The Park Road Pulpit

If you as much as turned on the television in the 1970’s you no doubt heard Archie and Edith Bunker singing their theme song:

Ah, the “Good Ol’ Days.” They just don’t make ‘em like they used to, do they?

When were the “Good Ol’ Days?” And, what made them “good,” anyway?

In many ways, where we have been determines where we can go in the future. In other ways, knowledge gained on past journeys enables us to chart the course for a desired future. Our past is an integral component, an undeniable part of who we are. In this sense, all days gone by are good days, and remembering can and should serve to create our very present.

In last week’s sermon, I enjoyed remembering my grandfather’s two goats.[3] This is one of the few but very fond memories that I have of Granddaddy Phillips. Though I hardly knew him, he is an integral part of who I am. What few memories I have, I treasure for that very reason. Many of you indicated that my reflection took you back on a trip of your own, through the land of the Good Ol’ Days. Remembering not only serves an important sociological and psychological function, it’s also just down-right fun.

During this season, then, let us encourage you to remember. The experiences. The people. Who are you? And why? Most importantly let us encourage you to remember your story? Your individual story. Your family story. Especially here, the old, story of our faith. During this Advent season of waiting, we hope you will take some time to reflect and enjoy. To reminisce and treasure. To remember and to be changed by that familiar story that you will hear yet again.

But the phrase the “Good Ol’ Days,” implies more than the simple remembrance of our past. Because human beings naturally seek to put aside unhappy experiences, sometimes a remembered past creates a warmth and glow that is untrue to the character of the actual days being remembered. In this sense, the “Good Ol’ Days” reflects a day that never was.

Several years ago in Birmingham, a friend of mine expressed his displeasure that Blacks in Alabama were organizing a reunion of the famous civil rights march in Selma. “My daddy always told me,” he said cynically, “If you’ve got a bucket full of manure, you ought to leave it be, because if you put a stick in it and stir it up -- it’s going to go to stinkin’ every time.” I think my friend missed the most important lesson from this barnyard metaphor. The operative use of the comparison should call us recognize that a bucket of manure, whether it has a stick in it or not, will always be a bucket of manure!

The past that African-Americans refuse to forget, a day which reunion marches serve to keep alive, a day which represents liberation and progress, is a day that needs to be remembered, honestly, for blacks and whites alike.

When were the “Good Ol’ Days?” And, what made them “good,” anyway?[4]

The diagnosis is in for Advent, and here is the bad news: The Church is suffering from a problem with its memory. Not only in dealing with human relations and politics, in which real issues are too quickly forgotten, but the Church’s memory problem is with God, in general. The inspirational quip is told of the child who walked up to the crib of an infant sibling and said, “Hey, tell me what God is like. I’m already beginning to forget!” Christians read the Bible as if it were a simple chronicle of the “Good Ol’ Days” – days gone by, when God used to do stuff.

How many times have you heard, or said, “Why doesn’t God do miracles anymore – like the ones in the Bible?” The Televangelists who urge us to “expect a miracle”[5] are no help here, because their words cause many believers, especially in days of trouble, to look to the heavens, longing, mostly in disappointment, for a God who will do something grand, some “miracle,” like God worked in Bible times.[6] As if God were more present or real or active in some former life than in ours, we allow the remembrances of God’s acts to separate us from the power of God’s enduring presence.[7]

The interesting thing for me is that in our text for today, in a poem of lament from the great prophet, Isaiah, we hear the very same longing.[8] 2500 years ago. Some 63-great-grandfathers-ago. More than 900,000 sunrises ago the people who claimed to be “God’s people,” our ancestors in faith, awoke to a new day with a longing for God to do something -- like God did in the “good ol’ days.”

I have given you the diagnosis. We have a problem with our memories. Now let me give you some good news: The power of God’s enduring presence is the miracle.

So the question for us in our Advent waiting is this: How will we hear this old, old story this year? Advent is a re-enactment of the thousand-year wait of the people of God for Messiah -- the Christ, God’s Anointed One.[9] But Advent also points us to a more important waiting -- a waiting for the presence of God to be born in us.

Will the story of Christmas make that event real in your life? Or will it speak to you only of the kind of miracles that God used to do – you know, in the “Good Ol’ Days”?

[1] In the old dialogue between “nature” and “nurture,” it seems to me that it matters not here. Our past determines our future, by virtue of genetic makeup and sum of experiences.

[2] The song was used for many years as the opening to the television sit-com, “All in The Family.” I do not know the composer of the piece itself.

[3] See “Giving Thanks in Sheep’s Clothing."

[4] This episode serves to illuminate that our own experience tempers our understanding of “good ol’ days.” For my friend, the civil rights movement had in some ways destroyed the “good ol’ days,” while the need to march again to Selma indicates that the opposite is true for many African-Americans.

[5] This phrase came to my mind as a slogan used by one of the well-known televangelists, but I cannot be sure of this.

[6] I have often quoted Dr. Frank Tupper, who says of God’s providential activity, "God always does everything that God can do." To deny that God "works" is essentially to deny that God exists. I believe that much (most?) of God's work is done through human activity (the God within), but I will not say that God never works in other ways. Having said this, however, "miracle" for me is not to be understood as some supernatural intervention of natural law, but as a contravention of one law by another, yet unknown law. I believe God works miracles in this way. We may one day know, for example, that a certain "healing" was brought about by a perfectly natural law, but today it remains unexplained and unexplainable. Because I believe there will never come a time when scientists will have all the answers, there will always be something pushing us to the "not yet known" – and experiences of the realm of the “not yet known” are “miracles.” I believe humans will always experience this phenomenon.

[7] Remembering the acts of God has served for generations of believers as the basis of a trust in this God who “works.” Yet my point here is that I believe the opposite is often the case – because we cannot see God working in the way that God is remembered to have worked (in the “good ol’ days”), then we come to doubt either our faithfulness or God’s “ability” or “goodness.” Neither outcome is acceptable. The sermon seeks to reverse the flow of action. Trust in God’s fidelity comes, not by remembering the past, but in sensing God’s “work” in the very present of our lives. Having experienced God’s work in our own lives, we can then (and only then) look to the past and “see” God’s work of old as the “miracle” that is was.

[8] Though scholars debate the date of Isaiah (and the number of authors), this passage is generally accepted as during the Babylonian Exile, which began in 587 BCE.

[9] This is an informal reference. The Jewish desire for a Messiah grew out of longing for the return of the glory of the monarchy of King David, around 1000 BCE.

[10] For readers not present in the worship service, note that this phrase comes from the reader/response litany used at the conclusion of the reading of scripture for this Advent season. We have typically used: “This is the Word of the Lord -- Thanks be to God.” During this Advent season, we have replaced the call and response with: “You have heard the ancient story – Let us listen now for the word of the Lord.”