One hundred years ago, almost to this very day, Boston experienced a great tragedy, one so odd that almost no locals even know about it. It’s called the Great Molasses Flood. In early 1919 a holding tank in a molasses distillery in Boston’s North End exploded, sending over two million gallons of hot molasses pouring through the narrow streets, with gooey, scalding waves over 25 feet high. 21 Bostonians sadly lost their lives.
That same year, eleven months later, Harry Frazee, the owner of Boston’s Major League Baseball team, sold its star player’s contract to the rivals in New York. It was a case of instant fundraising apparently to produce a theatrical performance Frazee wanted.
Everybody knows the Babe Ruth story. You probably think I made up the Molasses thing. Both are true. Both are history.
Why do we remember some things from the past and then forget others? It’s clearly not just a case of relative importance. Red Sox fans were not happy at Christmas 1919, but the scars of the gruesome flood were still being physically repaired. The lost lives would be mourned by friends and loved one all their days of course. Remembrance requires retelling. Deliberately.
History has lessons. It always has lessons. The Bible is history. And the subsequent history is also history, not inspired, of course, but still history. In the divergent, even antithetical “memory” of the information age, the essential art and discipline of remembrance sure looks like a casualty most of the time. Trivia becomes mainstream. But seminal historical events often virtually disappear. It’s happening even in church life.
History is at the heart of Boston, and Boston Baptist College. I may be partly to blame, because I’m an unabashed history guy. Yet surely there is more to it than that. Some significant part of who we are, as individuals, as churches, as colleges, as a Fellowship, is strongly connected to who we were and where we came from. That lineage should not, must not, enslave us to mistakes. But it should anchor us to timeless values and lessons.
On our campus, even church history is a priority – a fun one I would argue. We don’t worship history. But we have to know it. We have to learn its lessons. We have to teach it to those who follow us in each new generation. Don’t sell a priceless slugger on a whim. Don’t forget what leads to explosions that maim and kill. It’s where we’ve been. It affects where we are going.