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?

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