Sanctifying the Past and Future
one
The joy of youth
a. Hope and youth are concepts closely connected
i. Every time a speaker addresses a graduating class – listen for it! – he’ll probably say something about their bright, hopeful, young faces.
1. Why? What do hope and youth have to do with each other?
2. It’s pretty simple, really.
a. Hope is connected with youth because each young person, each person who isn’t fully grown, hasn’t yet tasted the fullness of human life, can very reasonably hope that the best is yet to come.
b. That’s why the theological virtue of Hope really is the secret to eternal youth. Because no matter how difficult or joyous this life has been, the Christian can look towards heaven and say, “The best is yet to come.”
two
Fighting Cynicism
a. Hope is therefore the antidote to cynicism
i. Cynicism is the attitude which presumes that futility and selfishness always have the last word.
1. Cynicism sees self-centeredness underneath all charity
2. It sees pain and boredom as being at the conclusion of all joy
3. It sees the pointlessness of death at the end of all human life
b. Christian hope rejects that.
i. It resists the pull to pessimism, to gloominess, to the lie that “the true story” is always the ugly one
ii. Yes there’s death and selfishness and pain. Those are part of the human experience.
1. But behind all of it, and at the end of all of it – for those who want it – are joy and love and the Good God waiting for us.
2. The Christian view of reality is that a good God created a good world and is guiding all things to a good conclusion.
3. That is the hope we live in and that is reality.
three
Overcoming Nostalgia
a. Nostalgia is another attitude which threatens to rob us of a proper Christian cheerfulness.
i. Hope is the virtue of youth; nostalgia is the vice of decrepitude.
ii. Hope says the best is yet to come; nostalgia says that the best is behind us
b. But, of course, if we’re honest, we know the past wasn’t perfect.
i. That’s why we were always so impatient for whatever was next – why we constantly fantasized about what we hoped our life would be like
1. Because it wasn’t perfect the way it was.
ii. Part of the proof that we were made for Heaven – and that this life isn’t it – is that when we’re young we eagerly look forward to the future and when we’re older we pine for to the past.
c. Nostalgia shows us that we long for a perfect life; but there’s no sense looking for it in the past – we’ve already looked there, and we didn’t find it.
i. Heaven isn’t found on earth – not in any physical place, and not at moment in time.
ii. Heaven is waiting for us beyond all this.
iii. And it’s going to be great.
four
Preserving the Past
a. One thing that makes it harder, especially for older people, to let go of the past, is that they worry it’ll all be forgotten.
i. And if it’s totally forgotten – if one day nobody remembers past sacrifices and joys, the stories and the tragedies and the heroic and beautiful moments – if it’s totally forgotten then it’ll just be swallowed up by nothingness. It’ll be annihilated – like it never happened.
1. So old people, in desperation, repeat the same stories over and over – they scrapbook and they try to remind people.
2. They try to save the past, keep it alive, rescue it from oblivion.
3. Because it’s so sad that all that history, all that goodness, all that beauty, should be lost forever.
b. And the thing is, if there’s no God and no heaven, all the past will be lost forever. One day the world will end, human life will be over, and there will be no one left to remember anything.
i. And then it’ll be like the entire human thing – the triumphs and the trials and the drama of every person and every family and every story – it’ll be just like none of that ever happened.
c. Everybody knows that if there is no God, and no Heaven, then we have no future. But actually, if there isn’t a God, and if there isn’t a Heaven, then our past is also doomed to oblivion.
five
But Hope knows that there is a Heaven
a. And that God not only has an unimaginably glorious future for us – He also preserves the full celebration of the past.
i. One of the things that the Church teaches us about Heaven is that everyone who goes there will be able to see and appreciate all the details of human history – we’ll be able to relive all the good times,
1. We’ll also be able to appreciate all the good that God was accomplishing in the midst of the hardest times.
b. So we don’t have to worry obsessively about clinging to the past, or preserving the past.
i. The home video collection in Heaven is complete. We’ll be able to enjoy it for eternity.
ii. The important thing now is to focus on getting to Heaven. Once we’re there, we can delight in the beauty of the past as we experience an endless future of perfect happiness.