January 15, 2012
Rev. Susan E. Gilbert Zencka
Frame Memorial Presbyterian Church

Texts: John 1:43-51, 1 Samuel 3:1-20

The month of January takes its name from the Roman god Janus, who is the god of beginnings and transitions. He is depicted as having a head with two faces - one facing into the future, one looking back at the past, and so was the god of transitions of all sorts - from season to season, from youth to adulthood, from one understanding to another, from life to death.

We aren’t always very good at looking into the past - increasingly we seem to have developed amnesia: interesting that a culture which has such a fondness for nostalgia should have lost its sense of history. While most folks have learned some history in school, and many of us actually enjoyed it, we still tend to take an ahistorical view of the world. Our memory goes back only as far as our own experience, if that. And even if we remember the past, we tend to ignore it.

I became aware of this recently because of a book that one of our sons gave me for Christmas - it is a large book called The Nature and Destiny of Man by Reinhold Niebuhr, who is commonly regarded as one of the more important theologians of the twentieth-century. He was a pastor, then a seminary professor, and is credited with writing the Serenity Prayer, that marvelous prayer which has become inseparable from the Twelve-Step movement. You know the prayer, its most popular version is:

“God, grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, courage to change the things I can, and wisdom to know the difference.”

Niebuhr was ordained in 1915 and became pastor of a church in Detroit where he stayed for 13 years, leaving in 1928 to teach at Union Theological Seminary in New York. I am just beginning to read his work, and honestly, I find it complex. It’s not an easy read. But as I am reading him, I am struck by some similarities between his era and ours. Niebuhr, in his early ministry was active during the optimistic years of the 1920’s but later as the Depression took hold, and then Nazism emerged, Niebuhr had to come to terms with realities that did not mesh with the optimism of his early adulthood. He is known to be part of the neo-orthodox school of theologians which include Karl Barth, Dietrich Bonhoeffer, and more recently Douglas John Hall. He is known in particular for espousing what is called Christian realism - an approach to modern life which recognizes the reality of evil in the world and is pragmatic about dealing with it. For example, Niebuhr believed that war could be justified theologically, and in particular, American military intervention could be a faithful response to the presence of evil. As a theologian, he has had an influence on a number of American politicians, and in the last presidential election both McCain and Obama cited him as influencing their own views. He received the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 1964.

As I’ve begun reading him, I’ve been reminded that ours is not the only era that has grappled with how to realistically and faithfully engage hope. And like Niebuhr, in his own time, many adults in our time were very influenced by the optimism of the late 20th century, an optimism which having lost the innocence and idealism of the 60’s and early 70’s, persisted as a kind of optimistic consumerism into the early 21st century.
But, in the last few years, beginning perhaps with 9/11 and deepening as both the economic crisis and political partisanship became intransigent during the last three years, optimism has given way to real soul-searching by people of all flavors of faith and politics - if we haven’t found unity in purpose, at least we can find common ground in discouragement.... Again and again over the past year, people have asked me, and I have wondered, how we find our way back to hope? And as I begin to read Niebuhr, I am reminded that ours is not the first era to deal with disappointment, with difficult challenges, with division, but that these need not leave us in despair.
Nonetheless, I also realize that the ahistorical perspective of our culture necessarily leaves us orphaned - without a sense that as a people, we have been here before and transcended tough times. And having lost our connection to the past, we find ourselves unable to discover a path to the future.

Not only does the culture suffer from amnesia, the Church does, too. In the introduction to her book A People’s History of Christianity: The Other Side of the Story, Diana Butler Bass discusses the spiritual amnesia of the Church. She writes: “...I realized that believing the usual story is one thing. In recent years, however, something else has happened. Many no longer remember. For vast numbers of people, including Christians, history has ceased to exist.” [page 6]

Knowing our history is important. Being able to root ourselves in the past does many things for us:
It tells us that we are not alone - we are part of a community of people who have suffered, rejoiced, despaired, hoped, been angry with God, and been overwhelmed by the reality of God’s love and care. Truly, there is nothing new under the sun - God and the people of God have been this way before.

It gives us some historical perspective on our own times - things have been worse. Things have been lots worse - and even in more desperate times, people found ways to be hopeful.

It can inspire us - people just like us, ordinary folks, have been able to make a real difference in the past. As we learn more about the experiences of others, we begin to believe that we can make a difference, too.

It shows us the way to hope - as we see that others have found their way to hope even in situations that seemed worse than ours, and that their hope was fulfilled, we find the courage to entrust ourselves to hope, which increases our own alertness to new possibilities.

The story of Samuel shows us how amnesia and remembering can work - Samuel was living in a time when visions were rare, and Eli and his sons had drifted away from faithfulness. So when God began calling Samuel, not only did he not have any background with this himself, he also didn’t have a sense of the experiences of God’s people as a reference to help him understand. When Eli remembered and helped Samuel to understand the possibilities, the young man was able to awake to his own call from God, to understand what he was experiencing. And when Eli remembered, it gave him a way to receive God’s message with humility - he could see his own place in history and understand his own failings.

As we learn the history of those who have come before us - we can look to recent history for people like Professor Niebuhr and Martin Luther King, Jr., who were both facing discouraging circumstances but prevailed in hope, and in seeking new ways to understand their own circumstances in light of the experiences of God’s people over the centuries.

And we can look to our ancestors in faith - to the men and women of every era - the Reformation, Medieval times, the early church, and the people of the Bible - to find others who have experienced some of what we are experiencing.

Martin Luther King Jr. was a great example of someone who allowed the historical and Biblical community shape his understanding of the present and his imagining of the future - his preaching is full of images from the Bible and from history that helped him understand his own work as part of God’s mission in the world.

And those who look to the experiences of God’s people throughout history can do so with the understanding that although we may be shaped by the past, and informed by the past, we are not trapped by the past because God is able to lead us to a new future which is not bound by the past. So that King’s understanding of history led him to hope precisely because he could see that throughout history, God had often made a way where there was no way, that the power of love had prevailed against the love of power, that the truth was indeed continuing to set people free, both in the history of this nation and in the history of God’s people throughout the world.

As we relearn our history, we will be able to see the very real grounds for hope that exist in this present time, so that we will be able to notice for ourselves what God is doing in our midst. Like those in the Gospel story who came to follow Jesus, we won’t have to merely remember, we too will be able to “Come and see.”

It has been my practice over the past ten years or so to read a section of Dr. King’s writings on the Sunday before the Monday holiday. Today I’m reading a section of his 1965 sermon at Temple Israel in Hollywood. Listen to the way Dr. King connects to both Biblical and national history and finds in those connections a way to hope:

“And I say to you that I am absolutely convinced that maybe the world is in need for the formation of a new organization: ‘The International Association for the Advancement of Creative Maladjustment’ -- men and women who will be as maladjusted as the prophet Amos who in the midst of the injustices of his day would cry out in words that echo across the centuries: ‘Let justice roll down like waters and righteousness like a mighty stream;’ as maladjusted as Abraham Lincoln who had the vision to see that this nation could not survive half slave and half free; as maladjusted as Thomas Jefferson who in the midst of an age amazingly adjusted to slavery would etch across the pages of history words lifted to cosmic proportions: ‘We hold these truths to be self evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable rights and that among these are life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness;’ as maladjusted as Jesus of Nazareth that said to the men and women of his day: ‘Love your enemies, bless them that curse you, pray for them that despitefully use you.’ And through such maladjustment we will be able to emerge from the bleak and desolate midnight of man’s inhumanity to man into the bright and glittering daybreak of freedom and justice.“And may I say in conclusion that I believe firmly that we will get to the promised land of collective fulfillment. I still believe that right here in America we will reach the promised land of brotherhood. Oh, I know that there are still dark and difficult days ahead. Before we get there some more of us will have to get scarred up a bit. Before we reach that majestic land some more will be called bad names. Some will be called reds and communists simply because they believe in the brotherhood of man. Before we get there some more will have to be thrown into crowded, frustrating, and depressing jail cells. Before we get there maybe somebody else like a Medgar Evers and the three civil rights workers in Mississippi this summer will have to face physical death. If physical death is the price that some must pay to free their children and their white brothers from a permanent death of the spirit, then nothing can be more redemptive. Yes, we were singing about it just a few minutes ago: ‘We shall overcome, we shall overcome. Oh deep in my heart, I do believe that we shall overcome some day.’“And I believe it because somehow the arc of the moral universe is long but it bends toward justice. We shall overcome because Carlyle is right: ‘No lie can live forever.’ We shall overcome because William Cullen Bryant is right: ‘Truth crushed to earth will rise again.’ We shall overcome because James Russell Lowell is right: ‘Truth forever on the scaffold, wrong forever on the throne. Yet, that scaffold sways the future and behind the dim unknown standeth God within the shadow, keeping watch above his own.’ With this faith we will be able to hew out of the mountain of despair a stone of hope. With this faith we will be able to transform the jangling discords of our nation into a beautiful symphony of brotherhood. With this faith we will be able to speed up the day. And in the words of prophecy, ‘Every valley shall be exalted and every mountain and hill shall be made low. The rough places will be made plain and the crooked places straight, and the glory of the Lord shall be revealed and all flesh shall see it together.’“This will be a great day. This will be a marvelous hour. And at that moment, figuratively speaking in biblical words: ‘the morning stars will sing together and the sons of God will shout for joy.’”

Amen.