History: Erased, Revised, Repeated

What does it mean to remember? And what does it mean to forget? In a world where history is being rewritten, censored, and erased, we must ask: Who holds the pen? From the echoes of prayers at the Western Wall to the solemn silence of Dachau, this journey confronts the uncomfortable truths that shape our present. What happens when one nation chooses to reckon with its past while another buries it? As history teeters on the edge of repetition, will we stand as witnesses to truth, or let power dictate what remains?

What does it mean to remember? And what does it mean to forget? These questions haunted me as I recently stood in places where history refuses to be buried.

Our theme this month is “letting go.” So let me ask you—is history one of the things we should let go of? Especially when it makes us uncomfortable? When it outrages us? When it breaks our hearts or fills us with shame?

Because let’s be real—some people are working overtime to forget or… to make you forget. To rewrite. To erase. Right now, in classrooms across America, history is being rewritten—books banned, discussions censored, entire realities erased from the record. Some say it’s about “moving forward.” But moving forward for whom? And at what cost?

I recently spent two weeks in Israel, visiting family. Now, you might wonder, “What family?” Coincidentally, that’s the same question Israeli customs just kept asking me. Well, my partner is a U.S. and Israeli dual citizen, who is actually from Belarus, where he’s not a citizen. Just a week before I arrived, he and his mother had to take shelter in a stairwell as sirens blared in the dead of night, a reminder that war does not sleep. He had been there for the last two months of the Israeli-Hamas conflict.

This trip was supposed to be about reconnection, but it quickly became a confrontation with history—its wounds, its contradictions, and the complex moral questions about violence and justice, about our collective memory. About who decides what we remember? And who holds the pen when history is written?

For decades, the story of America has been told by those in power—those who renamed slavery “labor,” who called stolen land “manifest destiny,” who painted injustice as “progress.” There’s an old African proverb that reads, “Until the lions have their own historians, the history of the hunt will always glorify the hunter.”

Standing before the Western Wall, I felt the weight of history engulf me… thousands of years of hope, of grief, and of the resilience of a people that refuses to forget. I heard the murmur of prayers, layered over millennia. Here, history was not just remembered—it was alive.

During my time, I walked past many memorials—names carved in stone, faces frozen in time, flowers left behind. The past is never past. History breathes. It weeps. These memorials are warnings to the living. They whisper to us, “Never again.”

So, what happens when some histories are preserved in stone, while others are buried in rubble? In that same land, another people cries out and mourns their dead. Another people live under the crushing weight of history, too often erased, too often rewritten.

My heart aches for Israelis grieving unbearable loss, and for Palestinians who have endured decades of displacement, violence, and suffering. Their pain is real too. Their grief is immeasurable too. Their humanity, too, must be seen.

But I’m not here today to debate the atrocities that Hamas committed on October 7th, 2023, or the proportionality of Israel’s response. History is not finished with this story yet. But we are the ones who must bear witness to the truth. Because you shall know the truth, and the truth shall set you free. And because history isn’t just what’s written in books or carved into monuments… it lives in us, too. In our families. In the stories we tell and the ones we bury. And certainly, we all have parts of the past we’d rather forget—mistakes, regrets, painful truths. It’s human to want to move on, to tuck them away where they won’t disturb us. But history doesn’t work like that.

Maybe YOUR forebears owned slaves or enforced Jim Crow laws. Maybe they burned crosses or turned their backs when their Black neighbors were run out of town. Maybe they just kept their heads down, believing silence kept them safe.

Or maybe your ancestors were the ones pushed off their land, the ones who had to drink from a different fountain, who were told they didn’t belong. Maybe your grandmother had to enter through the back door, or your grandfather couldn’t get a loan for a house in a “nice” neighborhood.

Whether our ancestors wielded power or suffered under it, we inherit the legacies they left behind. And what we do with that inheritance matters. By forgetting, ignoring, or erasing painful events in our history, we set the stage for their return. As George Santayana warned, “Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.”

And sometimes, it takes standing in the very places where history unfolded to truly feel its weight. After my time in Israel, I stopped in Germany to visit the Dachau Concentration Camp, bringing my journey full circle. The day of my visit, snow flurries fell steadily, and the bitter cold seeped through me. I didn’t pack for winter weather, and it was cold, y’all! Located on the camp’s grounds is the Protestant Church of Reconciliation, which I ran into for warmth.

There, I met the organist, Klaus Schulz. He encouraged me not to shield myself from the cold but to let it sink in, reminding me that prisoners were forced to stand for hours in these very conditions… with less clothing than I had on, drenched, shivering, enduring unimaginable suffering. His words stayed with me. They made me stop. To absorb. To feel the bitterness in my toes, my fingers… I sensed the importance of remembering.

Unlike those who urge us to forget, some nations choose to remember—to face history head-on, no matter how painful. Germany chose to remember.

As I walked through the preserved barracks, through the haunting silence of Dachau, the museum’s artifacts—documents, photos, and personal belongings—forced me to face an undeniable truth: that history demands to be seen. Germany has a word for this reckoning with its past: Vergangenheitsbewältigung (Fair-GAHN-gen-hites-buh-VEL-tih-goong), which literally means coming to terms with the past.

In Germany—not only did they give reparations to the victims, Holocaust education is mandatory, denial is illegal, and displaying Nazi symbols will get you arrested. In contrast, America often downplays or rebrands its history—slavery, Jim Crow, the Civil Rights Movement—all treated as if they were finished chapters rather than an ongoing struggle. So I ask: What does it say about a nation that chooses to remember versus one that chooses to forget?

People want us to stop talking about the past. To “let go.” And yes, we can move on from the wounds of slavery when we finally come to terms with it. We can move on from Jim Crow when we face it as a nation… We can let it all go when we finally embrace our original sins and atone for them. So I’m supposed to just “move on” from slavery, but y’all are out here clinging to Confederate statues like they’re long-lost relatives? Make it make sense!

In Germany… truth-telling wasn’t optional. The U.S.? We’ve done the opposite. Here in America, history is being selectively curated. Slavery, Jim Crow, the Trail of Tears—whitewashed, rebranded, or buried. Schools can’t teach certain truths about racism because it makes people “uncomfortable,” and the erasure continues. The Department of Defense is scrubbing 26,000 images—Tuskegee Airmen, female service members, anything tied to DEI—trying to erase us while claiming we didn’t earn it. Over four hundred years of unpaid labor… baby, we more than earned it. But I digress.

Florida’s “Stop WOKE Act” censors discussions on systemic racism. Public universities are gutting courses on race, gender, and social issues. The National Park Service wiped references to transgender people from the Stonewall National Monument. How can you take trans people out of Stonewall when it was literally a trans person’s act of resistance that began the movement? You can delete the “T” from websites, but you will never remove the T from OUR sights.

But the goal is clear, my friends: to erase the past and distort the present in order to control the future. In Dachau, reading the history of what led to the tragedy was sounding eerily familiar. In Nazi Germany, civil rights were stripped away step by step—the Nuremberg Laws revoked Jewish citizenship, banned intermarriage, and paved the way for the Nazi genocide.

You’re being a bit bombastic, Rev. Randy, evoking all this Nazi stuff. I realize that history doesn’t repeat itself exactly, but patterns persist. And we recognize the patterns and the playbook. And the reality is, so many people who are afraid right now—trans and nonbinary individuals, disabled folks, Black and brown communities, immigrants, women, my gay and lesbian friends—I hear from them. People who have fought so hard just to exist in the fullness of who they are now feel the ground shifting beneath them again.

If this is you, or if you are an ally to one of these groups, I want to encourage and empower you today. Know this… the forces that seek to demonize and erase… those who wage war against diversity, inclusion, and justice—have always been with us. But history doesn’t smile on people like these. We can be certain of that! And if there is any comfort to be found, know that this moment—this cruel, regressive chapter—will not be the final word.

The powerful once defended slavery as God’s will. They once stood on courthouse steps to block Black children from schools. They once swore that women would never vote, that love between two men or two women was unnatural, that trans people were mentally ill. They lost. And yet, here we are again—watching new hands reach for old chains, trying to shackle the future to a past that was never just, trying to revive ideas that should have died long ago.

But maybe—just maybe—this time, history will not only convict these ideas once and for all, but teach us. Maybe this time, instead of merely erasing the shame of this era, we will learn from it. Maybe this will be the moment we finally come to terms with who we have been—and who we refuse to be again.

For now, we bear witness. We resist. We tell the truth. And we do not lose hope. I said, don’t lose hope, baby…

Before I close, let me tell you a story about a man who understood both the power of remembering and the danger of forgetting. As I stood in the death chambers of Dachau, I couldn’t help but think of him… someone whose legacy nearly vanished, yet whose truth refused to be erased.

In 1923, Norbert ?hapek, a Unitarian minister in Czechoslovakia, created a simple yet profound ritual: the Flower Communion. You might recall participating in this ritual. It is a ritual we do here every year on Mother’s Day. Each person is encouraged to bring a flower, adding it to a communal vase, symbolizing that every individual has something unique to contribute. ?hapek wanted a service that reflected the beauty of diversity, the sacredness of human dignity, and the power of shared community. At the end of the service, each person took a different flower home, reminding them that just as they had given, they had also received.

But when the Nazis invaded Czechoslovakia, ?hapek’s message of unity became too dangerous for the Reich. His radical belief in human dignity and in the inherent worth of all people made him a threat to their ideology. (So, if you’re on the side of diversity, you might be feeling a little threatened right about now.) He was arrested by the Gestapo, sent to Dachau, and later executed. The Nazis tried to erase his voice. They tried to silence his vision. But they failed.

His wife, Maja ?hapek, escaped to the United States, carrying his legacy with her. She introduced the Flower Communion to American Unitarian churches in 1943, ensuring that his vision would live on. Today, nearly a hundred years later, this ritual is still practiced around the world—a testament to the truth that memory is an act of resistance.

And so, I ask again—what will we do with our own past? Forgetting is what power wants; remembering is what justice requires. But if we must forget or let go of something, let it not be the truth. But we can let go of resentment and hold on to resolution. Let go of hatred, but hold on to hope. Let go of fear, but hold on to fortitude. Let go of exclusion and hold on to inclusion. Let go of division, but hold on to diversity. Let go of comfort, but hold on to conviction. Let go of guilt, hold on to growth. Let go of envy, but hold on to empathy. Let go of apathy, but hold on to action. And in the end, let go of your weariness but hold on to our woke.

And while you are holding on to your woke… refuse to normalize the chaos. Call out lies, manipulation, and injustice every single time. Stop accepting “this is just the way things are.” It’s not. We must demand accountability from leaders, institutions, and even our own circles. When someone wants to rewrite history, bring the receipts. When someone wants to silence voices, speak louder. When they censor the truth, we amplify it. Protest. Write. Speak. Vote. Show up. Make them uncomfortable—because discomfort is where change happens.

Confront power… even if it costs something. Nothing risked, nothing gained. We can take back our power. Fear thrives in isolation. Find you a community. Share resources. Refuse to submit. Refuse to be complicit. Love… as rebellion. Let radical love be your weapon of choice. Love those they want you to hate.

And, if you still feel anxious, angry, uncertain… “Good.” That means you’re still woke—I mean awake. That means you care.

Let us remember to do the hard work of carrying history forward. And know that we do not carry it alone. When one of us stumbles, when the weight is too much—that is when we reach out. That is when we hold on. That is when we carry one another through. The song goes, if you got a problem, I got one too.

Amen.