BLOG 7/10/18. CLINGING TO ‘YESTERDAY’… WON’T WORK
A certifiable reality among us is that very small percentage of persons have the capacity to think in terms of the future. This results in their passionately clinging to past patterns, even as those patterns and strucures become dysfunctional and counter-productive. This reality cropped-up recently in a news release from a mid-western state where a political candidate was advocating his support of a politician because he was seeking “to preserve Christendom,” … alas! We are long-since past the era of Christendom, that collaboration between church and state which began with the Emperor Constantine, and which determined so much of western history, probably down to somewhere in the early 20th century. We are for the last century, at least, solidly in the post-Christian era.
We are watching the demise of many patterns of that past era: viable political parties, church denominations and institutions, standards of morality, and so much more. Christian dominance in the culture has been replaced with a self-satisfied humanism whose response to Christian affirmations is a dismissive: “So what?” To be candid, our western cultures have always been replete with embarrassing contradictions, intractable challenges, and charismatic personalities who were at the same time toxic in their influence.
So, what is to be the Christian response? Are we to be a people of despair? … Or of hope? I am frequently reminded when tempted to despair that when God commissioned Jeremiah to his prophetic ministry to a rebellious people, to a people who seemed blind and deaf to their calling, … with the instruction to “go and buy a plot of land in Anathoth,” in a high-risk area, as a token of God’s design for Israel’s future. Always there comes to us in scripture our calling to be a people of hope, to be tomorrow’s children, knowing that we will find unexpected co-belligerents along the way, who though not sharing our Christian beliefs or calling, never-the-less share our vision for peace and order and righteousness, our zeal to be reconcilers and peacemakers, our compassion for those homeless and poor and infirm.
I have often borrowed two graphic descriptions of this historic moment in which we are living: 1) it is a cultural whitewater between what was, and yet un-knowing of what is before us, and totally at the mercy of forces and turbulence over which we have no control. And, 2) it is a cultural diastrophism, that phenomenon when subterranean tectonic plates shift and so cause earthquakes that destroy much of the familiar on the surface. Both are suggestive of where we are living.
And so much of the church tends to fail to recognize these realities and clings to patterns no longer viable, and indifferent to the forces impinging upon us, and often even denying them, and so becoming salt-less salt. It is one thing to sing: “O, where are kings and empires now of old that went and came? But Lord your church is praying still, a thousand years the same …” and yet becoming immunized to the reality that we are the children of God’s tomorrow, and, so, called to be those radical practitioners of God’s love and hope, … even in the seemingly impossible realities of this moment. The prophetic voices also, frequently come from very controversial sources: Nelson Mandela, Mohandas Gandhi, Martin Luther King, … plus a host of little people who are faithful, and who are energized by the reality that we are living in God’s tomorrow even though the victims of this confusing today. But clinging to yesterday won’t work.
The Book of Revelation has a telling, and very instructive (for us) description of God’s people living in hostile cultures: “They overcame by the blood of the Lamb, by the word of their testimony, even if it cost them their lives.” (Rev. 12:11). We are to be a people of contagious hope. Yes!
