I’m doing an interview in a few days and will be asked some questions about how I view the past and future of my own denomination. Some of these thoughts came to mind as I prepared.

Psalm 77

 

One of my favorite things to do as an English teacher is to teach the stories of Flannery O’Connor. O’Connor has many lessons from her work, but I am continually impressed by what she has to say about the dangers of nostalgia.

O’Connor’s stories are populated by characters caught in the disease of blinding nostalgia. They talk about days when people were good and everyone was happy. Of course, these characters become brutal examples of what happens when our view of the present and past is contaminated by the mythology that blinds us to truth and exempts us from responsibility.

Southern writers have large resources of nostalgia to draw upon. The history of the south is dominated by the theme of a past golden age of southern culture, ruined by the war of northern aggression and the resulting forced assimilation of the south into the generic culture of America.

Southern nostalgia is the grist for entire industries. Southern culture, real and imagined, provides its particular contribution to our national character.

But O’Connor pointed out that nostalgia was more than a harmless looking back to plantations and southern cooking. It was a particular kind of poison that blinds us to racism, poverty, ignorance, bias and the dangers of living in a state of illusory superiority. It can send those who live in it down the roads that keep them in prisons of the mind and heart.

American culture has an increasing appetite for nostalgia. We have the sense that our best days may have passed us; that our future may be more technologically sophisticated, but our lives, morals, relationships, families, institutions and souls are increasingly impoverished.

So we find it alluring to look back. To remember past victories, past championships, better families, simpler economies, more virtuous children and more disciplined schools. “Glory Days” is an appealing song for us. We find waxing nostalgic a useful way to spend time even when we sit in the midst of serious present challenges.

O’Connor would say “Be careful.” That road to the nostalgic past may be a wrong turn, with terrible dangers of its own.

The Bible tells us to look back and remember the deeds of the Lord. Redemption is a story that cuts through the past, runs through the present and into the future. Scripture tells us to look back and remember God’s great works in the days of our fathers and mothers.

For Christians, this is an appealing invitation. We are generally far more inclined to construct our own version of the past than we are to honestly engage the present. The culture war, for example, thrives on looking back to a mythical, idealized past that has conveniently forgotten much that we ought to be ashamed of.

The agendas and rhetoric of denominations often look back to the days of post-war denominational prosperity as the days when “God was blessing”. Churches were full. Cultural Christianity, in the south and elsewhere, was pervasive. it was easy to be Protestant, and the winds of culture were with you.

Whatever evangelicals and denominational churches did in those golden eras, it seems to have worked, especially in our recollection. The women were beautiful, the men were handsome, the children were above average and the church knew what it was doing. Our past is the era of cultural dominance in America, and we long for it.

Today, denominations are shrinking and some are on the verge of vanishing, from the free falling PCUSA to the disintegrating ECUSA to the mid-life crisis SBC. Blame is plentiful. Desperation is in the air. Nostalgia sells and plenty of folk are buying. The way we used to be was better than the way we are, and we need to come up with a list of people to blame.

I’m looking at a letter from an SBC friend who has experienced significant difficulty in his church because he’s suspected of being a Calvinist. The thing is, he’s not a Calvinist. He’s a Southern Baptist who actually believes and preaches like the Kingdom of God is larger than his denomination. But the idea that Calvinism is to blame for the downward turn of baptisms in the SBC is easy and appealing in times of nostalgia and anxiety.

Everything was going well, and then someone messed things up. The liberals. The gays. The Democrats. The Calvinists. The Emerging Church.

Psalm 77 is a lament, and we live in lamentable times. Much has gone wrong and I have my doubts that some of it will ever go right as it did in the past. In times of lament, the answers to our questions seem lost in the fog. We can ask with the psalmist, “Is God hiding his answers from us? Has he forgotten his promises?”

The answer of scripture is to remember the story of redemption and to find our place in it. We remember the great deeds of the Lord, not how many people were here on Sundays back in the 50’s or the 70’s. We remember God’s actions of salvation for all of his people and for the whole world. We aren’t called to look back to when everyone was “churched” and no one ever said a bad word on television.

Nostalgia isn’t the remembrance that we’re called to in Psalm 77. In our times of questioning and even desperation, we must keep our eyes on the author and finisher of our faith, not on the way things used to be when a good man wasn’t hard to find because the world was filled with good country people.

The scriptures spend so much time lamenting, it makes me wonder if there is any hope for us if we don’t learn HOW to lament; how to mourn our decline and cultural exile in the presence of the Lord, rather than by becoming a wholly own subsidiary of whoever is fighting the culture war or crack addicts on the drug of blaming one another, throwing out pastors and blaming “Calvinists” and “Missionals.”

Lamentation is the proper stance for many of us in my denomination and in many denominations. I don’t want the cocksure arrogance of so many younger Christians. I want to take note of our past, but instead of turning it into mythology, I want to lament its meanings, both good and not good.

As fellow pilgrims, we should help one another remember rightly, and remember Biblically. We should turn our backs on the poison of nostalgia and look instead for the breakthrough of the Kingdom of Jesus in the places filled with the last, least, lost and little.

We should learn to lament, and in lamentation, to call out the questions without offering cheap and easy answers. We need to stop trying to manufacture evangelicalism out of rhetoric, and offer our prayers, tears, anger and confusion to God. Then we can, as so many have before us, follow a path into the future with the people of God, and we can stop trying to drag the corpse of our evangelical and denominational nostalgia around with us.

To lament and to remember should mean that we find a way to be free, and to walk into the future unburdened.