As a progressive, I believe there are many names for God and many ways to God; this article reflects one of those ways. Take from here what works for you. Celebrate life with joy and peace!
Recently, Dr. Emery J. Cummins, former SDSU professor and long time friend of MCC San Diego and a supporter of LGBT rights long before it became fashionable, preached at The Met Church. He has given me permission to share his sermon. It is worth the read. Enjoy! Pastor Dan.
We generally think of time as divided into three distinct regions; the “past”, the “present”, and the “future”. Accordingly, the past is regarded as being immutably fixed while the future is undefined and nebulous. As time goes by, the moment that was once the present becomes part of the past while the future, in turn, becomes the new present. In this way time is said to pass, with a distinct present moment “moving” forward into the future and leaving the past behind.
I invite you to consider your own life narrative as it cruises across these three regions in light of what our Bible has to say about them. Each of us has a life narrative – a novel, if you will – which had a beginning and is following a story line across the pages of our lives. While each person has a unique past, and while our individual futures still lie over the horizon dividing the present from the future, everyone reading this is living in the present. So I invite you to sit back and open your life’s novel to the present page as we consider where you’ve been and where you’re headed.
The past
Beginning with the past, we tend to think of it as a fixed entity, much in the same way that we regard history: it happened, it is done, fixed, complete and there’s nothing we can do to change it. However, we often fail to take into account the mistaken impressions we have of the past, either from our personal life experience or from the study of history.
Two examples will suffice to demonstrate the manner in which the past, as we understand it, is not immutable. When I was a child one of the favorite neighborhood activities of my friends was playing “cowboys and Indians,” in which the Indians were always regarded as savages and the cowboys as heroes. It wasn’t until my adulthood that I learned about the “Trail of Tears,” and in 1970 when I read Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee, I realized that the image of Native Americans foisted on me as a child was distorted almost beyond recognition.
A second example concerns the American experience during World War II, a major part of which was omitted from my high school and college classes in American history. There was no mention of the more than 110,000 Japanese-Americans rounded up and herded into Relocation Centers scattered across eight Western states. This shameful episode in our history was not etched into the American consciousness until 1994 with the publication of Snow Falling on Cedars by David Guterson. The “past” is not immutable: it is always subject to major revisions as we expand our knowledge and discover, in the words of Paul Harvey, “the Rest of the Story.”
We can be sure that if such historical inaccuracies and omissions occurred in history books, our personal life histories are also replete with errors and misunderstandings.
It is instructive to look back on the history of psychotherapy in this regard. Just as we carry inaccurate images of our national history, we are equally likely to hold distorted memories of our personal histories. This is especially important to recognize in light of the emphasis placed on our individual past by the purveyors of cultural wisdom beginning with Freud, who maintained that the child is father of the man. In his formulation our personalities are essentially developed by the time we reach puberty, and while the neo-Freudians that followed him refined his views somewhat, they retained its deterministic foundations.
In the mid-‘60s Eric Berne, a popular American neo-Freudian, introduced the metaphor of “old tapes.” These consist of negative communications from parents and teachers that were internalized but never discarded during childhood and adolescence. Rather, they are likely to play their adverse and self-defeating messages even into adulthood. Examples of such messages might be statements like these: “You’re just like your father;” “You will never amount to anything;” “You are not college material;” “No one would ever want to go out with you;” “You’re a pathetic human being.” The problem with the content of these “old tapes” is that it continues to inform the self-concepts of their hosts irrespective of their falsity or distortions.
The emphasis on determinism was not limited to Freud and the neo-Freudians. Our own American brand of behaviorism also provided a model for human development that was predicated on determinism. From John B. Watson in the early decades of the 20th century to B.F. Skinner in mid-century, the conventional wisdom was that our present situation is wholly controlled by our past experiences.
Indeed, the debate surrounding causes of human behavior that raged throughout much of the last century swung between “heredity and environment,” the only two determinants deemed worthy of consideration. Human behavior was regarded as traceable either to inherited traits or learned responses that were acquired from prior conditioning.
As the field of psychology evolved in the 1980s and ‘90s, the deterministic emphasis on the past began to fall out of favor (sort of like junk bonds) from being the sole predictor of present and future behavior to being only one of many influences that affect one’s life. A revolutionary development known as Narrative Therapy, originated by Australian psychologist Michael White, suggested that even though the past may be a fixed entity, the meanings one attributes to the past are continually changing.
He theorized that each of us has a life “narrative” extending from prior generations to the present, and by extension, into the future. We have interpreted our past experiences in particular ways, often forgetting that our view of these experiences may be based on distortions. While the actual events of the past cannot be changed, our interpretations (or meanings) of these events can be reframed to help us create new narratives for the present and future. Family histories can be reimagined and infused with new meanings to loosen their grip on our present personal narratives.
Take a moment to recall some formative experiences at age six; or ten; or 16; or 25. Your intellectual and social development at those ages was inevitably constrained by your limited experience. The meanings attached to life events occurring at these stages are necessarily tied to the developmental level at which they transpired. But as your understanding of life continues to extend and mature, you are better able to reframe these experiences as you reinterpret and amend your life narrative in keeping with a new sense of your self-worth and future goals.
We often attribute far too much weight to past experiences than they warrant – especially negative experiences. It is difficult to let the past “go.” Speaking through the Prophet Isaiah, the Lord proclaimed, “Do not remember the former things, or consider the things of old. I am about to do a new thing; now it springs forth, do you not perceive it? I will make a way in the wilderness and rivers in the desert” (43:18-19, NRSV). You may recall that this was written to a generation of dispirited exiles, who had been languishing in Babylon for nearly 70 years. They were ready for some good news. They regarded their past experiences as irreversible, and their despair, recorded in the Psalms, was palpable: “By the Rivers of Babylon, there we sat down, yea, we wept when we remembered Zion. We hung our harps upon the willows in the midst of it. How shall we sing the Lord’s song in a foreign land?” (137:1-2, 4 NRSV).
In the New Testament, the Apostle Paul also addressed the past in his letter to the Christians at Philippi: “I concentrate on this: I leave the past behind and with hands outstretched to whatever lies ahead I go straight for the goal – my reward the honor of being called by God in Christ” (3:14, Phillips). This testimony came from a feared terrorist who had formerly spent his life chasing down Christians to kill them. “Leaving the past behind” carried great significance to him, and it can carry great significance for us.
In each of these instances the people of God were urged not to be shackled to the past, but to move on to bigger and better things in their walk with God.
The present
We are not destined to be chained to the past regardless of our present circumstances. Whether our personal history may include abuse, addiction, crime or private shame, we all live on the cusp between the past and the future. It is within the grasp of anyone to create a new life narrative by revising old meanings to reflect a new storyline. Consider this amazing declaration from St. Paul to the Christians in Corinth: “So if anyone is in Christ, there is a new creation: everything old has passed away; see, everything has become new!” (2 Corinthians 5:17, NRSV).
This is no idle pronouncement: this is the Word of the Lord. Everything becomes new in Christ, including a tired, self-defeating narrative of one’s past life. Indeed, Paul continues this riveting train of thought just a few verses later in the same epistle with these words: “See, now is the day of salvation” (6:2 NRSV).
One of the great contributions of existential psychology, a counter-cultural movement in the last century, was its perceptive shift from Freud’s obsession with the past to a renewed focus on the present. According to this perspective, part of the adventure of life is realizing that you can seize any moment to change your direction in life. Indeed, the concept that every moment is potentially a moment of crisis is one of the great liberating messages from existential psychology. We all have the potential ability within us to shift the trajectory of our lives whenever we decide to do so. As Paul so boldly stated, “Now is the day of salvation.”
When existential psychologists employed the word “crisis,” they were thinking primarily of life crises involving anxiety. Not all crises invoke this kind of response, but whether or not one is experiencing anxiety, each present moment is still pregnant with potentiality. It is worth noting that the Chinese word for crisis is a compound noun composed of two characters, one representing danger and the other opportunity. This is a useful way to consider any moment of crisis we encounter. Danger may be lurking in the shadows, but we always have the opportunity to seize any occasion and turn it into something positive.
You may recall the Latin phrase Carpe Diem from Dead Poets Society, one of Robin Williams’ memorable movies, in which his students were challenged to “Seize the Day.” Originally coined by the Latin Poet Horace a couple of decades before Christ, it captures perfectly the Gospel promise, “Now is the day of salvation.” We are neither shackled to the past nor to the negative narrative with which we may have regarded our life story. Today is a new day: despite the events that constitute our past, we have the freedom to reinterpret them – and reinvent ourselves – as affirmed by St. Paul, “If anyone is in Christ, there is a new creation: everything old has passed away; see, everything has become new!” (2 Corinthians 5:17, NRSV).
The old narrative of your life, whether predicated upon failure, weakness, abuse, addiction, or despair, does not constitute your destiny. The message of the Gospel is one of a “new creation,” of rewriting old narratives and changing failure to success, weakness to strength, abuse to acclamation, addiction to recovery, despair to delight. This is the kind of future that God wants for each of us, as described in the electrifying pronouncement by the Prophet Jeremiah to the Hebrew exiles in Babylon. He wrote: “For surely I know the plans I have for you, says the Lord, plans for your welfare and not for harm, to give you a future with hope” (29:11, NRSV).
The future
A future with hope. This was promised to a group of dispirited Jews who had been taken captive by the Babylonian army and marched 500 miles in chains to a foreign city where they languished for 70 years. Talk about a depressing life narrative! I suspect that few of us can top that for sheer despair and hopelessness. Yet they were promised a future with hope, and within a short time they were back on their way home following the defeat of the Babylonians by the Persian army. The Old Testament Books of Ezra and Nehemiah (originally a single scroll) provide the historical record of this astonishing turnaround in Jewish history. “A future with hope” is not an empty promise but a reality that may be claimed by any child of God.
In our age we have been acculturated with a philosophy of determinism, the idea that our life script is predetermined and is largely beyond our control. There are certainly elements of our lives that are just that, over which we exercise little influence. But the manner in which we choose to interpret and respond to conditions and events is potentially within our control, and with the help of God we can do amazing things.
George Steiner, one of the great Renaissance scholars of the 20th century, was a secular Jew who struggled with religious belief throughout his life. He wrote a statement in his memoir (Errata: An Examined Life) that addresses the future in an extraordinary and unforgettable way: “I am unable, even at the worst hours, to abdicate from the belief that the two validating wonders of mortal existence are love and the invention of the future tense. Their conjunction, if it will ever come to pass, is the Messianic.”
Love and the invention of the future tense. I had never given much thought to the existence of the future tense even though I began my career as a teacher of high school English. I just assumed its existence as a matter of course. But the future tense gives us a fresh template upon which to create a “future with hope,” as promised by God to his people. It is noteworthy that Steiner, a self-described agnostic, believed that love and the invention of the future tense if ever brought together would be Messianic. In so stating he cited two of the three virtues suggested by St. Paul in his classic love poem from 1 Corinthians: “And now abide faith, hope, love, these three; but the greatest of these is love.” Hope is the silent partner of the future tense: where there is life, there is hope. In the words of an old French proverb, “Hope is the dream of a soul awake.”
If somehow, despite all the negativity in your life, you can muster some faith, you will have captured the essence of a good life.
The future, unlike the past, is unwritten. The coming week, indeed, the coming day, is a blank tablet awaiting our entry. What will you decide to write on its pages?
From a sermon delivered at the Metropolitan Community Church of San Diego, California Sept. 21, 2014.
