Articles - From the Vicar
Never ask, "Oh, why were things so much better in the old days?"
It is not an intelligent question
Last month's celebrations for the Queen's Golden Jubilee gave television
producers apparently unlimited licence to indulge in nostalgia, much of
it contrasting the celebrations of 2002 with those of 1977 when the Queen
celebrated her Silver Jubilee. You may judge how far I am in denial about
having entered middle age by the fact that until last month I still considered
1977 (the year I entered university) to be in the fairly recent past. Not
any more. Mere glimpses of punk rock, a victorious Virginia Wade at Wimbledon
and the unforgettable ugliness of the Triumph TR7 motor car were a firm
reminder of how quickly and irrevocably the 'red sweet wine of youth' is
spent.
To look back is a natural human tendency. Our past experiences, both as
individuals and communities, allow us to place our present situations in
perspective, to make sense of the journeys we have travelled. Yet the past
also has the capacity to exercise an often unacknowledged tyranny: as we
grow older and surround the past with a roseate glow of our own devising
we run the risk of alienating younger generations by making comparisons
between past and present, comparisons that hold no meaning for those whose
experiences do not stretch back as far as our own. This, perhaps, is one
way of defining the generation gap.
For Christians one of the disturbing features of God's call is that it
compels us to leave our past so that we can follow God into his future.
The 75 year old Abraham, travelling from Haran to Canaan, and the 80 year
old Moses, leading God's people out of Egypt, remind us that age is no guarantee
of stability; Peter and Andrew, James and John remind us, as they leave
their fishing boats to follow Jesus, that secure employment may not be compatible
with the radical demands of discipleship; and the post-religious landscape
of much of western Europe serves to remind Christians that we must seek
fundamentally new ways of proclaiming the Gospel and making disciples for
Christ. We can never hope to inhabit God's future by travelling backwards
for, as the writer of the Letter to the Hebrews tells us, we seek the
city that is to come.
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St Edmund's Church, Roundhay
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