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A sermon preached at Trinity Presbyterian Church of Scotia, New York, Nov. 26, 2023, edited
From the Hebrew Scriptures: Ecclesiastes 1:1-14 “One generation goes its way, the next one arrives, but nothing changes. All is smoke and steam, vanity, meaningless.”
From the Gospels: Luke 9:57-62 “No one who begins to plow and looks back is fit for God’s Empire.”
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This sermon is about the hope that we should have that can overcome the fears that we all experience.
I tell you this because I will be taking you on a long and winding road to hope.
You know our fears: We worry about crime.
(I was scammed out of several hundred dollars just a few weeks ago.)
We are grumpy about the economy, inflation, higher prices,
high interest on houses and cars, shortage of affordable housing.
Depending on your field of work, you are scared about the future of
health care, elementary to higher education, and probably every other endeavor and institution.
I gave you a chemistry illustration today.
The glass with the long neck sitting on the flame is called a “retort,” useful in converting liquid to gases, which can be condensed into new liquids.
This is the process for the distillation of alcoholic spirits - an interesting use of the word spirit!
A chemistry teacher among us tells me that the retort is drawn incorrectly!
The end of the tube through the stopper into the flask must not be in the liquid being heated, but above it!
Well, this was a meme I copied from Facebook about ten years ago
and now I have learned how to build a still properly.
Here we see fear as a flame, that when applied to ignorance,
which is not knowing something needful, distills to hate.
We can make more of this concept: If we put hate on the fire of fear we can get violence.
When I used to do conflict management I realized that the source of conflict is change,
because each of us reacts and responds with different viewpoints to the new situation.
The Teacher of Ecclesiastes is wrong in saying that nothing changes!
So fear plus change produces conflict.
Every change from outside causes problems for some, but maybe opportunities and benefits for others.
Climate change is an example so that attempts to change our past behaviors are resisted.
Every new invention sets many changes into motion: wheels became wagons, chariots, and trains;
trains gave way to cars and airplanes,
the telegraph became the computer and the cell phone replaced
wired phones, cameras, flashlights and a host of other things.
Each new invention delights some people and offends or frightens others.
Electronic developments have brought us robots and Artificial Intelligence,
which brings us back to fear.
Yet change is inevitable. Change cannot be changed.
Change can be either good or bad, but cannot be eliminated from life.
We can’t go back to the way things were.
Jesus said “No one who begins to plough and looks back, is fit for the empire of God.”
(Farmers have explained to me that if you look back your row will become crooked.)
To live in God’s kingdom is to live in the present,
not tied to the past and looking to the future without fear.
Recently, I have wondered where change itself comes from.
I think it comes from time itself.
[Some people say that the present is God's time.
In other words, God may be the quality of each moment, which just is, without past or future,
but always carrying within it our past and the possibilities of all futures.
Jack Caputo in The Folly of God says that God is the "call" itself that draws us into the future.]
As time passes, everything changes, and the basic change for humans is ageing.
As we grow older, we change – in how we understand the world,
in what we want, in what we have, in what we think.
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That leads me to some books I have been reading.
I often tell churches that I won’t preach when asked, because, I tell them “I don’t have anything to say.”
Today I am filled with ideas I want to speak about.
Four books from the library on my desk on racism.
I was struck by a comment on the radio
that before the time roughly of the Reformation in the 1500's,
there was no racism based on skin color.
How could this be? We cannot imagine this. So I ordered the books from the library.
Somehow before European exploration and colonization, skin color was just “difference.”
But White people were taught to fear people of Color.
This was explained in the musical South Pacific in the song, You Have to Be Carefully Taught.
So if we heat up difference with fear we get racism.
The ways people were divided was by tribe, ethnicity, or religion,
but primarily whether you were civilized or barbarian.
Often this meant urban or rural, so there is an ancient source
of the current grievance against cities, the educated, and the wealthy.
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Another book I read is The Fourth Turning Is Here, by Neil Howe.
He is the guy who with the late William Strauss defined 20 year Generations
and 80-100 year cycles of social history.
I heard him speak when his first book came out in 1993.
In his scheme there are 4 generations:
I and my sister are Boomers; my older brother is of the “Silent Generation.”
Our parents were the so-called Greatest Generation.
Our grandparents, born after the Civil War are called Missionaries
for all the social developments they began and entering WWI.
My daughters are Generation X, born in the ‘70's.
There are no Millennials in my family,
so my granddaughter born in 2008 is a “Homelander” or “Gen Z.”
There are many resources for thinking about these things on line.
The book was a shocker to me, even though
I have been preaching a lot the past few years about
how we now or only recently understand our American history,
and events and issues in our lives in utterly new and different ways
from what we thought we knew or what we were taught when we were younger.
We didn’t know how racist and violent our history was.
We didn’t know that the US was a less than benevolent Empire.
When I was in seminary I was taught that the first chapter of Ecclesiastes was wrong:
First, life isn’t meaningless and history doesn’t go in a circle, they said;
things don’t repeat; history is linear.
They didn't believe in inevitable progress, they said, but the line from past to present to future
may be bumpy, occasionally stepping backwards into older ways of thinking and behaving,
but generally moving ahead with progress
so that “the moral arc of the universe bends to justice.”
Now I wonder about that.
Aren’t there cycles of history like the changes of seasons in the year?
Isn’t there a circle of life from childhood to early adulthood,
midlife, and elderhood. (And that last one is getting longer!)
In the church year we have the seriousness of Lent followed by the grief of Good Friday,
followed by the joy of Easter and its season, and the life of Spirit in the season of Pentecost.
I think we need to reconsider the idea of time and history moving in circles of repetition.
Some things, like winter and old age, are predictable.
In The 4th Turning Is Here we find a repetition of generations
through a predictable pattern of a spring-like High,
like the post WWII years when I was growing up,
followed by a summer Awakening, such as occurred during the ‘60's,
followed by an autumnal Unraveling in the ‘80's, ‘90's, and early 2000's, highlighted by 911.
We are now in a Crisis, which Howe says began with the financial upheavel in 2008.
Howe says that this crisis should peak and be resolved in the next ten years,
in a similar way to how WWII followed the Depression, and victory was the end of the crisis.
Today we are living in a crisis and we all know it.
I can’t remember in my lifetime when the daily news was so threatening.
Political division, culture war, people living in different realities,
some built on conspiracy theories and outright lies.
We see a reversal of civil rights won in previous decades.
We experience a decline of the churches and other institutions,
great change in technology, economics, and climate,
with increasing income and wealth gap.
Dictators are being elected in Europe, Israel, and Argentina.
Terrible wars in Ukraine, Sudan, and Gaza follow years of terrorism,
which actually took many fewer lives.
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One more thing I have been reading about: Trauma.
My seminary, McCormick in Chicago, announced the formation of a “Trauma Healing Initiative.”
I said to myself, “What is this?
I had to look up a definition of trauma:
“the lasting emotional response that often results from living through a distressing event.”
Individuals suffer trauma from assaults, accidents, fires, and explosions.
We know about trauma through the incidence of PTSD, “post-traumatic stress disorder”
coming out of the wars in Vietnam, Iraq, and Afghanistan.
More recently, studies and groups have been formed
around the ideas of “public trauma” or “shared trauma.”
911 is an example of a public trauma shared by everyone.
(This is why generations are different: Different events mark their childhoods.
No one born since 2000 was much affected by or remembers 911.)
Imagine the trauma of Israelis Oct. 7, or of Gazans in the weeks since.
We see and hear and read news of terrible injustice, violence and natural disasters.
At some level each of us shares in these traumas,
psychologically, emotionally, and spiritually, if not physically.
Because of wartime PTSD experience, there are now treatment procedures in trauma treatment centers.
People recovering from trauma are told not to isolate themselves,
seek professional help, and join a Support Group.
Many groups are now forming for those of us without physical injury,
but suffering from public and shared trauma.
We all need to listen to our bodies and admit our traumas
as alcoholics and drug users have to admit their addictions.
All of us need to think about the reality of the possibility of bad things happening to any of us.
We all need to know this and know our strengths for getting through pain and bad times.
We can lessen the effects of the stress, sadness, fear, shame,
grief, and depression that follow traumatic events before they happen.
Thomas Hubl, author of Attuned: Practicing Interdependence to Heal our Trauma and our World says:
The avoidance of trauma shows up as an inability to meet life,
which is the foremost symptom of separation from others
and bypassing the spiritual dimension of life.”
Too often, we naively seek only 'light and positivity,'
and distance ourselves from the pain and grit
of our own and others' suffering.
By avoiding the raw nakedness of what is real,
we miss the deep spiritual intimacy that can only be experienced
through a willingness to profoundly be in and with the painful dark.
Of course, this is much too difficult to do alone.
When we come together, willing to receive one another's pain without judgment,
without turning away, we discover trust, connection, and healing release.
As Christians, we should know these things:
The cross of Jesus shows the reality of violence and trauma in human life.
We can look forward without fear if we recall from our past
that our ancestors survived and responded to the crises of their lives
in the depression, in WWII and in WWI before it.
As individuals, they lived through, suffered, or died in the Civil War,
and the War for Independence before that.
Terrible things have happened before and will happen again.
It may be that the next terrible, national crisis will bring people together again,
and churches will once again be centers for social and personal healing,
and for the basic expressions of gratitude, service to others, and democracy.
Neil Howe tells us that each generation is favored by certain traits and characteristics.
Some are heros, nomads, artists, and prophets.
He would say that I am living out my life as a senior prophet, fitting for a boomer in this time.
If you are of Generation X and the Millennial and Homeland generations
each of you has your own views of life because of the worlds you experienced growing up.
In many ways we gave you a bad deal, but you learned different skills from mine;
and your abilities will serve all of us well as the coming crisis reaches its depths and heights.
Younger generations give me hope.
Children and grandchildren have always brought hope and new life, and new beginnings to the world.
We can only regret that we aren’t leaving them a better one.
And we musn’t retreat from or give up on this world.
Stay engaged.
Everyday I read an obituary for someone in their 90's
who recently completed a book or a painting or who led a movement.
That means I might have a decade more, and you may have even more years
in which to accomplish something great.
May it be so.
