Moving Forward

Sunset, New Year’s Eve 2023, near Wilson, Arkansas, photo by TBH

Sermon Series “Through the Bible,” № 69, 2 Corinthians 4:13-5:1

 For this slight momentary affliction is preparing us for an eternal weight of glory beyond all measure ….  – 2 Corinthians 4:17

I was looking at a photo of my brother’s family outside their home, and the red tool shed appeared in the background. It’s a tool shed moved from our old family property, about twelve miles away. One of my earliest memories features that tool shed, when my Dad climbed onto its roof to look over the yard and garden he was purchasing. That was in the mid-1960s, and until about ten years ago, the yard in which the tool shed rested and, of course, the family home, offered me a certain sense of stability. Since I left for college, I’ve lived in twelve apartments or homes in seven different communities. Though there are still a few reminders, the sense of permanency my parents’ home provided exists only in my memory.

My experience is not unique; moving away from home and family roots is more common than ever. According to the U.S. Census Bureau, about 40-million Americans change addresses each year, about 8-million moving from one state to another.[1] Those of us in ministry know how that mobility affects the rituals and timing surrounding major life events like funerals. Cremations are more common, and often allow loved ones to delay services for weeks or months in order to gather family members dispersed around the nation. When family members have relocated to multiple locations, and no one lives “back home” anymore, there’s often additional discussion about where a grave should be selected, or memorial marker should be erected, or whether it makes sense at all for a family without permanent connections to any one place.

My mother faced a decision like that 42 years ago, when her father, who was alienated from the family, died near Paoli, Indiana. A few months ago, when returning from Louisville, Therese and I stopped by the community cemetery and found the grave. On the marker, my mother had inscribed, “Carl Lauck of Findlay, Ohio,” the place written as large as the name.  This was her way of making sure her father was connected to other family buried in the home place.

To me, lack of permanency feels like a major problem, but scripture takes a different view. From the perspective of the Bible, lack of permanency is a source of wisdom: it leads us to recognize the difference between things that are temporary and things that are eternal. Lack of permanency makes us ask questions about the best use of our resources, and drives us to invest those resources while there is opportunity. Lack of permanency is a great teacher and a great motivator.

Author and theologian C.S. Lewis once wrote an essay that he entitled with Paul’s phrase, “the weight of glory.” As I reviewed that essay, which I first read forty years ago, I remembered the way that Lewis so often turns upside down conventional views. Elsewhere, he says that while many imagine heaven as less than earth, a shadow of what we now know, it’s probably the other way around: what we experience now is likely only a one-dimensional shadow of a richly layered future reality.  The passage of time is leading us toward the object of our deepest desires, and the door upon which we have been knocking will open at last. The problem we have, says Lewis, is that we are “like an ignorant child who wants to go on making mud pies in a slum because he cannot imagine what is meant by the offer of a holiday at sea.”[2] God is leading us to glory, said Lewis, but we are far too easily pleased.

When we read Paul’s words about “temporary affliction,” most often we equate them with individual illness and death, but “temporary affliction” can mean many things. Years ago, the presbytery team on which I served was called upon to give advice and fine-tune a plan offered by the session of the Tyler Place Presbyterian Church in St. Louis. Their plan contained impressively detailed background about the changes in their neighborhood and membership. In the 1950s, the congregation was one of the largest in our region. Then came the I-44 highway that divided the Shaw neighborhood, and halved the congregation to about 750 members in the 1960s. As urban change led to the movement toward suburban communities, the congregation was cut in half again in each of the subsequent four decades. Finally unable to support itself, the congregation sold its neo-gothic facility, and nested its ministries in another church’s building. For the few dozen faithful members who could remember the glory days, there was nothing trivial about the emotional pain they felt. A troubling lack of permanency could have driven them into deep denial and isolation in memories of the past. Instead, it taught them to rely upon God and one another, and motivated them to discern God’s plan for a new kind of future.

What they felt, I feel in different circumstances. This week, I finally had opportunity for a holiday gathering with my children and grandchildren. These days, holiday gatherings lead to more social-media photographs than I have time to view.  But the photos I do look at lead me to my memories. As I look at my babies who have grown into adults, spouses, and parents, there are a couple of inner voices that compete for attention. One voice remembers and grieves: “Remember the afternoons at the park. Remember the bike rides. Remember the sand box and the tree house and the coloring books and the trips to the zoo. Why did that all have to end? Those were the days.” Another voice anticipates and hopes: “There will be other days. Look forward to the days of grandchildren doing those things all over again. Look forward to new generations with new perspectives and new solutions to the old familiar problems of this world.”

How about you? Is there something you miss so much that it isolates you in the past, and prevents you from receiving the gifts of the present and the future? Whatever it is, you have to find a way to surrender it to God’s care and keeping. An old year has ended; a new year has begun. There is no going backward; hope is found by moving forward. 

NOTES

[1] https://www.census.gov/library/stories/2023/11/state-to-state-migration.html#:~:text=The%20number%20of%20people%20who,released%20U.S.%20Census%20Bureau%20estimates.

[2] C.S. Lewis, “The Weight of Glory,” in The Weight of Glory and other addresses, ed. Walter Hooper, New York, Macmillan Publishing Co., 1980, p. 4

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