Sermon for 5 November 2006, 1st
Unitarian Church of Alton, Illinois
LOOKING BACK, LOOKING FORWARD
Ronald J.
Glossop
I. Introduction
B.
This situation is paradoxical but not surprising. The past is definite. Particular things have happened at particular
times and particular places. When and where were you born? When did you graduate from high school and
where was it? When and where were your
children born? Do you remember what you were doing when you first heard about
President Kennedy's assassination in 1963 or when and how you learned about the
9/11 disaster at the World Trade Center in New York in 2001? Even when we can't remember all the details,
there is something definite and objectively real about the past which is
absent from our thoughts about the future.
C.
The future is indefinite.
Even something that we know will happen, like our own death, is
indefinite. We know that we will die,
but we don't know when or where or how?
We can anticipate that certain events will happen or that we will do
certain things, but we can never be sure that the future will turn out to be as
we suppose it will be or as we intend it to be.
D.
Let me say another word about that distinction I made in the last
sentence. Even when we manage to think
about the future, we can do that in two different ways, ways that are
very dissimlar in their influence on our behavior.
1.
One way of thinking about the future is predictive. This way of thinking focuses on what might
happen or what is likely to happen in the future independently of
anything we might do or even try to do.
The model here is the expectation that there will be an eclipse of the
sun at some particular time and place.
That is going to happen no matter what we do. That kind of thinking about the future is predictive.
2.
But a very different way of thinking about the future is prescriptive. This way of thinking focuses on what I
should do, what is the right thing for me to do. Hopefully, that kind of thinking will have
the effect of producing good behavior in the future.
3.
Of course, one can also think prescriptively about what someone
else should do, but that is not likely to be a fruitful way of spending
your time unless you can somehow hope to influence their behavior. In fact, it seems to me that people often get
deeply engrossed in thinking about what someone else should do about
some problem without ever going on to the issue of what they themselves
should do to deal with that problem.
E.
Getting back to the distinction between thinking about the past and
thinking about the future, the situation is that our definite memories
are more vivid and real than the indefinite creations of
our imaginations. We can try to
enliven the creations of our imaginations by focusing on possible details, but
they always remain possibilities and not realities.
F. I
want to explore this situation as it applies (1) to our individual lives, (2)
to this religious congregation, and (3) to the wider national and world
communities in which we live.
G.
Let me make it clear that I am not saying that we can't learn
from the past. We can and should learn
from examining the past. We can discuss
the past with others in an attempt to figure out what to do in the future. Historians are important. Those who do not
learn from the past are likely to repeat the mistakes of the past. But though we can learn from the past, we
cannot alter it. The future, however, is
different. What we do may make a
difference.
II. So let us look first at our individual
lives.
A.
We can begin with photographs.
Photographs help is to remember and re-experience things from the past.
In general, the older they are the more interesting they are because we need
them more to help our memories. A
photograph from 25-30 years ago can even bring to mind something that we had
totally forgotten. But after a short
while, we get tired of looking at these photographs of the past. If you are like me, you have boxes and/or
notebooks of these old photos which you almost never look at again. There may
be videotapes too. It is pleasant from
time to time to look at these reminders of the past, but something is
definitely wrong if a person spends a great deal of time just looking at old
photographs and videotapes instead of taking an interest in the present.
B.
Life is happening now, and one's attention should be on what is
happening now and one's own decisions for the future. We should always remember this fundamental
fact: the past can't be changed,
but our actions may make a difference in the future.
C.
As one grows older, there is a natural tendency to look back rather than
toward the future, but that looking at the past should be limited. If we stop looking toward the future, if we
have no plans for the future and no projects or goals to work for, if we are
not going to do anything to try to influence what is happening or what will
happen in the future, in a sense we would have already died. Our continuing existence would make little or
no difference to anyone or anything else.
III. Now let us turn our attention to this
religious congregation.
A.
We have a wonderful history and are regularly celebrating various
aspects of it, such as the recent ceremony honoring the 100th anniversary of
the building of this sanctuary in which we meet.
1. If you view our congregation's
website at <www.firstuualton.org>, you will at once see a note indicating
that this congregation was founded way back in 1836 as well as the information
that this sanctuary where we are meeting was built in 1905.
2.
I was a bit surprised, but pleasantly so in view of my theme today, to
find that on our website there is no further historical information about
this congregation. Such historical
information perhaps should be added, but its absence on the church website does
say something about our congregation's commitment to look forward to the future
rather than to look backward to the past.
B.
We are presently engaged in an effort to show that this is a welcoming
congregation, a church which is eager to provide a religious home for everyone
regardless of religious upbringing, nationality, race, gender, political
affiliation, sexual orientation, economic status, age, educational level and so
on. This commitment is a clear statement
about where we are headed and what kind of congregation we want to be
and become.
C.
We can be thankful and proud that our church is not mired in the past
as are so many other churches and religions.
1.
I am amazed at how many people are so stuck in the past, in fact
in the ancient past, with regard to religion. Whether they are focused on the Bible or the
Koran or some other ancient scripture, these religious fundamentalists believe
that something must be true just because it is in some "holy" book,
even though what it says was originally written over a thousand years ago,
well before humans knew that the sun is but a star and that the Earth is one of
several planets that go around it or that the Earth has existed for over
4.5 billion years or that diseases can be caused by germs visible only
under a microscope or that the DNA of chimpanzees is over 98% the same
as the DNA of humans. Why should we who
are alive today be guided in our thinking by the ideas of these ignorant people
of the distant past, even if they might have been a bit wiser than most other
people living at the same time?
2.
This reverence for ancient religious texts is a most obvious example of
looking back rather than looking forward.
To have this kind of commitment to the writings and ideas of the ancient
past is to ignore the fact that thsee teachings and values reflect a society in
its agricultural stage , which is when these ancient scriptures were
written, a society where the task of women is to have as many children as
possible and where a little education is enough for everyone. Such teachings and values are not and should
not be the beliefs and values to guide a society in the scientific post-industrial
stage in which we now live where the challenge is to reduce the number of children
being born and where a thorough education is a necessity.
3.
The fixation on the past is so great in these looking-in-the-rear-view
mirror religions that all kinds of efforts have to be made to reinterpret
the words so they say something other than what they obviously meant to
those who wrote them. These worshippers of these old sacred texts try to
"explain away" even the most obvious plain meanings of these
statements from the ancient past.
a.
One obvious difficulty for the person who takes the Bible literally as
"The Truth" is that according to Genesis 1:13-18 there are three
evenings and three mornings before the sun gets created. It is obvious that the writer of this text
did not realize that our experience of what we call daylight is the
result of the scattering of the sun's rays by the Earth's atmosphere. That writer also evidently did not realize
that our sensations of day and night are produced by the Earth's turning on its
axis so that sometimes we are on the side of the Earth which is toward the sun
and sometimes we are on the side away from the sun. This text is obviously a pre-scientific
account by an ancient writer, not some infallible wisdom directly from
God as the fundamentalists claim.
b.
Another interesting effort to reinterpret the text also involves the
creation story found in the first chapter of Genesis. In this case it is said that a
"day" might refer to a thousand years because II Peter 3:8 says that
for God a day is like a thousand years.
But to be consistent with modern scientific thinking each of these days
in Genesis would need to last billions of years. People who advance such reinterpretations
also need to read the text, which clearly says "The evening and the
morning were the first day" and "The evening and the morning were the
second day," and so on for the other days.
Furthermore, they need to understand the point of the story as a
whole, namely, that humans get to rest from their work every seventh day
because that is what God did. If each of
these days are in fact thousands of years long, it will be a long time before
we humans come to the sabbath (seventh) day when we get to rest.
c. You might also ask your
Bible-quoting Christian friends about Jesus' statement in support of Unitarianism, a statement found in
the Bible not just once but twice. In
Mark 10:17-18 when a man addresses Jesus as "Good Teacher" Jesus
replies, "Why do you call me good? No
one is good--except God alone."
In Luke 18:19 we read the very same quote from Jesus. "Why do you call me good? No one is good--except God alone." That seems to me to be a rather definite
statement by Jesus that he is not God.
4.
An important part of what Unitarian-Universalism is about is our belief
that it is the responsibility of all persons to think for themselves
about philosophical, ethical, and religious issues. That is what being a human being is all
about. Don't put your most important
beliefs in the hands of someone else, and especially in the hands of someone
who lacks much of the knowledge available to us in the 20th and 21st centuries.
D.
Getting back to our main point about the need to think about the future,
I want to mention a facet of the future of our congregation that is just
beginning to be discussed and which is of special interest to one of our
younger members, Alex Hoeft.
1.
Alex has an idea about our future that I think we need to consider. His idea is that this congregation should
develop a plan to purchase the Old Alton Post Office located just across Third
Street. This near-by building is for
sale, and it has a lot of space in it.
2.
Our congregation is presently growing very rapidly and may soon need
more space than we have in this building.
With more space we would be able to expand not only our religious
education program on Sunday mornings but also might be able to provide a
recreational facility for people in Alton and in our church during the rest of
the week and/or shelter space for needy and homeless persons.
3.
Perhaps this congregation should lead the way in forming a nonprofit
community-service organization and fund which could buy and manage the building
and the lot.
4.
I have not investigated this possibility in detail, but as we think
about the future of this congregation I think we need to take a good look at
this interesting opportunity which has presented itself to us.
IV. Let me direct your attention to the past and
the future of the wider national and world communities in which
we live.
A.
Now is a good time to address this matter because we have a very
important election coming up just two days from now. That is in the future, and it is a matter on
which each of us must decide. For whom
should we vote?
B.
As we think about our country's future, we should nevertheless consider
what we can learn from looking at the past.
C.
Many people believe that somehow this country has lost its way,
especially during the five years since the 9/11 terrorist attacks on the Trade
Towers in New York and the Pentagon in Washington. At that time the rest of the world was
sympathetic. The chief French newspaper Le
Monde had as its headline "We Are All Americans," a sentiment
felt through much of the world. The U.N
Security Council readily passed a resolution approving international
intervention against the Taliban in Afghanistan. But what is the situation now? Americans visiting other countries,
especially countries in Europe, try to disguise themselves as Canadians to
avoid getting the cold shoulder.
D.
Certainly, the decision by the Bush administration to invade Iraq
even when it could not get approval from the U.N. Security Council to do so is
a great part of the problem. But it is
important to see that that is not the only reason that the rest of the
world has developed a negative attitude toward the United States. This country has reneged on its support of
the International Criminal Court, an effort to develop an international
system of justice to prosecute individual tyrants and vicious dictators such as
are now carrying out genocide and mass murders in Sudan and other African
countries, in Myanmar (the Asian country many of us know as Burma) and in
other countries. The United States
refuses to cooperate in international efforts to limit global warming. Earlier efforts to develop an international
treaty to stop all testing of nuclear weapons were reversed and a treaty
to ban landmines was rejected.
U.S. influence in the Middle East is perceived to be very one-sided
in favor of Israel. In Latin
America, Africa, and some Asian countries, U.S.-based corporations are seen as
a driving force in the continuing and growing gap between the
rich and the poor. This country refuses
to provide financial assistance to the U.N. Population Fund supposedly on
grounds that it promotes abortions to control birthrates, something which in
fact it does not do.
E.
All of this contrasts vividly with the situation in the period 1972-1985
and earlier when the United States supported the United Nations and its international
conferences on issues such as the environment, regulation of
activities threatening to the oceans, better economic cooperation between
developed countries and developing countries, better housing in poor countries,
and better protection of the rights of women. It was during the Reagan
administration that the United States began to oppose any more U.N. conferences
on these global issues.
F.
Something has changed in this country, and it isn't just a matter of
Republicans on one side and Democrats on the other. It is that the Republican Party has been
taken over by religious extremists focused on sex-related issues
such as whether a woman's only role should be to give birth to and rear
children, whether the government should eliminate all possibility of abortions
regardless of circumstances, whether homosexuality is a "sin" which
should be prosecuted by the government, whether gays and lesbians should have
the same rights as heterosexual couples, and so on.
G. These Christian-right extremists have
also displayed a distinct opposition to the United Nations and much of the rest
of the world because most people in the rest of the world do not share their
views on these sex-related issues.
It is ironic that those in the rest of the world who do have the
same agricultural-era views on sex-related issues as these Christian-right
extremists are the Muslim, Jewish, and Hindu fundamentalists, groups
which in a wider context are anything but allies of the Christian right.
H. So which way is this country going to go in
the future? Which way is the Republican
Party going to go in the future? Is that
party going to be able to continue to win elections by appealing to the
sex-related issues?
I. For many people, especially those in this
country, the possibility of more attacks by Islamist terrorists is of
great concern. The primarly focus has
been the possible use of a nuclear weapon, but in fact the use of biological
weapons is a much greater real threat.
Such weapons are potentially more lethal to more persons and much easier
to smuggle into this country than nuclear weapons. I fear that the protectors of the security of
our country may again be caught off-guard, looking in the wrong direction.
J.
With regard to countries acquiring nuclear weapons, the
efforts to keep North Korea and Iran from having them may succeed for a while,
but as long as international system remains anarchic and based on military
force more and more countries are going to be acquiring these weapons,
especially countries controlled by tyrannical dictators
K. Switching
our attention from our national community to the global community,
we need to recognize that there are important developments taking place in the
world that are not controlled by this country.
The influence of the European Community and the euro is
steadily growing even though the transition to a true federation is temporarily
stalled. The influence of China
is growing rapidly. As China becomes
richer and takes its place as an important part of the decision-making group
for the world community, we can expect its policies to become more sympathetic
to preserving the status quo. The
influence of countries such as India and Brazil is growing as
they become industrialized or developed societies. Little by little the "Third World"
less-developed countries of the 20th century are becoming the developed countries
of the 21st century. At the same time
the industrialized countries of the 20th century are in the process of
becoming the technologically advanced countries of the 21st century. A big question for the future is how rapidly
the less technologically advanced countries will now be able to again jump
ahead because of global communication.
L. A
serious question for the future is whether the leaders of the nation-states
will be able to develop a radically different system of international
relations based on having a democratic government and enforceable world law
rather than continuing to "muddle through" with a system where those
with superior military force ultimately call the shots.
M. Turning
our attention to the prescriptive way of thinking about the future, we
need to ask ourselves how each of us might help bring about that new kind of
democratic global community based on the
rule of law. There are many different
kinds of activities that can move us in this direction ranging from how children
are educated to how people can be inspired to act on the basis of
moral conscience to how citizens can be kept informed about the problems
which need to be addressed by the society to how political leaders can be
motivated to consistently act to promote the general welfare of the whole
human community, not just part of it. I challenge each of you to give this
some thought.
N.
And please don't think just in terms of what others should be
doing to move us in the right direction.
Ask yourself, What can I
do to move us in the right direction? Then
do it.
O.
Obviously one place your attention should now be focused is next
Tuesday's election. Which political
party and which individuals are most likely to take us in the direction we need
to go? I hope that all of you take this
matter seriously, get yourself informed, and then cast your ballot on the basis
of what seems best to you.
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