The cynical, media-savvy political part of me has been fighting this week with the pious Good Girl as I've lived with David's eulogy, "How the mighty have fallen!" Oh, right! You and Saul have been trying to kill each other for years, hatching dastardly plots with neighboring kings and intriguing with each other's relatives. Give me a break-the glory of Israel, my eyeball! If this isn't a photo op media event, staged for the purpose of consolidating power and spin doctoring, then I'm a blue-nosed gopher. Politics take up so much of our public imagination. Recently I saw a bumper sticker that read, "Let's just impeach Bush and call it even." It's mean, but it contains a truth about how we disagree with and handle the sins of our leaders. If we don't learn from our past, we are condemned to re-living it over and over. Which feels like the worst kind of vengeance. David's eulogy, even if it is a spin, contains truths about the relationship between leader and people. These are truths Israel has to acknowledge before it can embrace new leadership. So maybe blue is a good color for my nose. If I have get off my high horse, can we also remove David from the pedestal we put under him when we read his praise for the man who swore to kill him and then compelled his best friend to fight in the army against him? The only way I know to do that is to look at God-to see that this eulogy isn't about David and his feelings for Saul and Jonathan. It's about David and God, and how David perceives the leadership of God's people.

When we get down to that, David has much to teach us about leadership and grief. Today, David is responding to the defeat of his enemy. We are so far from the ticker tape parade at this victory event. No shots of David's troops lounging on the satin couch in the king's boudoir. No generals hugging each other and clapping each other on the back in congratulatory glee. No champagne shower. What we get is respect for the office and grief at the deaths of those precious to their Creator.

What is this all about? At the risk of sounding like Forrest Gump's mother, what you give is what you get. If you are arrogant toward your opponents, they will respond in kind. You may be familiar with this from private life. Perhaps your parents taught you that, just because you are right doesn't mean you are totally right. In other words, when you are arguing with your brother or sister or even your spouse, you might be right, but there is at least a small truth in what our opponent is saying. How would that change how you argue? There is only one way to understand this situation-mine. This is the dumbest movie I ever saw (never mind that maybe it reminds friend of someone's heroism towards them). The neighbor mows Saturday mornings because she knows it's the only day I get to sleep late (never mind that it might be her only time to mow). I've got the only ideas on this committee (never mind that the others can't get a word in edgewise).

David gives voice to Israel's loss by helping them remember. He isn't fooling anyone. His lament for Saul and Jonathan is an idealistic one on purpose, because as he re-frames the past in ideal terms, he helps call into being the future God envisions for Israel. As God's people, we need memory. As Presbyterians, we are committed to the notion that God acts first, so we know-at least in the abstract-that our congregation was formed in response to God's initiative. But we can't live in the abstract. For Spring-water to flourish and grow, for our own personal faith to grow, we need to act out our faith, and this takes both the memory and vision that can only be found in community.

Memory is recalling what God has done and how we have made faithful response to God's action. That's why we tell stories about our past-about how the steeple was re-set, about starting as a Sunday School, about how the early worshipers kept their feet from freezing during winter-time services, about sharing a circuit-riding preacher with two other congregations, about Christmases when the sanctuary was packed and everyone got an orange and how special that was, about classes in the attic and whose name is still in crayon on the tabletop. Memory is how we know who we are and whose we are.

But just as we cannot live in the abstract, so we can't live in our history, either. We must look also to our future-God's future. That's what vision is: anticipating what God is yet doing in the world and in us, aligning our lives to serve that action of God's grace. Vision gets a needed re-adjustment when we understand that the Church was designed to be an alternative community. We are supposed to be counter to the world around us. We are God's alternative. The things you bring and put in the red tub each week are God's alternative against hunger. We are counter to the forces that are ever trying to unravel the radical notion that God loves each one of us-even if the "us" is unemployed and sick and in jail and not as educated as we are.

As a church, we need to remember "who we are." That's why we need memory. Memory forms our identity, reminds us what is important, shapes how we see things and what we are inclined to tackle. Who we are-our character-is as important as what we do. Worship is one of the ways we remember. Sometimes it's a ritual remembering, like the gestures we make at the beginning of the service. When we pour water into the baptismal font, we are remembering that it is our baptisms that say who we are as well as whose we are. In worship, we also imagine together-dream about-who God calls us to be, what that looks like in the ways we act and the things we do. Which means that other parts of our church life support and reveal our identity. The mission we support-even the fact that we include a Moment for Mission in our worship services-says that who we are means we give ourselves away. Over the history of this church, we have literally given ourselves away to things like Ghost Ranch and Warm Springs and Sheldon Jackson College, we have given away cows and toothpaste and money. Our mission includes trees and water, land and food, friendship and hope.

What we do not give ourselves to, the ways we hold back or are reluctant to seem pushy-these also reveal our identity. Our evangelism style is sometimes passive (we'd welcome anyone who came) or it can be proactive (come to church with me on Sunday). The value we place on spiritual growth is shown by whether we practice individual prayer and study disciplines during the week as well as the corporate disciplines of prayer and worship together.

God's dream for Springwater is in the future as much as it is in memory. While memory is important, we aren't condemned to stuckness with who we were in the past. God is about transformation and sometimes that means letting go. Churches need "rememberers" as well as visionaries. Sometimes, like David, these are the same people. Sometimes, like in David's lament, our corporate grieving calls our future out of what has been valuable in the past. This requires a faith that the new will emerge from the past, but the logical consequence of our transformation has to be that we reach out beyond ourselves to others. Otherwise we are still stuck in the past. Twelve-step groups know this wisdom. Twelve Step groups know the importance of naming the past, mourning what has been and embracing the new. And then the last logical step is inviting others to share in this new. It's about life, friends. God calls us to life. Don't just give up the past. But don't get stuck in it, either.