December 10, Advent 2B (Mark 1:1-8)

Stillwater, Minnesota, is known for its antique stores. People from Minneapolis–St. Paul love to visit this old river town 20 miles east and spend a weekend browsing in the stores. My husband and I used to love one store in particular because it had automobile magazine ads from the 1940s to the 1980s. We are both car guys, and we could sit for a long time looking at these ads. They gave us a glimpse into an era we had no memory of at all.

Nostalgia is a powerful thing in our culture. A few years ago, I was the associate pastor of a church in Minneapolis that was moving into a new building with two other churches. In our preparations for the move, we dug up a lot of old stuff. Looking at bulletins from the 1950s gave a different picture of the congregation. In those days, the sanctuary was full at two services. I remember reading somewhere that the Sunday school classes had hundreds of kids. After reading something like this you notice how the feeling of nostalgia slides a bit into despair and sadness. The sanctuary was now sprinkled with 80 or so people. The Sunday school had just a few children.

I know that feeling of loss. When your hometown is Flint, Michigan, you live with nostalgia. You can remember when the city was near 200,000 people and when General Motors had 80,000 workers in the metro area. You can remember when the city was dotted with auto factories, and we saw trucks full of Buicks heading out to places around the country. Now that Flint is a city of 100,000 with large fields where factories used to be, you feel that sense of despair. Nostalgia is both a longing for security and a driver of pain.