memories

Here I am now in a new presbytery: the third presbytery of my life. I've ventured from Sierra Blanca in New Mexico, to Greater Atlanta, and now I'm in New Hope. I interned in Birmingham at Sheppard's and Lapsley, so I could count a forth as well.
As I answered questions at presbytery Tuesday, I considered how my study was influenced by the last examination I'd had. Or perhaps by the examination I'd heard on the floor of this presbytery last February. I considered the aphorism that generals tend to fight the last war. And that is a problem: that it is almost impossible to prepare for future problems in a complete way. That is, one can guess, and in some cases, it is possible to anticipate some of what will be asked. Still the tendency to attack yesterday's difficulties in the context of today persists.
This mistake is exemplified when teams try what worked for last year's champions. I remember the year the Falcons adopted the one back offense, right after Washington had won a super bowl with it, and the Falcons failed. It was a miserable experience, painful to watch. The Falcons have made this mistake, and many others besides, predictably over the years.
As an investment firm commercial says, "past performance is no guarantee of future success."
Whatever the past might have been, and past performance can tell you something it's true, you're entering into an investment that is founded on faith.
In life our predictions often don't pan out. Witness how Ivy League trained thinkers are unprepared for the consequences of war for instance. Every day and night on TV we witness intelligent men and women being flat wrong about many things, and their failure doesn't stop them - but certainly when I listen to them, they are consistent in approaching today's problems with solutions for yesterday's problems.
Life is more about faith. The question is What have we put our faith in? Niebuhr reminds us that we sin when we attach ultimate value to finite (non-ultimate) things, and finite value to the ultimate. When we treat God as a thing, a disposable commodity, and when we attach faith to, and give worship to, some temporary thing ( the market, a job, fame, our persona) we sin.
I think an element of faith is to enter into a new thing without thinking about the past, consciously not trying to fight the last battle, or answer the last test. Faith involves a letting go of the past.
Faith also involves imagination. Imagination is vital for living in new moments. I remember Faulkner saying that in the South the past isn't even past, and I think about how stultified the Southern imagination generally is. Part of the failure of unions to take hold down here certainly results from the population in general, seeing the failures of mill strikes in the 1930s, being too much in shock to imagine a world in which they would be better off without these kinds of jobs and that kind of paternalism.
We need faith that things can be different, and imagination to see how we can make these differences real - especially in the face of a world that puts all its effort in the narrative of real politik. The world loves nothing better than that the past should not be past. In the Balkans, in Ireland, in Palestine, all over the world, the past is firmly set in people's minds as an inescapable legacy requiring vengeance (though Ireland has moved beyond this, it's troubles are recent enough to recall how fixed in stone they were). The imagination and faith needed to move forward are hard won.
The Easter text in Isaiah 25 presents just such an imagining of God's abundance (which we must practice faith to see) over against the story of real politik - Moab that is crushed like straw. Of course Israel lives in the context of Moab, of exile, of displacement, and Isaiah's vision of a feast over flowing with wine and meat (and a vegan selection) is an eschatological promise, an elusive promise - but it is where faith leads. We wander in the desert to find it.
And this vision of Isaiah's is God's promised land of milk and honey. It's as if at the end of the Deuteronomist's history that God had said, "not here; this monarchy, this isn't it." Israel has not just wandered 40 years in the desert, but the subsequent 500 years as well. And here we are 2500 years later, called to engage our imaginations to find how faith will lead us to the feast.