The call to remember the ways in which God has delivered God s people harkens back to God s deliverance of God s people in the Exodus. The way to insure the remembrance of the time of communal crisis and deliverance is to tell the children, tell them to remember what God has done. This is not simply a remembering of the personal trials and tribulations out of which God has delivered oneself. It is a communal remembering. This plague of locusts is not a crisis of a selected few, it is a crisis of the whole community of God s people and deliverance was a communal deliverance.
Communal remembrance is a way of testing the stories of shared experience.
If there is any doubt of the need for such testing, think of those family gatherings where each recalls their own version of an event supposedly involving all family members yet each producing creative variations which leave you wondering if you were there at all. We can be quite effective at telling and retelling the stories of crisis and trial. It is quite easy to share our common stories of distress, sometimes know as complaining . Communal remembrance is also a guard against our own excesses of complaining and despair or optimism. For the way in which we remember informs both the way in which we live presently and the way in which we hope for the future.