Forgetfulness and Grace / Isaiah 43:16–21 / Pr. Ted A. Giese / Sunday April 7th 2025 / Season of Lent / Mount Olive Lutheran Church

Mount Olive Lutheran Church / Pr. Ted A. Giese / Sunday April 7th 2025: 5th Sunday in Lent / Isaiah 43:16–21 “Forgetfulness and Grace”

        Thus says the LORD,

               who makes a way in the sea,

               a path in the mighty waters,

        who brings forth chariot and horse,

               army and warrior;

        they lie down, they cannot rise,

               they are extinguished, quenched like a wick:

        “Remember not the former things,

               nor consider the things of old.

        Behold, I am doing a new thing;

               now it springs forth, do you not perceive it?

        I will make a way in the wilderness

               and rivers in the desert.

        The wild beasts will honour Me,

               the jackals and the ostriches,

        for I give water in the wilderness,

               rivers in the desert,

        to give drink to My chosen people,

                the people whom I formed for Myself

        that they might declare My praise.

Let us pray: May the words of my mouth and the meditations of all are hearts be acceptable in your sight O, Lord. Amen.

Grace, peace and mercy to you from God our Father and from our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ. Good Christian friends at the beginning of Isaiah chapter 43 our Heavenly Father, through the prophet Isaiah, re-introduces Himself as the creator of the Children of Israel:

        But now thus says the LORD,

        He who created you, O Jacob,

               He who formed you, O Israel:

        “Fear not, for I have redeemed you;

               I have called you by name, you are mine.”

The people had gotten to the point that they felt that the Lord of Hosts was far away, so far away that they weren’t sure if God even existed.

Our Heavenly Father wanted Isaiah to tell the people some fundamental things about their God and He wanted Isaiah to help the people to remember their God and to know that He was not yet finished with them and that there was no other God but Him. 

Let us look at two kinds of forgetfulness: Both are deliberate, but they are not the same. One is sinful and the other is full of grace. One is self-centered and the other is centered in Christ Jesus our Lord the one and only Son of our Heavenly Father, begotten not made.

The parable of the Wicked Tenants that Jesus gives us today in our Gospel Reading is an excellent illustration of self-centered forgetfulness. So let’s start there and quickly boil it down: A Man planted, cultivated and supplied a vineyard with everything it needed and while He owned it He let it out to tenants. These tenants turned out to be wicked and evil; they abused the authority that they had been given regarding the vineyard, because they opted to kill the messengers sent by the Owner of the vineyard in the hopes that they would be able to keep the vineyard for themselves. They even killed the Son of the Owner thinking that this would secure their grip on the vineyard.[1] This is a sort of position is nine tenths of the law sort of outlook.

You might say to yourself “that has nothing to do with forgetfulness! They certainly remembered and knew who the Owner was.” Sure but think of it this way: Your neighbour has a tree that’s getting out of control and he asks you if he can borough your 4 horsepower 18 inch Craftsman Electric Chainsaw, being a good neighbour you say yes and off he goes to cut down his unruly tree. A couple of months latter you are about to cut down a problem tree of your own on your own land when you remember that you lent out your chainsaw to your neighbour, but when you send a message to him and ask for it back, he denies that you even lent it to him, and says you must have lent it to someone else. All the while your neighbour knows it is under his workbench in his garage. He has chosen to “forget” that you lent it to him in hopes that you will just move on and let him have it, that you might doubt that you gave it to him in the first place, that you were the forgetful one not him.  

Years ago at a party I was attending for an art gallery function—while still living in Edmonton before movie to Regina—I got to talking with this artist I met who was visiting from Montréal and while we talked he discovered that I was going to seminary, the conversation shifted to religion. He told me that he was a Buddhist but that he had grown up Roman Catholic. That he was baptized as an infant and that he had attended catholic school as a child: But that later in his life he became a Buddhist. There is more to this story but here we need to focus on one important detail. For this man to become a Buddhist he had to actively forget who he was, who God made him to be in his baptism. He chose to forget himself in order to remake himself, not in God’s image, not in Christ’s image (the image he received as a gift at his baptism) but in his own image - patterned after the example of the Buddha. He like the Children of Israel from the Book of Isaiah chose to forget their God, chose to forget who they truly were and who they truly belonged to.      

Isn’t it tempting to “allow” yourself to forget that you are a Christian when it is inconvenient to be one? We with the Children of Israel ask from time to time: “God are you really there?” sinfully hoping, like the wicked tenant of Jesus’ parable, that there will be no response. The devil goads us on and tempts us to take control of our own affairs, he says with a sly and cunning voice “God isn’t there, do what you will, just forget about all this Jesus nonsense and get on with your life, the way you want it be.” Maybe it starts small, you notice a pen you accidentally took home from work and you “forget” to take it back to work, “oh well, it’s just a pen, who will notice?” or maybe it’s bigger, someone starts to flirt with you that you have no business flirting back with, as a Christian you know it’s wrong but in the moment you “forget” and find yourself drawn ever closer to them, “it’s just flirting, it’s not like I’m sleeping with the,” and step by step you drift deeper and deeper into forgetting who you are as a Child of God.   

At the beginning I said that Isaiah was the instrument our Heavenly Father used to deliver some fundamental knowledge about God to the people. Isaiah conveyed four very important things about the LORD in chapter 43 of the Book of Isaiah.

1) The “forgetfulness” of the people didn’t change the fact that He was their God and Creator.[2] 

2) The “forgetfulness” of the people didn’t change the fact that He had them firmly in the grip of His Almighty Hand and nothing could pry them from that grip.[3]

3) The “forgetfulness” of the people didn’t change the fact that He had a plan for them that exceeded all previous salvation that they had experienced: A plan that would make their rescue from Egypt look small in comparison,[4] and

4) The “forgetfulness” of the people didn’t change the fact that His great plan would blot out their transgressions for His own sake, and that this would result in His not remembering their sins any more.[5]

You see in the Parable Jesus gives us in the Gospel Reading from the Gospel of Saint Luke: the Owner of the vineyard is God our Heavenly Father; historically the tenants are the Scribes and the Pharisees and the Sadducees,[6] but like I said a couple weeks ago we too can be the wicked tenants when we, like the ones who plotted to kill Jesus in the days leading up to Good Friday or like the Children of Israel from the time of Isaiah purposely, willfully, sinfully “forget” God, choosing not to remember Him, not to see Him in our lives in what we say, think and do; and the Son of the vineyard Owner in the parable, the one that the tenants killed is Jesus Himself. In this parable Jesus hints at the great plan of His Heavenly Father. In a couple of weeks we will celebrate the completion of this great plan when we gather together for Easter. 

Through the prophet Isaiah in our Old Testament Reading today God our Heavenly Father says, “Behold, I am doing a new thing; now it springs forth, do you not perceive it?”[7] He speaks of Jesus, whose victory in life and death and resurrection is greater than all previous salvations: a lasting eternal salvation that the rescue they had experienced from Egypt only pointed towards: a great and almighty salvation unequaled before Jesus’ birth and unequaled after Jesus’ cross and passion. The results of this Salvation, is the very substance of the second sort of forgetfulness that I’d mentioned, the good kind full of grace. Because of Jesus, the grace of God prevails, and God our Heavenly Father deliberately forgives us all our sins on account of Jesus and then forgets that sin once it is forgiven. This is the best of Good News. Your sins once forgiven are forgotten, God promises to blot them out and He does this in Jesus His only begotten Son.

Dear ones, I want to leave you with a little bit more of my encounter with the Buddhist artist from Montréal that I spoke with at that party at the art gallery. He pulled me aside away from the rest of the guests at the party and he said to me; “the thing that troubles me most about being a Buddhist is that whenever anything in my life goes very badly I find myself praying to God.”  This is a big “no, no” for Buddhists who are supposed to be emptying themselves of everything and focusing on personal nirvana. For the Buddhists there is no god, yes they have the supernatural devas but this isn’t what he was talking about, he was talking about his Heavenly Father, he was talking about Jesus, he was talking about the Holy Spirit. That’s who he found himself praying to, and as a ‘Buddhists’ it bothered him because he wasn’t supposed to believe in God any more. So I said to him, that even though he had given up on God in many ways, even though he was trying to forget God, clearly God had not in fact given up on him, and that the Holy Spirit was obviously still at work in his heart. I reminded him what his Heavenly Father has promised concerning him saying, “I Am He, there is none who can deliver out of My hand; I work, and who can turn it back?”[8]

While it is very dangerous to test God in this way, I saw nothing but grace in that poor confused mans situation. Here he was trying to forget God and Jesus and the Holy Spirit, yet God had not forgotten him. And in times of trouble God was calling this man back to remember Him and this man would find himself praying to the one he tried so very hard to forget, the one who had not forgotten him.  

Each of us in our lives have had periods of time where we have proceeded foolishly in our own way, bone-headedly seeking after selfish and unnecessary things, yes we like sheep stray, we easily become the wicked tenants, the forgetful people who need to be brought back to remember our Heavenly Father and the innocent sacrifice of His Son Jesus our Lord on that Good Friday Cross. And we are not alone in this: Do you know someone like this confused Roman Catholic/“Buddhists” who had drifted from the grace and love of Jesus because they chose to forget. As one who is strengthened in the taking of Holy Communion, strengthened in the hearing and reading of God Holy Word, as one who has been called to remember God, Father, Son T and Holy Spirit, reach out to such people in your life. For the stubborn and willfully defiant you may need to be very direct and firm in your warning of the danger they are in, yet for the brokenhearted and crushed in spirit don’t be harsh with them. For such as these, simply start by reminding them that God their Heavenly Father has not forgotten them. That God still loves them & has them in His almighty hand.

The Prophet Isaiah pointed forward to Jesus – the new thing, which was springing forth – soon we will be blessed to celebrate this new and lasting salvation in Easter, yet even sooner, this very day we partake in the mystery of God’s grace in the Body and Blood of Jesus with the bread and the wine of the Lord’s Supper. Let this be for each of us a time to remember how we are in the firm grip of our Heavenly Father, saved, forgiven – with sins forgotten, blotted out by the blood of Christ, with the very drink He gives you for your salvation.[9] Be strong, have courage, be not afraid to share this Good News with others, “remember not the former things”[10] – remember instead that because of Jesus you are now a new creation free to live a new life in Him “forgetting what lies behind and straining forward to what lies ahead:”[11] In Jesus name, Amen.  

Let us pray: Lord have mercy on us, Christ have mercy on us, Lord have mercy on us, “take our minds and think through them, take our lips and speak through them, take our hearts and set them on fire; for the sake of our Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ, Amen.

[1] Luke 20:9-16
[2] Isaiah 43:1
[3] Isaiah 43:12-13
[4] Isaiah 43:18-19a
[5] Isaiah 43:25
[6] Luke 20:18-20
[7] Isaiah 43:19a
[8] Isaiah 43:13
[9] Isaiah 43:20
[10] Isaiah 43:18
[11] Philippians 3:13

Photo Credit: Main photo detail of Le Penseur (The Thinker) in the garden of Musée Rodin, Paris from wikimedia commons.