- LENT 2020: Day 10
- Saturday, March 7, 2020:
“Who controls the past controls the future. Who controls the present controls the past.”
Those lines from George Orwell’s 1984 are a warning. History, in the wrong hands, can be a weapon. But the flipside is also possible: History can liberate.
Today’s reading from Isaiah is part of a broader speech, in which the prophet is calling the exiled community to restoration.
Isaiah calls back to Abraham and to Sarah, back to Eden, back to creation. Then Isaiah looks forward into the future, to the end of creation. The prophet uses the past to inspire a better tomorrow.
“My rescue shall be forever,” says the LORD.
This rings true to a people living in exile under the oppressive Babylonian Empire.
Likewise, the way Dr. King used the past rings true. In his famous “Mountaintop” speech here in Memphis, the night before he was assassinated, he said this: “All we say to America is, ‘Be true to what you said on paper.’” He used the past to inspire action in the present to make a better future.
King shows that the idea of looking to our nation’s past to find inspiration for the present and the future is not a bad one. There is much in our nation’s past to celebrate and inspire us.
The question is how we understand the past — and what we think the past is calling us to do.
We are at a time in American history where the past — what stories we tell, and how we tell them — is up for debate. But Orwell warned, “Who controls the past controls the future.”
Will we use the past to liberate? Or will we use the past to oppress?
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