The Rev. Noah Van Niel
The Chapel of the Cross
October 6, 2019
Proper 22 (C): Lamentations 1:1-6; Psalm 137; 2 Tim 1:1-14; Luke 17:5-10
There’s a really important question I keep hearing, without ever actually hearing it asked: “What do I do with my past?” It’s never phrased like that though. Usually it’s hidden underneath statements like, “I want you to know something that happened to me” Or, “I just found out that…” Or, “I wish I could go back to…” but it’s there; the question of how we integrate our past into our present and what that means for our future. I am convinced this one of the central questions of our lives.
And not only our lives as individuals but our society also seems to be wrestling with the same question these days. Look at the various crises of the day and you’ll notice that many of them stem from an unwillingness or an inability to address the question: what do we do with our past? Particularly in the South, with a past that includes slavery, secession, Jim Crow, the Klan, I’ve noticed this question keeps bubbling up, longing to be addressed but often side-stepped. Think of the Silent Sam situation from just last year. Or those stories that keep coming out about people or churches or Universities that owned or profited from slavery. What do we do with that? To be sure, this is not just a southern issue, it’s a human one, and thus global in scale. It’s the same question at the heart of problems like the climate crisis: we have done this awful thing to our planet, how do we deal with it?
I have observed a few common ways that people try to address this question of what to do with the past, none of which are ultimately very effective. The first is forgetting, ignoring, denying, or in some extreme cases trying to erase the past. We know this doesn’t work but we keep trying to do it. As the philosopher George Santayana famously wrote, “Those who cannot remember the past are doomed to repeat it.” And so we end up like the people of Israel who time and again forget or ignore the covenant God made with them in the past, only to repeat their mistakes and end up in exile looking back over their beloved Jerusalem that is now laid waste, as the author of Lamentations is doing this morning. This is not a productive way to deal with our past, because not only is it impossible to erase the past, pretending it didn’t exist prevents us from learning from it or moving on from it. “The past is never dead,” Faulkner said, “it isn’t even past.” It’s not helpful, and in fact can be quite harmful to pretend otherwise.
On the other end of the spectrum are those who, rather than forget the past, become obsessed with it. This usually takes one of two forms. First there are people who mourn continually for a past that is gone and never coming back. And like our Psalmist this morning, when we mourn the past obsessively it imprisons us in a state of grief and a certain bitterness can infect our hearts. That’s how an otherwise gorgeous psalm can turn so ugly in the end. The flip side of that are people who obsess about the past by idolizing it; who hold it up as perfect and see only the positive. To recall, often with much exaggeration, how good things used to be and long for them to be great again. Paul is doing a little bit of this in the Epistle this morning. He’s coming to the end of his ministry and needs to convince himself that Timothy has what it takes to continue his work, so he goes to great lengths to pump Timothy up. He talks of his sincere faith, his perfect faith, and not only Timothy’s faith, but the faith of his mother, and grandmother. He idolizes this young man’s past, creating an amplified, exaggerated view of him. I’m sure Timothy was a fine disciple, but he was also human and would struggle and fail, just as Paul did. As is always the case, idolizing the past sets us up to be disappointed or dissatisfied with the reality of the present. Because what present reality could compare with a memory that is shorn of all the hard or negative parts? Not only is it impossible to bring back the good ol’ days, the reality is that those days are rarely as good as we have fashioned them in our mind’s eye. To think they could ever come back is a delusion that keeps us miserable in the present. Both obsessively mourning the past and obsessively idolizing the past poison our present by chaining us that which has been and preventing us from living into that which shall be.
None of these ways—forgetting, mourning, idolizing—are productive ways to deal with our past. In order to deal with our past productively, we need find a way use it.
Long before he was a saint, Giovanni di Pietro di Bernardone was heir to a rich silk merchant in Italy. When he was born, his father was in France on business and when he returned home to Assissi, he took to calling his new baby boy, Francesco, or, Francis. Francis grew up in great wealth and comfort. But as he got older he had some experiences that changed his view of the world. He joined the army but was taken prisoner, spending a year in captivity. Then he suffered a grave illness that gave him reason to question what his life was all about. Over the coming years he shifted gradually towards a more introspective, simple way of life, and spent a lot of time alone in search of God. This transformation culminated in the great story of him renouncing his inheritance and breaking from his family, and some accounts say he stripped himself naked as a sign of the rejection of his former way of life. Francis then became the Francis that we know and love. Living in poverty, founding the order of the Franciscans, nursing lepers, and finding great joy in the life of simplicity and service.
At first glance it may seem like Francis broke completely from his past, tried to erase or deny it. He certainly made a big show of distancing himself from his family and their wealth. But actually, if you look at how his life unfolded it seems his past served as the fuel for his future. The person he became was directly linked to the person he was, even if he lived a very different life. He chose great poverty because he knew the hollowness of a life of riches. He chose to go to the lepers and nurse their wounds when no one else would touch them because he knew what it was to be laid low by illness. He sought peace because he knew what it was to be at war. And he sought companions in this journey because he knew how hard it was to serve God all alone. Changing course is not the same as erasing the past, in fact it is using the past to propel you in the direction you feel like you should be going, even if that direction is the opposite direction from which you came.
To use our past as motivation gives it a chance at redemption. We cannot go back and change our past but we can use our past to change our future. Using our past is how we can walk that fine line between remembering it, and not obsessing over it; of making it a constant source of life, not a constant source of loss.
Using our past takes something that is impossible to change or fix or recover and gives it new life, gives it possibility and purpose in the future. Recently, we have finally started composting at our house, and while it has many benefits, I have gained the most satisfaction from finding a productive use for our scraps. They are being given a future, a purpose not just tossed out for no reason. We can do something similar with our past. We can put it to good use. Not throw it away. Not leave it out to rot and stink and fester. Take it and use it; turn it into soil for the future. Take the lessons learned, the mistakes made, the people hurt, the love lost, the glory dimmed, the sins of our fathers and mothers, the pains of the world we have inherited and use all of it to motivate us in the present and propel us into the future, a future that promises to be better because of the past from which it came.
In order for that to work though we need to be able to look at our past for what it is. And this can be painful, because much of our past was thrust upon us, an ugly inheritance in which we had no say, and yet own all the same. And the part of our past that was our doing is sure to be full of errors and horrors and grief and loss and we’re stuck with it. Even if we were lucky enough to be those for whom the good old days were really good, there is pain in admitting that they are gone and aren’t coming back. So we need some courage. Because one of the hardest things in life is accepting reality—life as it is, not life as we wish it was. And the extent to which we can confront reality of our past will determine the extent to which we are able to move forward.
And if we are to use our past to change our future we need one more thing: faith. Faith that such transformation is possible. Because ultimately the work of using the past to fashion a new future is the work of God and not achievable by our own strength. The work of transformation, the work of making the new out of the old, of cultivating life from death, this always has been and always will be holy work. It is the heart of our Christian story. God takes the detritus of our past, even and especially the parts of the past that seem irredeemable, and composts them, turns them into the soil from which new life will sprout. God never erases the past, He uses it. That’s true from the patriarchs all the way through Paul and the apostles. Perhaps the most powerful illustration of this comes from that wonderful story after Easter when Jesus appears to his disciples, bathed in the glow and glory of resurrected light, transformed from dead to alive, and yet, and yet still bearing the wounds of his crucifixion. The past is not erased. And yet now they are not wounds they are proof, offerings to Thomas and the other disciples that Resurrection is real; that transformation is possible. Torturous marks of the past, made holy by the power of God. This is our story. We cannot help but carry with us the scars of our past, but they can be transformed into reminders, motivators, symbols of lessons learned, that allow us to improve, to be better. The question is, can we believe it? Can we have even just a mustard seed of faith in the promise that our past can be transformed into the soil of our future?
If we can believe it, and if we have the courage to look at our past as it is not as we wish it was, then we will have figured out how to use it, how to answer the question: “what do I do with my past?” The transformation of our past into the material from which something new, something better is made, this is the power and promise of God. Our present faith in that promise, our present faith in the promise that though our past is a part of us it need not imprison us, that something beautiful, something good can come from the refuse of our lives, individual or collective, this is the kind of faith that can move mountains or mulberry trees. The kind of faith that can change us. The kind of faith that can change the world. Amen.