F. Harry Daniel
Second Presbyterian Church
Sermons: June 10, 2007

"Rooted in History"

In February, 1942, the heavy cruiser USS Houston, the largest US warship still afloat in the Far East, ran into a Japanese invasion fleet off the northern coast of Java. Vastly outgunned, the Houston put up a gallant fight, but she was reduced to a burning hulk before sinking. The story of her last fight was unknown in the US until three years latter when survivors of her crew were found in a prison camp. When I first read the story I mourned for that gallant ship and her crew. When I go back to the story from time to time, I am still moved. What human gallantry in the face of assured destruction! We are rooted in history.

In William C. Davis' six volume photographic history of the Civil War, the last photo is a scene in Hollywood Cemetery, Richmond, VA of a sea of crosses marking fresh graves, with one lone soldier kneeling in front of a particular grave with his head in his hand. 620,000 dead; 459,000 wounded. Civil wars are the bloodiest of wars, and we still have not gotten over ours 142 years ago. We still wrestle with its impact. We are rooted in history.

When I was privileged to lead a group to the Middle East, I remember an episode at the Garden Tomb. We were in the tomb itself, and my eye caught Fred Zimmerman backed up against the wall of the tomb looking at that empty grave. And I knew that he was feeling the awesomeness of the event so long ago when God entered Jesus' tomb bringing life where there was only death. We are rooted in history.

On June 6, 1944 on the beach at Normandy there were two kinds of men on the beach: the dead and those who were going to die if they did not move forward, which they did gloriously. History is in our bones. These are stories about our being rooted in history.

And yet we live in a time of historical amnesia. Our world is highly personal, selfish, and extremely adolescent. Too many have no feeling for the past, for stories, tradition, and precedents, and so have no perspective in making judgments or discerning values. They may know the facts of history and read historical novels by the dozen, but they do not feel history in their bones. It is not their history. The result is they begin every problem from scratch. There is no feeling of being a part of living tradition that already has some answers worked out and some procedures worth repeating. When these same people go to church, they have little consciousness of being part of a community that carries in its scriptures, its worship, and its forms of discipleship, life twenty and more centuries in the making. O, they may have little local traditions, but not the great tradition of the Christian church.

But such people never show much sign of wising-up - of developing a historical sense, of becoming conscious that they are part of a continuing people of God and growing beyond the adolescent susceptibilities to novelty and fantasy. Such an attitude is really a cover for sin, a clever way of avoiding responsibility for the past. The sin is a denial of dependence upon God and interdependence among neighbors. It is a refusal to be a people of God and becomes instead an insistence that the individual ego be treated as something godlike. History could teach them the destruction the human ego can bring not only upon itself, but upon others and the world. Our lives individually and communally are part of a much larger story, with a past we did not fashion and a future we could not ourselves create.

Could it be that Tevye was right in Fiddler on the Roof? Tradition, and I would add history, help us keep our balance on the roof of life. Our loss of the past with its tradition may be why we are so unbalanced today!

A serious test of character is involved in any person's attitude toward history. Fullness and maturity of life is in part a matter of the number of tenses a human being possesses. In infancy the present tense alone is important. Needs, hurts, pleasures of the moment are all there is. Immediate gratification dominates. Youth leads to the acquisition of a future tense. As W. Wordsworth described it: "...hope that can never die, Effort, expectation, and desire, And something more about to be."

As we grow older we tend to acquire a past tense also, a past tense not confined to our narrow little world, but one that grows and grows and grows. A person's spiritual quality is tested by the possession of a past tense. The ability to recall, to remember distinguishes us from the lower animals. Again and again God says to God's people "Remember."

I am not talking about the glorification of the past that is idolatry. A great deal of nonsense has been said about the good old days. Those days are gone, and they were never so good! Being rooted in history does not mean a false idealization of the days gone by. Nor does it mean the tyranny of the dead hand, nor overlooking the miseries and failures of the past. That is the meaning of that odd text in Philippians that is our New Testament lesson. Paul appreciates the past and knows its power, but he calls us not to live in the past, but to press forward into the future with the history the past has given us.

History is alive, we are rooted in it. From the Stone Age until now, lives beyond our power to repay have brought us thus far, with our physical comforts, civic values, spiritual enlightenment, liberty, cultural privileges, etc. etc. What do we suppose all this has cost? One of the most ennobling insights that can come to any of us is the perception that no blessing's trail can be traced far back without running into blood, tears, pain, courage, love, steadfastness. It's profoundly Biblical: at the beginning of every road down which a benediction comes there stands a cross.

We are rooted in history. It is a given, but we can choose our attitude toward it. We can be grateful for it, live up to it, rejoice in it, weep with it, learn from it, be worthy of it, or we can forget it, be ignorant concerning it, and unappreciative of it. But we cannot escape it!

Most of the good we know and are was given to us. History calls us to thankful receptivity, to appreciation. As a people we Americans are energetic, ambitious, pushing, not inwardly rich. We are strenuously absorbed in things to be done by us. We too often forget to be appreciative of some glorious things that have already been done for us. If someone is tempted to say that strenuousness is hard and appreciation is easy, they display their ignorance.

The stories, the traditions, the past, history is a free gift! Money may buy a ticket to a Bach concert, but we can never pay for Bach's music. Such blessings are not for sale; we cannot bargain for them; they are given to us when we are born; and we grow up if we are wise, to be glad and grateful, that they are in our world.

History provides courage for fighting the battles of the present. History provides inspiration for going forward. History provides wisdom for the living of these days. We have a rich resource of accumulated experience, good and bad.

Our Old Testament readings say it well. "Remember the days of old, consider years long past. Ask your father and he will inform you, your elders and they will tell you." "Look to the rock from which you were sculptured."

History provides us perspective. Christianity transmits a family story. You and I are in continuity with a community that reaches back to Abraham and Sarah and further. Without a consciousness of history, the church degenerates into a religious society designed to meet the needs of' its clientele. That is no longer a church. If Christians are out of touch with their history, they lose their identity and become societies for servicing their own religious wants and desires. They scarcely know who they are or what they are called to be or to whom they are accountable.

History saves us from the tyranny of the moment and our own times. History provides a perspective on our own time and culture that sets us free from the dictatorship of the claim that our own time is the best and the goal toward which history is moving.

History teaches us that in and through, over and above, there is a gracious, loving, mighty healing at work in the world, and when you and I have blundered about and come to the end our resources, there is still open to us stores of forgiveness, caring, and reservoirs of power which we have not even begun to tap. Out of history God lays nailed-scared hands once more on the future. History teaches us to cry and weep and praise and give thanks, and it also teaches that this world, this church, all people are God's.

And what are we called to do? Remember truthfully and justly. Truth is elusive, but indispensable. Deceitful memories are unjust and injurious. What are we called to do? Remember so as to heal. Wounds can wreak havoc in lives and lead to more pain and destruction. What are we to do? Learn from the past. We can learn lessons from the past so as to apply them in new situations.

Why do this? The 20^th century was the bloodiest of all centuries. We are called to making peace and living justly so that the horizons of human life will not be dark beyond hope as they were in 1941/1942. We are called to such a life so that the horizon for our children and grandchildren in this violent, pain-filled world will be brighter. You and I, as Christians, know something. We can count on the future reality of a radically different world. We have seen that possibility is Christ.