Daily Lesson for July 9, 2014

Today's Lesson is from Matthew chapter 23 verses 29 through 32:

29 “Woe to you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites! For you build the tombs of the prophets and decorate the monuments of the righteous, 30 saying, ‘If we had lived in the days of our fathers, we would not have taken part with them in shedding the blood of the prophets.’ 31 Thus you witness against yourselves that you are sons of those who murdered the prophets. 32 Fill up, then, the measure of your fathers.

In Robert Penn Warren's novel "All the Kings Men" the narrator of the story is a kind of shadow or alter-ego to the main character. His name is Jack Burden, and the burden he bears is the terrible, shadowed history of his Southern family with its infidelity and cruel complicity in the terror of the American slave economy. It is the burden of shame.

One of the most difficult journeys is the journey toward coming to terms with the sins of our ancestors. It is fraught with such shame and dis-ease that most of us cannot face it. We cannot bear the burden long. For soon we discover the weight of our own mothers' and fathers' sins drags us down also as we realize we have coursing through our own veins the blood of the cruel, the unfaithful and even the murderous. And then we discover the burdensome truth that in so many ways we are beneficiaries of their duplicity and evil. 

I see this now throughout the South as in the last 25 years so many monuments and museums have been built to remember Slavery, Jim Crow, and the struggle for civil and human rights. It is fitting to build these, and has even become economically beneficial for a city to do so. But what Jesus said is so true in all of this - one generation kills the prophets and the next builds their monuments. But what is generally left unsaid or undone at these monuments to the past is the ways in which our past continues to give shape to our future. The past is left in the past with little attention to the ways in which that past also continues to order, capitalize, privilege, and segregate our present. We think it was all over in 1865 or 1965. To think otherwise is almost too much to bear.

But with God's help it is not too much. While there are no painless ways of coming to terms with the injustices of the past, today's Lesson reminds us that the alternative is even worse.

Santana famously said that those who do not remember the past are condemned to repeat it. But in order to remember it rightly, we must risk bearing its pain and the truth of its consequence.