I’m a sucker for nostalgia. For good reason, I think. There is something innate in the human soul that tells us that we should be grateful for what has come down to us through history. However, there are a lot of people out there, both on the left and the right, who’d like to take that inborn feeling out back and shoot it. Part of this comes from a place of fear, fear of what history has brought to bear as well as fear of what history could do to the present. Another portion of it comes just out of ignorance. People hate what they either don’t want to or can’t understand. A time-honored tradition of its own is to publicly humiliate heroes of the past so that it makes it anathema to continue to give earned praise to that individual or set of persons. The heartbeat of our current iconoclastic age is the idea that we are the captains of our own destiny, but at the same time prisoners of our past and contemporary circumstances. Individualism in this sense is the heresy most prevalent in the Church. Our personal experiences, rather than the feeling and inheritance of the group, is what should drive life. What motivates us from point a to point b is not a sense of duty to others, but what I need in the here and now. I’m here this morning to warn of that dangerous line of thinking.
This may seem like an odd place to go to in a Tuesday prayer and worship help, but I think after a year and a half of these encouragements we’ve expanded our repertoire to include some reflections on deeper subjects to help us think more about our faith in real life and how it applies to wider concepts.
Let’s go back to the opening gambit for a second. Where does nostalgia come from? Some of it is the way in which everything we experience as children through our young adulthood is seen through the eyes of our parents, grandparents, and other relatives. I can remember vividly walking the graveyard at Old Stone Presbyterian Church in Lewisburg, West Virginia and my granddaddy, who was the caretaker of the grounds, pointing out to me various stones that bore names that he and I were related to. As a curious young boy I’d ask who they were, what they did, etc… One name that I recognized, even at that age, was “Patton”. Partly because they had a small mausoleum with the family crest on it that stood out among all the graves, yet it was also because I’d seen the movie Patton about a dozen times at that point. Sure enough those Patton’s were those Patton’s. In the film note was made by one of the German officers that his grandfather had served with Stonewall in the War Between the States. In some roundabout way in my young brain I had it in my head that by my presence in that cemetery I was somehow “co-existing” with not only General Patton, but those actors on the screen. There was a powerful mood in those times. I didn’t of course recognize what it was when I was five, but seeds were planted that would flower in a couple decades. Granddaddy would make sure of it.
If you asked me if there was anything I could do right now and time travel was part of the equation those days of strolling around Old Stone would pretty much be #1 on the list. It was not just the walking and talking with my granddaddy that makes those moments so precious. It was what he was doing in those ticks of time, inculcating in me a sense of ownership of the past. That I had a legacy to live up to. Now, in his mind that included going to Washington and Lee, getting a law degree, and restarting the family business in town. The good Lord of course had other ideas, but there was still a sense in which my granddaddy got his wish. When I enlisted in the Marine Corps there were few people I knew more happy than he was. He know what kind of ne’er-do-well I had become. He knew I needed my teeth kicked in a bit. Most boys do. He had served in Korea, mostly because he got drafted, but moreso because he felt like the Imjin River was safer than the mines. When he got back he used the G.I. Bill to square himself away and set up for the future. His early life had been incredibly hard, his dad died from drunkenness when he was six, spending most of those early years in a difficult family situation being taken from coal camp to coal camp. It was his own granddaddy and grandma who would take him under their wing and raise him up, telling him stories of the family and life before it got hard. It was those lessons that he passed on to me. Of all the tales I was told growing up by him one was the time the Federal troops under Sheridan had come down the Valley and raped his great-great aunt and murdered his great-grandfather in 1864, burning the farm in the process. Anyone who has grown up in the South and is old enough to have relatives that knew Confederate Veterans knows the kind of sense I got out of that story. It’s like it happened last week and that scoundrel Phil is out there somewhere and needs whipped. Today happens to be Confederate Memorial Day in South Carolina, and I know it has become politically incorrect to mention it, yet it is out of that nostalgia and historical ownership I feel moved to mention it today. All of what has come in this post today is not in service of that, yet in some sense it is. Yet that feeling of belonging and presence at an event that happened 120 years before I was born is something we need to understand, for it is good. Those who died deserve it.
My point today is pretty simple. We owe a lot to those who came before. They made us who we are, they provided what we have. Israel always got itself in trouble when it forsook the memorial stones, and so does the Church. We are seeing the results of it in our society and culture today as we destroy our own monuments. God in His great providence has brought us to bear in the second millennia of the new covenant. It is our responsibility and call to care for and bless the inheritance we have received, to walk and talk with our youngin’s and speak to them of the sacrifices of those who have gone before. We didn’t make our history and it isn’t ours to destroy, but to care for and safeguard for generations to come.
Here is something else to consider:
https://www.ligonier.org/learn/devotionals/secure-inheritance
Blessings in Christ,
Rev. Benjamin Glaser
Pastor, Bethany ARP Church