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By Kenneth Humbert
Genesis 9: 8-17; Mark 1: 9-14

There's a movie out just now, "The Strange Case of Benjamin Button." It's about aging backwards, reversal of fortune and meaning, expectation turned upside down.

I find that phrase, "The Strange Case" spiritually intriguing. What else is out there that seems strange, but holds some deeper meaning, or new revelation of God? These are not new questions. They're as old as Genesis and Jesus, just sometimes mislaid.

I know about mislaid. I may not be alone. The phenomenon may be more than "not strange", but cosmic, even eternal.

To illustrate: we have an odd ritual at our house. About four times a week, something gets mislaid. "Have you seen my car keys?" "Where's that article I set aside, that file on my computer? It was on my Desktop just the other day."

It drives me bonkers. Does it sound familiar?

The thing is out there, waiting to be found, likely just where I left it... set aside for safe keeping so it could not be lost. But now it's a mystery with an urgent need to be solved.

Most of us can relate. But what's this got to do with the eternal? Why this jarring phrase about "divine forgetery?"

Well, it turns out there are intimations in Scripture these things are not unknown On High. Genesis 9 tells us of the rainbow. Its purpose, says God, "When I see my bow, I will remember." My covenant. You and yours. Every living thing.... Fascinating!

Genesis insists the rainbow is a reminder to God, not to us, as we always thought. It connects God to that which seems so often set aside on earth: promise, covenant, faith, faithfulness.

Has God somehow forgotten too, that so extravagant a reminder as a rainbow is required? Is there a divine forgetery? It's as though the fire has gone out in the connection between heaven and earth. The relationship has grown cold, fruitless, even mislaid.

There are other biblical echoes of this. God Godself repeatedly declares a holy intent to lay aside, remembering iniquity and sin "no more."

The Psalms are replete with references to even the most faithful feeling forgotten, or to justice and mercy put on hold or abandoned. Jesus himself lifts such a Psalm from the cross (22). Deeper down he knows it is not so. ‘Perhaps because he has been in the wilderness before, and from the start. Mark 1 takes us to Jesus, propelled to the desert wilds by the Spirit, the consequence of his baptism and the certification of his place in God's heart.

There are beasties out there -- bad, belligerent, beguiling, bedeviling. ‘Enough to leave any soul bereft. But not Jesus. ‘Because at any moment, at just the right moment, at the very instant when forgottenness is felt... "the angels come" to minister to Jesus. And this Jesus, the Christ, is able to return and report, "This is God's moment. God's reign is re-membered, re-joined to our lives, and this is the moment for us to turn toward God, as God had turned toward us!"

Sometimes I wonder if God remembers. And you? We confront the daily news and contemplate what God has set aside for us. The mystery grows urgent.

I doubt I'll find the answer with my car keys. But maybe a closer look at how God prompts God's memory of us, even written on the sky, will help.

Check it out. Genesis describes fire in the sky. ‘A holy passion for us, burning on a million million droplets, arcing above the clouds. A technicolor testimony that God never forgets to remember, save for what God remembers to forget.

God's faithfulness encourages our faith. But let's not to stop there. See, wilderness-walking happens to us all. When it does, there's Jesus to remember. The angels remembered him! And this, God will not forget when God's eye is on us. "And the desert will bloom like a rose." What a remembered fruitfulness that will be.