WHERE ARE YOU GOING, WHERE HAVE YOU BEEN?
Rev. Dr. Kathy Fuson Hurt
FBC, February 8, 2009
Scripture: Isaiah 40:21-31
I finally realized that I have done you a disservice since becoming your pastor. You tried sometimes to set me straight, but being the stubborn person I am, I resisted such efforts—but no more, for I see the error of my ways.
Like many pastors at any time, like many pastors especially at times of starting new ministries, I wanted us to embark on a whole new way of doing church, to utterly remake ourselves, to become a church unlike any seen before, and particularly to become a church unlike the church you had been before. My motivation did not stem from any negative judgment I harbored about the church you had been; on the contrary, part of my desire to serve you grew from admiration for the inspiring history of the First Baptist Church of Granville.
But admiration notwithstanding, I still pressed for us to break from the past, to change directions, to reinvent ourselves, because I believed that a new orientation was necessary for us to grow and thrive, and also because I was eager to put my own stamp on this congregation, to make you identifiable as the church that Kathy Hurt is serving.
An egotistical motive, I am chagrined to admit, and an all-too-common tactic of new pastors when they arrive on the scene, acting as though the church had not truly existed before they rode into town. Pastors forget repeatedly that we are the ones who come and go, while it is the congregation that remains, that lasts beyond any one pastor, any one exciting new program, any one transformation in mission and outreach. And to act otherwise, to dismiss the history and the congregation that has gone before and will abide after, does a disservice to a church, its traditions—and its faith.
Perhaps like many of you, I listened to President Obama’s Inaugural Address with considerable enthusiasm, especially cheering whenever he emphasized the break with the preceding administration’s style and policies that he intended. Take that, Dick Cheney! How about them apples, W? The new President made it very clear that the nation was going to be seeing a drastically different way of governing and being in the world, and I realize that in part his motivation in outlining this difference was to give us hope at a time of national anxiety, to cheer us on for the difficult work that lies ahead. But along with these noble aims, I also worry about President Obama’s eagerness to dismiss from our collective memory the past several years of national experience, for the same reasons that I realize I have been mistaken, that new pastors and presidents are often mistaken, when we are quick to discard all that preceded us in a race towards the future.
I also notice this tendency to discard the past as some useless time that no longer has any claim on our functioning in the present, much less the future, popping up in individual conversations around this church, where so many of us come from unfulfilling, even harmful spiritual backgrounds. We mark the disconnection in statements of identity, saying “I used to be Catholic” or “I left the Lutheran church” or “I’m a recovering fundamentalist.” Some of us wince whenever a word or gesture reminds us of the church we left behind, or even insist that nothing must be said or done that has any echoes, however faint, of our former spiritual tradition.
Breaking with the past, rejecting the past, as having no value for the present and no part in the future: it is a style so typical of our country and culture, with our beginnings in a revolt against our home country, with our preference for all things youthful and our uneasiness with age. It is a style that marks liberal congregations of all sorts with our eagerness to embrace the latest trend, the most progressive idea. And it is a style which, when it emerged among the ancient Hebrew peoples, threatened to be their undoing.
The first hearers of today’s reading from Isaiah would have been the Israelites suffering under Babylonian captivity, neither the first nor the last time they would find themselves lost, wondering whether all the magnificent prophecies about their nation and Yahweh, the God who took special interest in them, were about to be proved false. President Obama tried to rally the nation in his Inaugural Address by emphasizing new directions and a very different future from the recent past; Isaiah takes the opposite tack, reminding the Israelites of their past and all the times they have seen Yahweh’s ultimate power at work in their lives. “Have you not known? Have you not heard? Has it not been told you from the beginning? Have you not understood from the foundations of the earth?” (Isaiah 40:21). In the Hebrew tradition, a core belief was that faith begins with memory. Where memory fails, the faith of the community is threatened. So the prophet begins by calling the people to remember, and halfway through this passage, when he echoes their despair as they say, “[Our] way is hidden from the Lord, and [our] right is disregarded by God” (40:27), he poses the same challenge to remember: “Have you not known? Have you not heard?” (40:28). The tactic is similar to one I have experienced in the course of psychotherapy: I bemoan my present state, and the therapist invites me to recall previous times when I felt similarly challenged. How is it that I overcame the challenges before, that I made it this far?
Faith was rooted in remembering for the Israelites. To remember is to remain strong in faith; to forget is to lose faith. In a culture such as ours, so focused on the future, the notion is an odd one; with our tendency to experience faith itself as future directed, as looking hopefully forward towards a time when life will be better and our situation will improve, as we encourage one another to “have faith”, locating faith in the past and in memory may not make much sense. Even more problematic is the likelihood that the past and its memories are not positive or reassuring ones, since the past for many of us here, particularly in terms of spirituality, was a time of harsh judgment, of shaming, of being told what to believe and being scolded for asking questions, of learning that our very essence was contaminated and unworthy in the sight of God. Who wants to remember a past like that? Just as we may be eager to forget the past several years of our national experience, so may we be eager to set aside the past several years of our spiritual experience. Yet if faith comes at least in part from remembering, what happens to our faith when the memories are not preserved and recalled lovingly, but rejected, cast aside like any other unwanted possession?
Family systems therapists observe that in most families (and in most family-like groups, like congregations) there will usually be someone who plays the role of black sheep, outsider, one who has never quite fit and probably never will. Exactly how the outsider in a family system (or a congregation) is identified is mysterious—but once the identity has surfaced, it tends to stick, regardless of the passage of time and regardless of changes in circumstances. You will probably not be surprised to learn that I played the outsider role in my family, and I suspect that many of you did as well; churches like this one tend to appeal particularly to those labeled “different” in their families, and we’ve translated that same role to become church-wide, often playing the role of “different” and “outsider” in the larger community and our own denominational family.
Family systems therapists will tell you that the identified outsider in a family or family-like group often is the one who has the most important perspective, who is able to see through the dysfunction and narrowed vision of the family to larger possibilities and healthier ways of functioning. Our church has certainly played that role in the community, and I know many of you played such a role in your own families and workplaces and neighborhoods. But we become outsiders, black sheep, precisely because we see through the present and tend not to be silent about the limitations around us. So to undermine our message, our families and communities and denominations call us odd, crazy, wrong-headed, sinful, unscriptural, weird, dangerous, presenting us with two equally unappealing choices: shut up and get with the program, or leave. And if we refuse to do either, we usually get kicked out. Family systems, congregations, communities, groups have a powerful need to preserve the status quo, and will stop at nothing to silence anyone who upsets that status quo.
This church has learned well how to play the outsider role in our community, and many of us have learned well how to play the outsider role in our families and workplaces. Outsiders come to be heroic, prophetic figures in the eyes of other outsiders. We take pride, and justifiably so, in our courageous willingness to stand apart from the oppressive system, the narrow-minded group, the abusive family. But in doing so, we pay a heavy price: we cut ourselves off from our roots, our environment, our families, our histories, severing relationships, wiping out memories, never speaking of the past except in critical, distancing terms. We live a segmented existence: the fine people we are now, no longer having any connection to the people and church and community we used to be part of. I used to be a Southern Baptist, but I left all that behind. My siblings all chose to remain in Texas as adults, but not me, I wanted out of that cowboy culture. We used to be part of the local Baptist community, but they kicked us out and we’re never going back. I used to believe that, I used to think that way, I once saw the world in those terms, but no more. I left all that behind.
“Have you not known? Have you not heard?” The prophet does not just urge the people to remember, but more specifically to remember all the times and places that present them with indisputable evidence of God’s power, majesty, and abiding presence. Nothing can outlast God; nothing escapes God’s notice; nothing lies beyond God’s understanding and care. God embraces everything, everyone, everywhere, all the time.
Which is the same perspective we are invited to assume: embrace everything, everyone, everywhere, all the time. That all-encompassing embrace and acceptance is not just to be offered to others; it is to include our own lives as well, the magnificent and the mundane, the successes and failures, the present we enjoy—and the past we may want to forget. Spiritual growth is not growth in some sort of superhuman perfection, but is growth in wholeness, so that the spiritually mature life is the life that has a place in it for every experience and every time of our lives, especially including those experiences and times that we distance ourselves from, that we prefer to reject as not really who we are. Playing the role of outsider can help us critique and reform. At the end of the day, however, whatever we have placed outside ourselves has to be drawn back within the circle of our lives. God embraces all—and so must we.
So the next time I start acting as though the First Baptist Church of Granville only began the day I took up residence here, remind me that the church was here before I came and will still be here after I leave. Encourage me, as I will encourage you, to remember the past: the past of this congregation, our individual pasts. If we tell one another our stories often enough and fully enough, we may come to find, as the Israelites did, that the remembering gives us the strength and vision we need to keep going, to rise up with wings as eagles, to run and not be weary, to walk and not faint.
