Mar | 12 | Heave-ing in Heaven’s Toilet

Key Word:- BECOME

Title:- Heave-ing in Heaven’s Toilet

Numbers 11;5,6 We remember the fish which we ate freely in Egypt, the cucumbers, the melons, the leeks, the onions, and the garlic; but now our whole being is dried up; there is nothing at all except this manna before our eyes!”
 
Mark Driscoll, in his excellent little book ‘Reformission,’ spoke about the problems that both ‘Nostalgia and Innovation’ are causing in the church. They are not new issues for sure, save that the present and ever continuing increasing pace of change in our culture and society, means that those of us desperate to evangelize the ever increasing numbers of lost neighbours around us, push the envelope of innovation sometimes so far, that it becomes not only ineffectual but often times, even offensive to the Gospel and the hearers. However, the good news for those of us who push this envelope, is that compared to nauseous nostalgia, failed innovations are quickly seen and the big red ejection button is often pressed, most of the time, just before the ensuing crash and explosion of entrails! Nauseous nostalgia however, that attitude that says “we’ve always done it this way and it worked well in the 1950’s:” has a sickly smell that lingers for years, like the grimacing whiff of old vomit that festers in your nostrils. Outsiders smell this problem of our continued nostalgic church practice, but somehow, we insiders choose to pucker up and embrace the nostalgic sickness, even though it is slowly killing us. Why is that?

My own memory is extremely selective. On the whole, I choose to remember the good things of the past, indeed, we all tend to block out most of the bad and mundane, the fickle and the furious frustrations of the past. Mostly, the only ‘bad stuff’ we remember is the totally traumatic. Our thinking about the past is quite selective don’t you think? It is in this way that I believe nostalgia can become nauseous to God. That is, when our appraisal of our personal history, our local church history, our denominational history, our missional history is so disconnected from reality that it is to all intents and purposes, a living lie, just a robotic parakeet singing in our hearts the songs we long to hear!

Such lies are strange and intriguing sources of reflection, that like warped mirrors, magnify falseness and belittle accurateness. In other words, even nauseating nostalgia when reflected back in such selected mirrors of falsehood, makes looking back an easier and more attractive option than the demanding work of rightly appraising the present to so prepare you for a far better future. In other words, we prefer the past because our selective thinking, our lying parrot, our warped mirror, has made it a seemingly better, nicer, kinder, sunnier, and a less sinful existence than the present. Yet everyone watching the pantomime from the ‘moved on’ stalls cries out in disbelief, “Oh no it wasn’t!”

Friends, despite the many nostalgic country songs of sunny days gone by, with cheap ice-cream and hot and steamy apple pie, such reflection is all to often, still a big fat lie. Let’s talk about the 1930’s and the deep depression. Let’s talk about the world war of the 1940’s and of the atom bomb; let’s talk about the killing fields of Korea in the 1950’s, the violent and vicious Vietnam of the 1960’s. Let’s talk about the glandular growth of birth control and sins of the sunny 1970’s and of the rise of abortion and sexually transmitted diseases; lets talk about aids and apartheid and civil rights and riots; lets talk about……well friends, you get my drift, don’t you? With a shaking and shuddering good look at reality, let’s just allow nostalgia to become the smelly and nauseous hindrance it truly is.


Above all, maybe we should be talking about NOW? NOW is the day of salvation. NOW is the point where time touches eternity; NOW is the day in which we live and move and have our being; NOW is the point where our thoughts and prayers effect the future; NOW is where we live, and friends NOW is demanding and frightening and full of controversy. NOW is not romantic; NOW is not where nice people appear in fine poems; NOW is where we must come up with the right answers to often the so very wrong questions! In this fight, in this context, in the NOW, God is ever and always, the God of the living and not the dead. Me thinks that some of us today, need to let go of the past and so embrace the present, and in such a fullness, that the future might indeed be ours, in all it’s aromatic headiness!

Listen: - Do not say, “Why were the former days better than these?” For you do not inquire wisely concerning this. Ecclesiastes 7:10

Pray: - Lord, may the failures and hurts of the past become a training ground for the success of my now. Help me to become, if at all possible, inoffensively innovative and so free me, from that ineffective and offensive old nostalgic stench, which surely makes You heave in heaven’s toilet. Amen.