is that Smith the banker? Or is that Smith the, if memory serves me, Smith the philanderer?" What if God is like that?

"Citizen of the year? Well, I'm not so old that I don't remember the time there was that trouble with the IRS."

We delight in remembering the sins of the youth, middle age, and any other age because our remembrance is a way of putting and keeping others in their place. Pinning them down. Oh, they may try to begin again, start over, make a go of it, but they can never break out of our remembrance, always enslaved.

One day Thomas Aquinas was lecturing to his students on the omnipotence of God. God is all-powerful, all-knowing. "Is there any way in which God is limited?" a student asked the learned Aquinas.

"Yes," he replied. A shocked hush fell upon the classroom. "Yes, God has limits. Even God Almighty cannot make the past not to have been."

Even God Almighty cannot clean out our past. What's done is done. What's done is remembered and what's remembered, even the sins of our long-past youth, are forever. Trapped, desolate, doomed to bear this burden of divine nemesis for ever, we are.

I'll tell you who your real friends are: A friend is someone who knows you, remembers you perhaps better than you know yourself, but who doesn't remember. Friends are those who discreetly forget, before whom certain things don't have to be dredged up, recollected. For the sake of love, they forget. A friend is someone who forgets what you've done in order to remember who you are.

Remember not the sins of my youth. Remember me. Isn't that what each of us wants from God? That God will love us enough to forget what we have done and left undone, in thought, word, and deed, in order that God might remember us. In order that God might remember us! In scripture, such divine forgetfulness is called forgiveness. On our knees, with outstretched hands, that's the mercy for which we beg, the mercy that God will forget in order to remember. "Smith? Is that E. Smith? Gabriel, forget the file. I remember you. Smith I remember."

Lord, you know us, better than even we know ourselves. Remember us, Lord, even when we forget you, remember us and keep us close to you, because in your love is our hope, and in your hands are our lives, this day, and evermore. Amen.

Hanging on the cross, one thief mocked Jesus. The other said, "Man, don't you fear God. We're getting what we deserve. This man has done no wrong."

And then he said, "Jesus, remember me..."

Remember not the sins...remember me. It's our last, deepest prayer.

Two Psalms later (27:10), the poet recalls, "If my father or mother forsake me, LORD, you will take me."

"Remember not the sins of my youth, or my transgressions; according to thy steadfast love remember me!"

Interview with William Willimon
Interviewed by Dave Hardin

Dave Hardin: You talked so well about God forgetting what we've done and just knowing us. It seems to me that forgiveness is also what He asks us to do. It seems to me we're not doing it very well at a family level and even at a national level. There are so many conflicts where people can't let go of the past. What is your feeling about that?

William Willimon: I suppose, traditionally, Christians have said that any ability we have to forgive is sort of based on the awareness that God has forgiven us — we were strangers to God and were forgiven. From a Christian perspective, He forgave us for crucifying His Son and that becomes our basis for dealing with others, out of that gratitude.

Hardin: Let me swing over to your experience at Duke University, with college students, with young adults. What are the key spiritual issues they face today — what are they looking at and how are they reacting?

Willimon: I'm impressed to be on a university campus with a sort of a religious vitality. I think they're concerned spiritually with a search for roots, for enduring values. There is, I think, a lot of pessimism among the young about our society, about certain political solutions. I think they are looking for their own sense of rootage. There is a lot of interest in certain issues like hunger and peace and things from a particularly Christian perspective.

Hardin: It's been my experience with many of my friends, and my own family situation, that the young adults walk away from the church for a while and it despairs people. Is that so bad?

Willimon: Well, it's a very typical phenomenon. I think today's students — many of them — are sort of in an anti-institutional mood. They have a great suspicion of institutions. But it's very normal during the young adult years to distance oneself from one's parents and their values. The funny thing is, some of the religious commitment we see on college campuses is, in a way, part of the young people's distancing themselves from their parents own lack of religious commitment or secularity. So this thing of distancing itself can kind of cut both ways.

Hardin: Many of my friends suffer from guilt feelings about the fact that their children aren't following in their spiritual path. Should they feel guilty about that?

Willimon: Well, it's a fact that in the mainline Protestant denominations — Methodists, Presbyterians, Lutherans, Episcopalians — the statistics are our churches have really lost our young people in rather alarming numbers as they grow up. That's an interesting and disturbing trend and I'm not sure I know exactly why. That should concern us about our inability to contain. I think though probably there's a lot of switching and searching going on. Unfortunately, mainline Protestantism has not been very successful in recent decades retaining young people who grow up in our traditions.

Hardin: Good parenting is sometimes a matter of not forcing that issue, isn't it? Letting go a little?

Willimon: It is. I think many times good parenting depends on having the confidence that God is infinitely resourceful in bringing people back to Himself. Sometimes on campus I have students who are very agitated that their beliefs are changing; they worry about losing their faith. I think a good approach is to say, "Well, relax. We have confidence that God eventually — that you'll come back. Go ahead and explore. We believe the Christian faith can hold it's own."

Hardin: You did mention the kids are getting interested in ecology and hunger and all. These are real concerns that they face and it's a little scary, I think. It's a harder world for them today than it was, maybe, for us when we were their age. How do we build a foundation for them? How do we help them do that?

Willimon: I think it's important for us to stress the Christian tradition in a strong way, as a real alternative to so many of the world's solutions. And as parents, to live our lives before them in ways that have integrity and depth.

Hardin: Modeling more than saying anything.

Willimon: Yes, I think always — witness.