Pastor's Perspective

Let's not go back!  One of the phrases often heard on the presidential campaign trail these days is "take the country back."   I understand almost everyone has some slice of America they'd like to go back to.  I'm not exempt.  I'd like to go back to a more civil, respectful tone in our national discourse, for example.  But it occurs to me that the set-up of the universe doesn't allow us to "go back."  We can remember the past, and emulate certain aspects of the past, but time always pulls us forward.  


This is not a bad thing.  It means that we continually have opportunities to build a better world.  Those who wish to build a better world (for all of us) have no reason to fear the future.  The good -- the public good-- does not lie in the past, unrecoverable in the present.  We can always move toward it.


I find myself made nervous by those who would seek to "go back."  We had the 20th century.  It wasn't perfect, but a lot got done.  There are reasons why the 19th century was left behind.  It contained child labor, 7-day work weeks, industrial violence, an abysmal lack of rights for women and African-Americans.  Voting rights, civil rights, workplace rights, reproductive rights, a slowly dawning enlightenment about human sexuality-- these are some of the things that took big strides in the 20th century.  We should not go back.  We should go forward.  We go forward, not because we have some misguided idea that we can reach some kind of human perfection, but because 1) forward in time is the only direction the universe allows; and 2) because going forward is faithful.


There seems to be some idealized picture of a "Christian" culture that the religious right wants us to move toward.  Some of those cultural elements may rightly lay claim to the title "Christian,' others clearly do not.  Followers of Jesus know that we do not practice a Christian culture, or worship some idealized point in time.  We do not follow a program or a platform.  We do not follow a set of principles.  We follow Jesus Christ --  crucified and raised from the dead.  Christ does not live in the past, calling us backwards toward the first century, or the 19th century or even the 20th!  Christ does not stand behind us in the past pushing us forward!  Christ is with us in the present and also stands in the future calling us forward.  And that's the way we should go, with our rhetoric, and with our work, never losing sight of the fact that Jesus rejected a society where the rich and powerful continually grew richer and more powerful and the poor were used up and ground into oblivion.  In the name of Jesus Christ, let's not go back to that!