Living with Your Honest to God Self: The Lifelong Task -
Living with Your Ancestral Past 
By Ken Wilson

We can only get as close to God as we are willing to be our honest-to-God selves before Him. First, "living with your body"; last Sun. "living with personal past"; today: "living with ancestral past"

German has some long words. vergangen-heits-bewaltigung:
fer-gangenheits-be-valti-gung; coming to terms with the past

Americans have short national memory. Opening ceremonies of Olympics celebrated thousands of years of Chinese history…..    

This ponderous German word--fer-gangeheits-bevalitigung--sounds like what it is: a mouthful.  Coming to terms with the past. 

Don spoke about coming to terms with our personal past. I want to consider coming to terms with our ancestral-communal past.

God invites us to embrace our ancestral-communal past so that Jesus can redeem it and together we can transcend it.

The biblical view of being human includes a profound sense of identity with our ancestors, with our communal past.

Example:  "Now consider how great this man was, to whom even the patriarch Abraham gave a tenth of spoils. And indeed those who are of the sons of Levi, who receive the priesthood, have a commandment to receive tithes from the people according to the law, that is, from their brethren, though they have come from the loins of Abraham; but he whose genealogy is not derived from them received tithes from Abraham and blessed him who had the promises. Now beyond all contradiction the lesser is blessed by the better.  Here mortal men receive tithes, but there he receives them, of whom it is witnessed that he lives. Even Levi, who receives tithes, paid tithes thru Abraham, so to speak, for he was still in the loins of his father when Melchizedek met him. (He 7: 4-9)

Author is saying: priesthood of Jesus is greater than priesthood of Levi, because Levi was "in Abraham's loins" when he tithed to M. Hence, entire Levitical priesthood was recognizing a higher priesthood in the action of ancestor Abraham. (Like saying, "You were there when Lee surrendered to Grant" so don't fly confederate flag.)  
What does this sound like to our ears? Gobbledygook! Because we don't identify with ancestors like that.  DNA now agrees with author of Hebrews.  Some of the DNA that made it into Levi's DNA and thru him to the Levitical priesthood, was in Abraham's loins when Abraham tithed to Melchizidek. Something of Levi and his sons was there. The ancestors are linked to us and we to them. Check your DNA; it will speak the language of your ancestors. 

For the ancients, ancestry wasn't a scientific fact.  It was a profound cultural, personal, spiritual fact. They felt powerfully connected to their ancestral past.  It wasn't just the past of heir dead relatives, it was their past exerting power on their present.

We are more connected to our ancestral past than we realize.

My mother lived through the depression.  I grew up with cupboards full of food, just in case. I grew up hearing, clean your plate. Because food can get scarce. I eat whole massive hamburger at Red Robin's, the last French fry fragment and feel bloated.  But I have satisfaction of cleaning my plate. 

We carry ancestral burdens.  I learned potent facts about my grand-fathers in early 40's.  My father was so upset by the irresponsibility of his father that he waited to call the ambulance when his father was suffering a heart attack, knowing it would be easier for his mother if they didn't get there in time. During depression mom's father left his family to work in another state, where he acquired a new family, then had a stroke and came back home so my mother and her mother could take care of him.  "Where were your brothers?" Gone by then.

I learned these potent facts knowing my own father, suffering from depression, struggled to manage his own responsibilities.

I learned them as a father myself and a pastor.  As a leader in a   charismatic community that had run off the rails during his watch.  I was eye-ball to eye-ball with responsibilities.  And I was a male.  

I remember agonizing: "Is there a man in the house? Are men bound to shirk responsibility? Will I be able to live up to mine?"

When I was an irresponsible 18 year old male who got his girlfriend pregnant, about to become a father, I listened to Abbey Road, side 2  last track: "Boy, you're gonna carry that weight, carry that weight, a long time."  That and the Dylan song from Music from Big Pink: The Weight.  Take a load off Fanny, take a load for free. Take a load off Fanny and put the load, right on me.  Funny the songs that grab you.

I didn't realize at the time how deeply rooted this issue was for me.

Years later, wrestling with my family history, it would have been easy to ignore, except pain is God's megaphone and I couldn't ignore it. So I faced it: talked it over with my men's group, Nancy, trusted friends. In absence of other options, I accepted it--this is my family history.  

It wasn't until I faced it, accepted it, owned up to it as my history that my redeemer was able to speak to me about my ancestral past and say, "It ends here, the male irresponsibility, because I am here-- there's a man in the house with you, and you are not alone to carry this weight."  Man, did I need to hear that from my redeemer!

I learned a powerful lesson through that painful time.  Jesus can't redeem what we're not willing to embrace.  If we won't own it, we can't give it to him to redeem it.

It's easy to embrace the good parts of your ancestral-communal past.
I feel great that my father was part of the army that liberated Europe in WW2.  I spent my childhood watching movies celebrating that.

I also spent my childhood playing cowboys & Indians. It wasn't until high school that I realized what a raw deal the Indians got.  

The past we're willing to own is the one he's able to redeem.

My friend Levon Yuille received a call from a white man named Yuille living in the South. This man had become a believer and felt led to trace his genealogy only to discover that his family owned slaves. slaves.  He traced the slaves, who took on the name of their masters, to Levon's family.  He said, "I can't erase the past, but our family would like to invite your family to a joint family reunion." 

That's a work of the Spirit, isn't it?  He didn't go with the crowd saying, "Get over it! Slavery ended a hundred years ago!"
Part of our loving one another: learning that we have different ancestral burdens.  Walking gently in that territory.

I received a mailing inviting me to purchase "Wilson family coat of arms." I thought, "What a cool idea, maybe I'll do that." Mentioned it to one of my African American friends, who said, "Yes, I got that in the mail recently too.  I tore it up and threw it away I was so angry!"  Why? I said, completely oblivious.  "Because my family name is the name of a slave owner. Unless you think I'm Irish, Ken."

My brother-in-law is Jewish.  When The Passion came out, he wasn't excited as I was to see a movie that had Jesus speaking Aramaic by an accomplished director. He feared it could stir anti-Semitism by the  brutality it portrayed. How could I love my brother in law and not take his ancestral burden into account? Especially when the Nixon tapes came out, and in the Nixon tapes, Billy Graham, one of my spiritual-heroes was recorded laughing at Richard Nixon's anti-Semitic jokes.   

If we embrace our ancestral past, we can offer it to Jesus, so he can redeem it, and together we can transcend it. 

Jesus came without sin, but his first public act was what?  Baptism. He submitted to John's baptism, which was a baptism of repentance for the forgiveness of sins. The people baptized by John weren't just getting baptized for their personal sins. They brought there ancestral and national sins with them in the waters.  

Jesus joined them. He who was without sin, who had every right to say, get over it! instead came under it.  He took on the ancestral burdens all the way back to Abraham, all the way back to Adam, the dirt man, who shows up in his genealogy for that reason.

He took the pain of it, so as to own it, the price of ownership being his life blood poured out on a roman torture device.

When we Gentiles come, we carry our ancestral weight with us.  We get grafted in to his lineage and he redeems the whole of it.

All our ancestral, communal, national stuff gets redeemed there.
Anything we're willing to own, he's willing to redeem.

This is so central that we're to re-enact it until he comes.

Each of us is invited to bring our ancestral burdens to the communion meal we are about to receive where he feeds us with the agent of his redemption, his body broken, his blood poured out.

As you come to receive the bread and the wine, offer yourself and your ancestral burdens….

Open your eyes when you come this time and look around.  It's not just about you and whatever boring sin list you've been able to wrack up in your meager lifetime.  It's about the Lamb of God taking away the sin of the world--including this debt of the ancestors that's been crushing the offspring. 

Sin is a boutique we walk out of with different items. Light & manageable in store; heavier in parking lot, crushing by time we get home; after we're gone, the executors of our have to pay 2 Men & a Truck to haul them away. 

Maybe you bear an ancestral load of anger.  Another has an ancestral load of shame.  One bears a load of irresponsibility from the ancestors. Another a weight of greed, a grudge, wastefulness.    

Our ancestral burdens, without our even knowing it, may tempt us to continue ancestral conflicts.  

How can we possibly love each other unless we have some place to lay these burdens down?      

As we come to the foot of the cross, we may lay them down and leave them there.

But with this  freedom comes responsibility.  You, my brothers and sisters, were called to be free. But do not use your freedom to indulge the sinful nature; rather, serve one another humbly in love. For the entire law is fulfilled in keeping this one command: "Love your neighbor as yourself."  (Gal. 5: 13-14)

Redemption doesn't just take place along the horizon of a single lifetime. It's a stake in the ground for a generational cleansing.

Aspects of the curse of old creation are ending with you and aspects of the blessing of new creation are beginning with you for the benefit of those to follow.

Up in the Arctic, we were at cove here they killed the certain type of whales to light lamps of Europe with whale oil. The whales were so easy to kill, our ancestors forgot to leave some. They could have had plenty of whale oil and left enough whales to keep the oil coming for future generations, but they got greedy. Someone asked, "Any more of these whales around?"  The naturalist said, "Just these bones."  They wasted entire species.

Someone sighed and said, "We're standing around saying, 'They left us bones.'  What will our children be saying about us?"

Our actions have a generational impact.

Are you concerned about the crushing burdens we are piling up for our kids to manage?  We're in the middle of a 700 billion bailout of some big investment banks. Upwards of a trillion dollars to cover bad loans taken out by those who couldn't afford them, offered by those who might have known that bubbles burst.

It was great while the party lasted. But a whole system was driving drunk on the profits and ran off the road. 

What are we doing to bail these investment firms out?  Are we taking up a collection to pay off the bad debt?  No, we're simply adding it to the national debt, which means leaving it for someone else to deal with later. Putting it on the back of our children and their children. 

Fear not little flock, I don't know enough to offer a partisan opinion.    

But we all know political leaders will only be as unselfish as we are.  If they sense we are unwilling to face difficult choices, they will offer us easier choices now.  Easier choices now usually mean harder choices later for future generations.

Something needs to congeal in us: a willingness to face and make hard choices now for the sake of future generations.  

What are we willing to saddle our kids with?  So far the answer seems to be, more and more.

Maybe that's a sign we're not as free as we'd like to think.

The baby boomers--we had a very idealized view of ourselves.
This is the dawning of the age of Aquarius!  We reveled in the generation gap. 

Maybe this tendency to view ourselves as the generation from nowhere--the ultimate individualists--isn't the path to freedom.

Maybe we need to face and embrace our ancestral past.

Maybe we need to own it, that part of being human, so we can offer it and our redeemer can redeem it so together we can transcend it.

Perhaps then we can walk in a greater freedom, and put that freedom into the service of unselfish love.