Earlier today, my family and I walked through the archaeological site beneath the Cathedral Church of St. Peter in Geneva, Switzerland. We lived here from 2013 to 2019, and in that time, I brought plenty of visitors to the cathedral itself, a masterpiece of Medieval construction, dating back to 1160 AD. I always took comfort in the history of the cathedral, this giant structure built 600 years before my home country existed. My visits to the cathedral reminded me that God’s people have been meeting together for millenia, and that he has been faithful to his people for much longer than we even know.
Despite my many tours of the cathedral itself, today marked the first time I had gone under it. The site is full of interesting stonework and architectural clues to the past. The tiny rooms for priests had radial underfloor heating, using small handcrafted tunnels under the stone floors. The well dug below, perfectly round in size, dated from before the birth of Christ. One of the baptistries was smaller than the previous, pointing to the change from baptism by full immersion to the sprinkling of water more commonly practiced now. All of this was traced through old gray stones, tiny fossils, and layers of sediment beneath the earth’s surface.
Grown-ups, outside of perhaps archaeologists, often forget that we are a historied people. We usually think of all the things we have to do in the present—the bills we need to pay, the appointments to make and keep, the tasks we must finish. It is rare to be faced with a reminder of our connection to the ancient. But it’s good to remember that we are a people who are descended from other people who are descended from other people… it goes on and on. We did not emerge in this world without a long series of events and people that have made our lives what they are. We are connected to the past, whether we remember it or not.
This is why we need to keep telling the old stories. Our future is adrift without the anchor of our history. Grown-ups sometimes think we already know all we need to know Abraham and Sarah, Isaac and Rebekah, Jacob and Leah and Rachel, Joseph and his brothers. And they seem too far removed from today’s problems and stresses. But hearing the story of God’s faithfulness to his people over generations reminds us that we are part of God’s story too.
My children’s chapel kids and I studied The Dreamer Zine this past semester, starting with the story of Joseph annoying his brothers with his vivid dreams, which resulted in his being sold into slavery by those same brothers, living in prison after trying to do the right thing, advising the powerful Pharaoh, and eventually saving the lives of his entire family. On the last day of the semester, we reviewed each of the stories and talked about how, if we had stopped the story at any one chapter, Joseph’s story would look like a complete failure. But because God is always at work, we can trust that the story is not over yet. One young girl stopped me and said, “It’s like if Joseph had never been thrown in the pit, he would never have saved his family!” The story is never over. Because of Christ’s death and resurrection, even death and destruction does not mean the end.
Last week Nadia Bolz-Weber wrote in her newsletter, The Corners:
“This is the bonkers thing we people of faith do. We say that our hope is not in the Dow Jones but in the God of Abraham and Sarah, our hope is not in the government but in the God of Isaiah and Mary Magdalen our hope is not in the non-profit industrial complex but in the God of and Teresa of Avila and Theresa of Calcutta. And, just to be clear, our hope is not ever in our ability to be hopeful. It is not in our ability to get anything right whatsoever. Our hope is in the God of Jonah and Hagar. Because foundationally we are a people of a story. And it is through this story (and not through cable news and doom-scrolling) that we get to view ourselves and others and even history itself.
“And as an anxious people, here’s what I want you to hear today - When we stand in this big of story - with one hand reaching back to the hope of the prophets and one hand reaching forward to the promises of God, we can stand firmly in the reality of the present and not have that reality consume us.”
I left the archaeological dig site under the cathedral feeling encouraged. Sometimes it feels like the world today is at a low point, torn between toxic politics and false prosperity gospel promises, denominations splitting and re-forming, harmful exclusions of various groups of people by other groups of people, and constant arguments about many things that I honestly don’t really understand. But when I look at these old stones, I remember that I am a part of a long history of people who are given the gift of faith, welcomed into the household of God, and have spent centuries telling others the story about God’s love for them.
