"Nevertheless, God was not pleased with most of them, and they were struck down in the wilderness. Now these things occurred as examples for us, so that we might not desire evil as they did. Do not become idolaters as some of them did; as it is written, ‘The people sat down to eat and drink, and they rose up to play.’ We must not indulge in sexual immorality as some of them did, and twenty-three thousand fell in a single day. We must not put Christ to the test, as some of them did, and were destroyed by serpents. And do not complain as some of them did, and were destroyed by the destroyer. These things happened to them to serve as an example, and they were written down to instruct us, on whom the ends of the ages have come." [1 Corinthians 10:5-11]
Look, I'll be the first to admit that as I keep going in the journey of faith, I'm going to keep making new mistakes and messing up in different ways; but I don't have to keep mistaking the same old mistakes all over again. And I certainly don't have to repeat other people's mistakes as my own. That by itself is reason enough to learn history.
Maybe it's really that simple. I know this passage can feel kind of dense, with lots of ominous warnings from a laundry list of obscure references of past events from the history of Israel. But the point is obvious--while our ancestors in faith may have really screwed up their relationships with God over and over again, from chasing after other gods, to trading faithfulness for casual sex, to grumbling in doubt against God's ability to provide, we don't have to make those same mistakes. We are capable of learning from the stories of those who came before us, and we can make different choices. We are not, in other words, doomed to repeat the wrongs, sins, and missteps of an earlier time. In fact, knowing their stories is precisely the best way to help us learn so that we can avoid their mistakes and failures and try a new way--to clear a new path forward.
That's true in a family system, to be sure. In even just the decade and a half or so that I have been in congregational ministry, I have gotten to see multiple generations of families deal with the traumas that have come before--sometimes with the intentional choice to turn over a new leaf and break with old dysfunctions, and sometimes with the unintentional sway of inertia just to repeat what the previous generation suffered. I've seen family systems in which an older generation struggles with alcoholism or substance abuse, and then their children and grandchildren make the conscious choice to break the cycle and not to get sucked into those same addictions... and I've seen family systems where kids and grandkids perpetuate the same tragic arcs of their parents and grandparents and can't seem to understand why the bottle or the pills or whatever else has such a hold on them. I've seen families in which patterns of emotional or even physical abuse get reinforced, and a later generation learns to inflict what was once inflicted on them... and I've seen families where those who were abused as children dedicate themselves to ensuring that their children will not have to go through what they endured. But so often, the key difference is being able to truthfully and courageously tell our stories, and to make the choice to learn from those who came before us, including learning what not to repeat from an earlier era.
At the end of her powerful book, Caste: The Origin of Our Discontents, a history of racism as a socioeconomic structure in American history, as well as in India, author Isabel Wilkerson offers a surprising possibility of hope--but a hope that is contingent on people in the present moment telling the truth about our story and making the choice not to repeat old patterns that caused so much pain and suffering in our nation's history. She writes these poignant words:
"We are not personally responsible for what people who look like us did centuries ago. But we are responsible for what good or ill we do to people alive with us today.... We are responsible for our own ignorance or, with time and openhearted enlightenment, our own wisdom. We are responsible for ourselves and our own deeds or misdeeds in our own time and in our own space and will be judged accordingly by succeeding generations."
I know that Wilkerson is telling a different story from the saga of the fickle, wandering Israelites. And while telling our American history truthfully is different from Paul's recounting of the mess-ups of ancient Israel, they both bring us face to face with the same truth: we may not bear guilt for the choices others made in the past, but we do bear responsibility in the present for learning from the sins of the past so that we do not make them all over again, and so that we can turn in a new direction, a good and right direction, with the paths in front of us. For Paul, that means in particular that we keep our eyes on Jesus rather than selling out to the idols and counterfeit offers of lesser loves that are out there in the world around us. It means we will risk believing that Christ knows what he is doing with us, even when the road is hard and it feels like we are wandering in the wilderness. It will mean we will trust God to provide us with what we need and surrender all attempts to hoard the manna for ourselves, which will only rot in our clutches if we tried. And it will mean we take the time and summon the courage to look closely into the histories we find ourselves entangled in, whether the ancient saga of the people of God stretching back to before Pharaoh's Egypt for us as the people of God, or the stories of settlers, sojourners, slavers, and the enslaved in American history. We do not bear responsibility for how others' actions brought us to this point in history--but we do bear responsibility for what we do with this moment and this place where we find ourselves. The question is whether we will be brave enough to tell our histories truthfully so that we can chart a new course right now.
May we be given such courage to hear our stories rightly, and to make good and wise choices with the next step in front of us.
Lord God, give us ears willing to listen to the histories of those who have gone before us, so that we will not be lured into repeating the mistakes of the past, but will seek to walk in your ways of justice and mercy.
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