More Than the Good Old Days--May 19, 2025
"Then I saw a new heaven and a new earth; for the first heaven and the first earth had passed away, and the sea was no more. And I saw the holy city, the new Jerusalem, coming down out of heaven from God, prepared as a bride adorned for her husband." [Revelation 21:1-2]
I dare say we may well have missed the point.
I heard a poet on the radio some time ago, and he was asked to read a poem of his entitled, "Heaven." The poet, Patrick Phillips, shared that he grew up as the son of a Methodist minister, but he has since lost his faith... although he misses, he said, the comfort of the idea of a reunion in with those we have loved in this life one day in heaven. But the closest he could dare to imagine now is the idea that after we die, we live on in the memory of other people. So reflecting on all of that, and longing for the comfort of an idea he no longer believes in, he wrote this poem:
It will be the past
and we'll live there together.
Not as it was to live
but as it is remembered.
It will be the past.
We'll all go back together.
Everyone we ever loved,
and lost, and must remember.
It will be the past.
And it will last forever.
What saddened me as I heard these words spoken over the airwaves was that somehow, this minister's son had heard the Christian hope of resurrection as solely a looking-back, as though the Gospel's big promise were some future day we will all sit around a table drinking and wistfully remembering "the good old days." As much as the poet said he wished he could have the comfort of believing in heaven, even that hope he coveted strikes me as a misreading of what the Scriptures have really been promising. All the poem can envision is a rose-colored wistful living in the past.
Now, here's the really hard part of me: I don't blame the poet for that picture. I think by and large we Christians have done it to ourselves--or more accurately, we have done it to the Gospel. We have made our hope of resurrection sound like it is only a looking back--like it will just be an eternal greatest-hits album and a bittersweet (at best) remembering of stuff we used to do. We have made it sound, I fear, like we really just think heaven is the glorification of "the past."
And to be really honest, I fear that goes hand in hand with the way we Christians have of only looking back wistfully at some imagined past (like Phillips says, "not as it was to live, but as it is remembered," which is not quite the same) that we wish we could recreate. So we end up with religious folk who say things like how much they wish they could make society "like it used to be" and then envision an eternal afterlife in which all we will do is tell stories with the angels and our dead relatives about how great "it used to be."
But I will be very, very honest with you--that is not much of a hope. I have been in a number of conversations, some lately and some over the years, that were mostly wistful looking back at the "good times" of the past. And when there is no shared future to look ahead to as well, those are awfully painful conversations. You have to keep the silence at bay with another story from "the good old days," because if things get quiet you have to face the uncomfortable present--whether it is going separate ways, or the fear of death on the horizon, or the awareness that a relationship is drifting apart. You can bask in the afterglow of past good times together, but when the storytelling is done, if there is nothing ahead of you to look forward to, it starts to feel awfully dark. The elephant in the room is the awareness that you have only been looking back because you have nothing pleasant left to say about the present or the future. If "heaven" were just an everlasting high school reunion (perish the thought--that sounds more like hell!), we would never be able to escape the sadness that all our adventures were behind us and that we were all just dreading the moment when they closed the doors and we all had to go our separate ways again.... as if all that were real were behind us, and all that was left was to retell and rewatch movies of the real. Maybe we don't want to admit it, but deep down inside of us we need a bigger hope--something more than the good old days, brought back, zombified, into the present.
That's what made me saddest as I heard this poem on the radio--I fear that we Christians have unwittingly broadcast that kind of message to the world, and that all the watching world sees from the outside is that Christians are reserving their seats now for an eternal high school reunion, something that is only "the past," and only remembered, no new adventures looking forward. Maybe it wasn't that the poet had misunderstood all those sermons from his childhood. Maybe he had just been listening to a lot of Respectable Religious Voices who never talked about our hope as something wholly new, but only an eternal "greatest hits" compilation of the past.
See, one of the difficult parts about a picture of heaven that only looks backward, or a religion that only thinks about going back to some imagined time when things were "great" in the past, is that our past wasn't "great" for everybody. I was listening to a radio preacher yesterday (ok, there is my confession--it is like spiritual junk food that I don't even like the taste of, but I keep listening in every so often just to hear what is out there), and I was listening to him recap the last sixty or so years of history in the United States. And he waxed nostalgically about how great things were in the 1950s in his memory, and then began to lament that the world isn't like it was "back then." It was classic "Good Old Days" thinking... again. And of course, you could surely say that there are some things that were more pleasant about 1950s America for some than the present day feels like. But at the same time, those were not the kind of days that everybody looks back on so fondly--those were the days of fear of nuclear war, drafts for multiple wars, segregation and Jim Crow, lynching and McCarthyism and missile drills in school. If all you can see when you look back--at any given moment in history--is the stuff that was good for you, it's worth asking if there were others who got the short end of the stick and on whose backs or shoulders your happy memories were built. If your childhood memories are full of times you got two popsicles for yourself, you had better double check and make sure you aren't misremembering taking your little brother's popsicle every time.
Well, all of this is to say that when it comes to the Christian hope we call "heaven," if we are just looking backward to some "great" time in the past, we are forgetting all the things that made that time in the past not-so-great, and we are failing to imagine a new kind of future that is good for everybody. And when the Bible does envision that promised future of the resurrection life, it doesn't just describe some glory days of our history--it envisions things that have never happened before. The Bible envisions life that is good for everybody, including the people who have been stepped on and forgotten during the times we thought were 'great.' When the Bible talks about that hope of life beyond the grip of death, it doesn't say, "Remember how great the 50s were? Well, it will be like that...," not for the 1950s and not for the AD 50s, either. The Bible doesn't idolize any moment from the past--rather the voices like today's from Revelation 21 looks forward. And instead of dwelling on details about what it will be like, the Bible focuses on the who question--who will we be with? God. None other than God. And if we are clear that God will be with us somehow more completely than we have ever known before, then all the other stuff is window dressing. We can head into whatever future awaits us as long as we know that the God who loves us will be there with us.
In some ways, this vision of a "new heaven and a new earth" from these verses in Revelation 21, which many of us heard in worship this past Sunday morning, remind me of a poem of Langston Hughes, entitled, "Let American Be America Again," written back in 1935. After describing some of the people who have suffered throughout the past of our nation's history, near the end, Hughes offers this powerful vision of the future:
"O, let America be America again—
The land that never has been yet—
And yet must be—the land where every man is free."
I think the vision from Revelation 21 is like that, but not just for one country or territory, but for all creation. It is a longing for all the universe to be what it was meant to be, but which we have not ever really experienced. It is a hope for us to be truly at home with God and with one another, even though all we have ever known in this life is some level of estrangement from each other--what church folks often call "sin." Our hope is for a whole new creation, something that has never been yet, but which will be our truest home.
Think about this today: the Bible's many voices do not merely look back to recreating some "great" time in the Israelites' past, or the church's past, and to make everybody work to make Israel great again. Rather, the Bible seems to say, "That backward-looking kind of hope was always too small and too narrow--God has something better and bigger up the ol' divine sleeve--and you ain't seen nothing yet!" Whatever it is, it will be good for everybody there--there will be no groups left out because of the color of their skin or the language they speak, and there will be no fear of war against one group or another. That is unlike anything this world has ever known--our hope has to be a forward-looking one, one that always looks to the future, rather than trying in vain to duplicate the past... at least if it is going to be real Christian hope. Our hope is for something more than the good old days... which weren't always so good after all.
Today, maybe we need to think about what kind of witness we have given to the watching world, and whether they think our hope is just for a celestial high school reunion or if there is something more to be said and hoped for. How can you witness to that future day when God dwells among us and wipes tears away... right now? How can we be sure not to miss the point of it all today?
Lord God, come and do your new thing, and keep us looking forward to what you will do for all.
May it be so!
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