Rev. Kendyl Gibbons
First Unitarian Society of Minneapolis
June 6, 2004
The Future is Now
On the other side of the globe, in the makeshift of a refugee camp at the foot of an ancient monastery in Thailand, a Hmong family waits for the wheels of bureaucracy to turn. The days are uncertain, as everything is uncertain in that gray, precarious world, but sometime soon, in a handful of weeks or a month, they will climb into an airplane, clutching everything they have in the world, and that airplane will carry them on a journey that ends here, in Minneapolis or St. Paul, Minnesota. In long years of terror, boarding that airplane may not be the most terrifying thing they have ever done, but it will be an act of wrenching and breath-taking courage, leaving behind all that they know of land, and culture, and language. Yet they will do it with stoic fortitude, determined acceptance and even thankfulness, because there is no future in the timeless limbo of a refugee camp. If they and their children are to have future, it lies here, with us, and the future is now.
They will arrive carrying the barest remnants of their former lives; they will need the simplest of everyday items - something to boil water in, something to sweep the floor with, a pencil, a towel. We who will be their new neighbors cannot undo the tides of geopolitical conflict that have washed these newcomers bereft to the shelter of our inland city; we cannot amend their fathomless griefs, or give them back their lost years. What we can do is to make this at long last a safe harbor. We cannot change the past, but what we can do is help them to build a future; help them to start out with some of the most basic necessities of daily living while they come to terms with all the realities of a new home. We are, by heritage, by moral duty, and by necessity, a community of welcomed immigrants. The future of these strangers is the future of our city, and the future is now.
At the ice cream social following this assembly, there will be a social action table where you can get a list of the most important items needed immediately by newly arrived refugee families. The Minnesota Council of Churches has invited the faith communities of Minnesota to help greet these newest members of our community with welcome baskets containing essential housewares, personal care items, and getting started basics. Our FUS social action committee has proposed that together the members of this congregation can fill ten of these baskets with pots, towels, light bulbs, and other things that we take for granted in our daily lives. Even as we shift into our summer programming schedule, the needs of those less fortunate than many of us do not take a vacation. I urge you to stop by the table, to take a list, and the next time you are at Target, or the grocery store, or Costco, pick up something to help a family you may never meet make a home and a future in the strange, alien world of our city. If our future is to be a community of diversity, justice, hospitality, and hope, the future is now.
Most of us are not asked to embrace our futures with an act of such radical discontinuity as refugees must undertake; we do not have to board airplanes, or ships, and leave behind all that is familiar in the service of unknown possibility. Yet for many of us, it was only two or three generations ago that our ancestors were doing exactly that; betting the starvation, oppression, incessant warfare of home against the chance for a new life, for a future of opportunity and peace in a new land, even though it meant dislocation, and risk, and the loss of a way of life. Our lives are what they won in that wager; our prosperity and security are what they gambled for, that their grandchildren's grandchildren might live safe and healthy, might come to such wisdom or happiness as we can manage without the ancient hatreds and hardships to weigh us down. We are what they labored for; our lives are the dreams they believed in; the promise of their future is now.
But even in the comfort of middle class, 21st century America, no future comes without a price, and no future comes without a vision, or without risk, or in the end, without faith. We live in a time of radical discontinuities; of technological innovation, of political dissension, of cultural shift, and the future no longer seems to flow forward from the past in a smooth progression that can be trusted to carry our own most cherished values with it. Who can feel that their view of the world has not realigned itself since the fateful date of September 11th? Different people have made sense of it in differing ways, but there is no question that for our national self-image and self-understanding, that event represents a watershed; whatever we may think about it, it cannot be ignored. One commentator has observed that following the fall of the Berlin wall in 1989 and of communism generally as a viable threat, America took a ten year vacation from history. To whatever extent this is true, that vacation came to an abrupt end in September of 2001, and we have been attempting to re-calibrate our location and direction in history ever since.
It is in this kind of social climate that the genre of apocalyptic literature always flourishes. Whenever people are uncertain and fearful, they find comfort in stories about the end of the world, and what happens next; stories with ultimate good guys and bad guys, that display the underlying structure of a moral universe that can at least be understood, even if it cannot be controlled. This impulse can be seen, of course, in the huge popularity of the "Left Behind" book series, in which authors Jerry Jenkins and Tim LaHaye have created a sequence of contemporary adventure/suspense novels based on Biblical images from the book of Revelation. In their fictional scenario, faithful Christians and innocent children are instantly zoomed to heaven, to await the second coming of Jesus, while the world undergoes a period of chaos and struggle between the forces of god and the anti-christ. Liberals, intellectuals, Catholics, and the United Nations are aligned with the powers of evil, while new believers in orthodox Christianity struggle to defend the nation of Israel, convert the Jews, preserve themselves, and defeat the forces of arrogant, godless reason. This scenario would be funny - indeed, it is hard to parody these books; they are their own caricature - if it did not represent both the theology and the basis of international policy embraced by many figures at the highest level of our real national government. Writing for Salon.com, reviewer Michelle Goldberg observes:
"Desecration," the ninth volume of a projected 14, was 2001's best-selling hardcover novel. These books and their massive success deserve attention if only for what they tell us about the core beliefs of a great many people in this country, people whose views shape the way America behaves in the world. The seemingly wacky ideology promulgated in the Left Behind books is one that important people in America are quite comfortable with. The Left Behind series provides a narrative and a theological rationale for a whole host of perplexing conservative policies, from the White House's craven decision to cut off aid to the United Nations Family Planning Fund to America's surreally casual mobilization for an invasion of Baghdad -- a city that is, in the Left Behind books, Satan's headquarters.
Political attitudes and actions that make no practical or moral sense to secularists become comprehensible when viewed through Christian pop culture's eschatological looking glass. At a time when America is flagrantly flouting international law, spurning the U.N. and tacitly supporting the land grabs of Israeli maximalists, surely it's significant that the most popular fiction in the country creates a gripping narrative that pits American Christians against a conspiracy of Satan-worshipping, abortion-promoting, gun-controlling globalists -- all of it revolving around the sovereignty of Israel. Israel is the key to the theology that dominates Left Behind (as well as much of American evangelical Christianity). Indeed, the chain of events that lead to the return of Christ depends on the existence of a Holy Land that is under catastrophic assault. No wonder the born-again lobby is obsessed with Israeli self-defense, but opposed to any peace plan.
Those Israeli settlements in the West Bank that add so much kindling to the conflagration in the Middle East are often "adopted" and funded by American evangelical churches whose members are devouring a novel that depicts Jews reclaiming Palestinian land, moving Al-Aqsa Mosque out of Jerusalem and rebuilding the second temple on the Dome of the Rock. The chosen people are suddenly the darlings of the religious right, while a bestseller promotes the idea that Jews will soon convert to Christianity -- and atone for their centuries of stubbornness -- en masse. Of course, it's not that every reader of the more than 50 million Left Behind books sold so far is an end-times fundamentalist any more than every Eminem fan is a homophobe. Nor are the books guaranteed to change their audiences' views on American foreign policy -- the relationship between culture and politics is never that simple. But the stories people tell themselves about the world necessarily shape the way they act in it, and right now, this is the story that's captivating America.
Those of us who might wish to see our nation's international and domestic policies determined according to a different understanding of history's structure would do well to recognize the incredible popularity of this narrative and its implications.
At the same time, we are not without our own apocalyptic response to the stresses of current cultural anxiety. There is such a thing as a liberal apocalyptic narrative; the recently released popular movie "The Day After Tomorrow" is a case in point. While its disaster is based upon a scientific premise of global warming rather than ancient scripture texts, the structure of the plot has an eerie similarity to the "Left Behind" stories, including the same level of both fascinating and disorienting special effects images. It offers the same threat of impending doom, in which those who made light of the warnings will be sorry, if indeed they do not perish instantly as a result of their own willful blindness, together with a great many ignorant and sort of but not entirely innocent people. Meanwhile, a righteous and believing remnant struggles to survive and deal with a world cataclysmically altered by overwhelming forces; powers that are released by human action but not controlled by human will. The authority by which these forces operate differs in the two narratives, in fact, they are mutually opposed, and each holds the other at least partly responsible for the imminent catastrophe. In the fundamentalist version, science has led humanity away from god, and astray, while the liberal perspective sees religious orthodoxy as one of the obstacles to peace, progress, and proper respect for the implications of science. Despite these mirror images, it is structurally the same story. The world as we know it is at risk; irretrievable change may occur at any moment; the future is a very scary thing.
I point out these parallels, not because I think the two stories are equally credible - I don't, and global warming concerns me much more seriously than the possibility that Jesus is really going to return, which concerns me not at all. The similarities among apocalyptic narratives interest me because I think the way that they are being told, and heard, in the popular culture has more to do with our sense of discontinuity, powerlessness, and free-floating fear, than it does with either authentic science or authentic theology. And I think it is that collective anxiety which has more power to rob us of our real freedom and safety than any of the various end-time scenarios that humanity has ever envisioned.
The truth is that we are all in the same boat - or on the same plane - with those bewildered refugees who will soon be struggling to build a new life here among us. We are all headed on the wind stream of time into an unknowable future, fraught with challenge, and risk, and enormous possibilities. The human spirit quails in the face of change; it always has, for we are usually more comfortable with the devils we know than with a new world that we can scarcely begin to envision. Yet I believe that real faith exists - for us, as for the Hmong families arriving here with empty hands but hopeful hearts - real faith exists to give us courage and good cheer and shared confidence in the future that we will build together; the future that begins here, today; the future that is now.
We know this. Despite our fascination with the imaginative stories that lift responsibility for the future out of our hands, we still go on, so many of us, creating the world that we long to see. It is said that every baby born is a signal of god's opinion that the world ought to continue. That's a nice thought, but the opinion that matters to me is that that child's parents think the world ought to go on, ought to be made, insofar as we can make it, into a world worthy of our children. And our children go on, learning and growing and graduating from our care into their own unknowable, infinitely possible futures. New members come to this Society, seeking a covenant community of memory and promise, bringing their aspirations for their own fuller humanity and their yearning to witness to the world the possibilities of reason, responsibility, authenticity, mutual care, and peace. And dear, devoted people like Gordon and Joyce Asselstine make provision for the future of this institution by creating, out of their own abundance, a fund that will support our operating budget into a time that they themselves may not be here to see. They called it the Future Is Now Fund, and it creatively balances the desire to see our contributions persist over time with the need not to lock money away so that it can never be spent on what the congregation needs to fulfill its mission and to build for the next generation. Their gift is an expression of their faith, not only in the First Unitarian Society, but in our community, our world, and the human race. It is a signal that who we are and what we are doing ought to go on, and I hope that others will come to see the wisdom of their plan, and join them in securing the future of our faith with the same kind of generosity.
But look, if it's all going to end in some enormous tidal wave, or some fine, careless rapture, why bother? That's what apocalyptic stories do to us; they substitute the spurious satisfaction of saying, "See? We told you so!" for the challenge of building new lives and stronger communities while the world changes around us. They invite us to say, "Don't worry; everyone who doesn't agree with the truth we know will get their comeuppance;" they let us resign from the responsibility of being the changes we want to see, of living into the future and shaping it by the way we conduct ourselves and by our generosity. Of course we do not directly control the onward sweep of history; at any moment we may find ourselves tossed by currents of change over which we have very little power - that has always been the truth of the human condition, and never more so than in our own era. What matters is how we meet those changes, whether we cling to the past, or abandon ourselves to self-righteous apocalyptic despair, or instead choose to live as people of faith, embracing the future that is always now. The challenge before us, in these anxious days, as in all days, is whether we will be guided by our hopes, or by our fears. The fears certainly make for more spectacular books and movies, about the end of the world and how we were right after all and everyone should have listened to us, but they don't make good politics, or effective diplomacy, or compassionate neighborhoods, or a freer, safer, more livable world. Those are the things that we build out of our hopes, using the tools of reason and trust and generosity, of human intelligence and welcome to the stranger, and commitment over the long haul and the age-old longing for peace. These are the promises that every tempest-tossed immigrant comes seeking, this is the life that our forbears sacrificed in order to bequeath to us. Still it beckons us onward, as the world spins down the ringing grooves of change, and the future shimmers with all the challenges and possibilities of the yet unknown. We do not control the future, and yet we build it; it is a function of our courage and our faith as together we encounter its demands. For the days that are to come begin today, and the future is now.