In Memoriam + Neil Oliger

10 January 2015

+ IN NOMINE IESU +

I never knew your father the way you did. I never saw him sing songs about grasshoppers on railroad tracks. I never knew him when he’d played cards or when he spoke about his time in the Navy. I knew him as one always struggling to remember, struggling to recognize me.

And even though I didn’t know him the way you did. I suspect that in these past years you have struggled to recognize him as well because he wasn’t who you remembered after Alzheiemer’s did it’s worst.

This is not the way it was supposed to be. We were meant to live forever. And forever in health and happiness and goodness in communion with the Holy Trinity. But because of sin, our own actual sins and those that we endure at the hands of evil in this fallen world, we don’t. We grow old. We get sick. We die. For the wages of sin is death.

Death is overcome and Hell is escaped by the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ in our place. He has paid the price for our transgressions. He forgives all who believe and trust in Him, all who confess their sins, where they have done wrong, desiring that those sins be removed from them as far as the East is from the West. All who so believe and so confess do not die. They pass through death into life. For Jesus brings them to the place He has prepared for them with His Blood. That life, lived in glory and in bliss, is as life was meant to be: full and complete, without sickness or regret, without sorrow, loneliness, or distress. There man is as he was meant be, as he was created to be: in communion with the Holy Trinity, forever perfect and holy, forever at peace and in joy.

And yet this is your question, isn’t it? Did he still believe, despite the Alzheimers. Did he still trust and confess?

When the Lord established the Feasts of Israel, when He set forth legislation for the Daily Services at the Tabernacle and the Temple, he instituted them always with this phrase, “This shall be a memorial for you, that you will remember that I the Lord your God brought you up out of the land of Egypt, the land of slavery, and into your own land.”

The point I’m making here is that the people of Israel didn’t remember the covenant by thinking about it, by using their brains. They remembered the covenant by doing, by observing the feasts, by offering their sacrifices, by hearing the promises of God once again.

And on the night when our Lord Jesus Christ was betrayed, he said to the disciples “Take, eat, this is my body; take drink, this is my blood. As often as you do this you do it in remembrance of me.  (See 1 Cor 11:23–26).

For as often as you eat this bread and drink the cup, you proclaim the Lord’s death until he comes. Here, too, remembering isn’t so much a mental exercise as it is an action, something we do. And in the cases we’ve just heard, it’s not just something we do, it is something we receive–God’s word reiterated, the feast provided by the Lord, The body and blood of Jesus given and shed to forgive sins, give life and eternal salvation to all who beleive this as the words and promises of God declare. It’s not what we think, but what we receive by faith. This is how we remember. He serves us an, more than anything, He remembers us by remembering his promises.

And that is the great, good news about your father. Despite his illness, the Lord remembers him. The Lord remembers His promises. The covenant He made with him at His Baptism. The promise God made to Him in His Word, in having received the very Body and Blood of Jesus.

Memories come and go, the grass withers, and the flowers fade, but the Word of the Lord endures forever. For today Neil is with Him in Paradise. Amen