Let's Give Up... Hope for a Better Past
what's done is done
Hello, fellow travelers on the journey! It’s the last week of my Lenten series!
We here at Hold My Chalice are a motley bunch from a variety of religious faiths, but there’s something quite lovely about a season where we consider what no longer serves us and how we might prepare ourselves for what’s next. So this Lenten season, we are considering seven things we say or do or believe in our congregations that no longer serve us, and maybe we can give them up.
Kimberley Debus
This week: Hope for a Better Past
There’s a Kids in the Hall sketch where Bruce McCullough plays a disgruntled restaurant customer who’s annoyed that his check hasn’t yet arrived - “If I don’t get that check soon, I’m gonna spin out. It feels like an hour. How long has it been?” His wife replies “four minutes.” But when the waiter gives him the check, the customer continues to spin out, screaming at the waiter and the manager about how he doesn’t “want it now! I wanted it fifteen minutes ago!”
Ultimately, the customer just wanted an apology, but he couldn’t articulate it, instead demanding a different past.
But see… a different past can’t happen. Not for a late check, not for a better diagnosis, not for a different election result, not for a different outcome from a congregational conflict.
And those who want a different past often hold on to hurts, slights, and grudges. They judge every current situation as one that can change the past. And they make demands on new people and new situations to try to change the past. Sometimes, people rewrite the story so that the past becomes their entire identity.
Now I am a proponent of remything - shifting our stories to see the lessons and better come to terms with who we have become because of the past. But tacit in that process is acknowledgement, healing, repair, and rebuilding relationships. Too often, those who hope for a better past are not interested in rebuilding or looking forward. They’re too invested in litigating what happened and being dissatisfied that the past hasn’t changed.
Unfortunately, this is a pattern I see too often in congregations; what starts as conflict becomes entrenched ways of being with each other - often creating isolation and disconnection, often causing long-held grudges to erupt as something else goes awry, and only those who have been around a long time understand why the bruhaha of today’s crisis isn’t actually about today. This can be confusing to newer members, clergy, and staff, who may have never heard the actual past people are trying to change.
Hoping for a better past never works, because it keeps you stuck in the past. It prevents you from moving forward, from meeting the moment. It prevents you from envisioning a possible future. It prevents progress and growth. And it definitely prevents healing.
I actually started thinking about this when I was gathering thoughts for my Easter sermon. I was thinking about how the women told the men about the open tomb and the missing body, and the men (as the gospel writers tell us) didn’t believe them. And so when they go to look for themselves, they still need to go back to what was, when Jesus was among them, in the flesh. The hoped for a better past, a past before the violence, the torture, the horrific death, the suffering. This, I think, is why the gospels tell of Jesus returning to them, speaking to them, allowing them to touch him - a way to return to a better past.
What if they’d understood that Jesus was killed by the state with the support of the church? What if they had understood that they didn’t need him to be not-dead and just needed to preach the messages of love, justice, and compassion?
Now I’m not entirely sure we would know about this man’s incredible ministry and message over 2000 years later if they had… but I can’t help but wonder if part of that Easter story is the tale of a congregation unwilling to let go of their hope for a different past, and that hope now translates into a broader message that we can only accept today because we know we can’t change the past?
I want hope to thrive in our congregations. I want hope to point us to new visions, new futures. As the lyrics by Marion Franklin Ham says, I want us to “revere the past but trust the dawning future more.”
Let’s give up hope for a better past, and instead, work for a better today and tomorrow.
