Grace: the God who remembers . . .

Last week we saw how God met Noah's faith as he exited the ark with more over-the-top abundant, abounding, amazing grace. . . . (LISTEN HERE, if you missed it!)

Toward the end I quoted Walter Brueggemann on how God's remembering is His grace . . . Janice Phillips asked if I'd post it, so here it is. . .

The Gospel of this God is that he remembers. The only thing the waters of chaos and death do not cut through (though they cut through everything else) is the commitment of God to creation. His remembering is an act of gracious engagement with His covenant partner, an act of committed compassion. It asserts that god is not preoccupied with Himself but with his covenant partner, creation. It is the remembering of God, and only that, which gives hope and makes new life possible. . . . The flood not only has no memory. It means to destroy memory and set us in a world of utter amnesia. But the flood will not have its way. Yahweh will not be "brain-washed" by the flood.

The experience of chaos and death lets one conclude that everything is broken off, that everything in creation is ended. But this God stands free from and not controlled by creation. His commitments are not subject to such circumstances. And that is the ground of this Gospel in this narrative. The world rests on a graciousness not subject to the waxing and waning of historical initiatives, or even to the rising and falling waters. --Walter Brueggemann

I love that. The fact that God remembers does not imply that He ever forgot, but that He never forgot. He keeps remembering us in His unfathomable grace and He remembers still.