Too often we want to restore a romanticized and largely invented past. But Christianity is about manifesting now the future Kingdom of God. Rather than looking back at a comfortable and sentimental lie, Christianity looks ahead to the truth revealed in Jesus. In order to enforce a lie, violence is required, but to live in the truth all we need is love.
Nostalgia has been a virulent and ubiquitous disease in the church for my entire 37 year career as a pastor. We have to deal all the time with people who idealize and idolize the-way-things-used-to-be. This became a crisis in the 1970’s when the so-called mainline churches began hemorrhaging members, a situation that has continued unabated for four decades. The generations that remember it are dying off now, but the memories of full churches and Sunday Schools continues to haunt us.
The 1950’s were not the Kingdom of God, in America or the church. We had enforced segregation and regular lynchings. We had women thoroughly relegated to second-class status. We had environmental depredation and degradation increasing. We had a nuclear arms race that was driving the world to the brink of annihilation. We had colonialism oppressing people around the world. We had bad and foolish policies that were planting the seeds for the terrorism and wars that are killing people now. And we had a Christian establishment defending, rationalizing, and blessing all of it, even though it was categorically contrary to Jesus’ life and teachings.
Churches may have been full. Indeed, we were even building new ones all the time. But our faith was revealed to be weak, shallow, and hollow. Our complacency, privilege, self-righteousness, and ignorance eventually corroded our superficial “success.” The gods we really worshiped were nationalism, capitalism, and racism. We stoked our own egocentric fear, anger, and even hatred. Like the Israelites with their golden calf, we pretended that these deities were the true God.
All those children in Sunday School in 1960? Where are they? If those days were so great, why did the message not stick? Why did my generation abandon the church as soon as it could? During the years of decline, it has became a reflex to find some nefarious element to scapegoat for this. Conservatives blamed liberal caving in to pop culture; liberals blamed conservatives’ irrelevance. But the church was itself to blame because it was not witnessing to Jesus Christ. It had allowed itself to become little more than a vague religious justification for America and Western Civilization.
I am in the tiny minority that stayed with the church. That only happened because of the Holy Spirit and my reading of what Jesus really calls the church to be. I hoped that some miracle would happen and the church would start living into his vision.
The Lord Jesus is not about the past. Nowhere does he paint a picture of some long-ago perfect time that he has come to restore. More to the point, Jesus is emphatically not about lifting up our nation, race, family, or even ourselves as individuals. These are usually the categories that were supposedly doing so much better back in our days of past “greatness.”
Jesus is about the future. He is, in a sense, from the future. How many times does he talk about “that Day”? The gospel is inherently and necessarily apocalyptic in the sense that it is a revelation of what is, in the End, true and real. His message is the nature and destiny of human beings and the creation. Those of us who follow him are living in advance — the theological word is “proleptically” — the life of eternity.
The character of this life, which we see in him, is compassionate, generous, humble, self-emptying love. It is the life of God which Jesus gives to us, models for us, and calls us into. Jesus Christ is about this seemingly other world which is always being born among us.
Trying to live in or bring back the past is only going to make us frustrated, angry, resentful, and violent. To worship the past is to embrace extinction and drag as many down with us as we can. It is to follow a lie, which never ends well. (This valorization of a mythic national past, by the way, is the very core of fascism.)
But turning to dwell together in God’s certain future revealed in Jesus Christ… that is true life.
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