(By Andres Villatoro)
“Come mothers and fathers
Throughout the land
And don’t criticize
What you can’t understand
Your sons and your daughters
Are beyond your command
Your old road is
Rapidly agin’.
Please get out of the new one
If you can’t lend your hand
For the times they are a-changin’.”
The year was 1964 when Bob Dylan coined these most remembered words. I recently heard this song in movie where they showed how drastically American culture changed in the last 50 years and has been in my head since. It is a song of protest against the old way of doing things, against tradition, against older generations. This song is actually often viewed as a reflection of the generation gap and of the political divide marking American culture in the 1960s and like everyone knows the 60s was time of great change. I mean a man landed on the moon, the civil rights movement was reaching its climax, and the hippies of the boomer generation were showing just how they wanted to be different.
But then I began thinking about Christianity, about church in general and even about the Salvation Army. Have we caught up with the times? Did we change along with the rest of America or did we stay in the past in thought and in style? Some would argue that we have and very much so. It is a great thing to know that God and Christ is above culture and above time. Culture and time does not limit him and He chooses to glorify himself in all cultures and in all times. The Kingdom of God, after all, is everywhere. Look around you and see.
The Church as a whole, however, has a hard time believing this and always has. We tend to glorify the past and restrict the Lord to our own ways and to our own style when clearly the Lord does not work like that. Even Jesus Christ himself when he came to be with humankind was doing things so different so as to reach the most needed that the Pharisees wanted him dead. They would not have their religion disturbed or changed.
What Bob Dylan was trying to say through this song still rings true 45 years later for us. “Don’t criticize what you can’t understand.” Don’t exalt your way of doing things over the extension of God’s Kingdom. Be fresh. Be relevant. May God give first give us the power of love but also the wisdom to be relevant that though we should never change the powerful message of the Gospel, we can change the way we present it. Let us live in the present; let us not make the mistake of other generations of just admiring the bravery and courage of the forefathers instead of imitating their aggressive faith.
May that be true for us!