Because we are free, the future is open. Because the future is open, there are no certainties, either of glory or of doom. Uncertainty makes space for doubt but also optimism. Unitarian Universalism is characterized by a sense that our future will be better, because we can make it so.
This year in worship, we are taking a long walk through the fundamentals of faith.
As this is my last year in professional ministry before I retire from this pulpit at the end of June, I thought as I planned the worship for this year last summer that I would revisit the fundamental issues of spirituality I’ve preached on many times and challenge myself to preach not as Unitarian Universalist preachers usually do: raising questions and avoiding answers, but to decide for myself what I believe and share my answer with you. Not to pretend I have the final answers, because these questions don’t have final answers, and my answer may not be yours, but to model for the congregation what it looks like to have a firm faith.
I wasn’t sure as I laid out the issues Sunday by Sunday, that I had answers to all these questions, but this was the time, my final chance, to stake a claim. I wanted to know whether my spiritual journey through ministry had been a fruitless wandering, entertaining but not enlightening, profitable to my retirement account, but not profitable to my soul, or could I claim that in thirty years of professional and spiritual work that I had arrived somewhere valuable, to me, and hopefully to the congregations I’ve served?
As I stand, actually, in the same place where my ministry began in 1996 as your intern minister, I wanted to know, am I standing in the same spot spiritually, or have I traveled to somewhere new?
Whether the future is open or closed is one of those foundational spiritual issues.
I preached back in October on the subject of free will when we celebrated our church’s Founder’s Day. Back then, I affirmed my belief that the future is open. This morning, I want to push that conversation to the question that belief in an open future leads to, which is, if the future is an open vista not a determined path, what are the chances we’ll get to the place we want to go?
Not everyone believes that the future is open. Interestingly, I think the truth is that the more people think about free will the less likely they are to believe in it..
Theologians will tell you that an all-powerful God leaves no room for your power and that to an eternal God the future would be as clearly known as the past. Physicists will tell you that the matter of our brains is just as bound by the physical laws of nature as every other physical thing. The chemical reactions that we interpret as expressing personal desires are just as automatic as any chemical reaction in a test tube. Our genetic inheritance shapes us in the womb and throughout our lives. Psychologically, we’re bound to habits that were ingrained in childhood.
That you feel you have free will is no evidence that you actually do. Instead, you choose exactly what a person in your situation, with all the givenness of your past and the world as it is around you, would always choose, would have to choose.
You may think you’re making it up as you go along, but really, you’re following a script and hitting your marks, and the final scene is already in the can.
Coincidentally, as I was thinking about this sermon this week, the latest copy of the New Yorker arrived and in it was an article about apocalyptic thinking, titled, “What We Learn About Our World By Imagining Its End” by Arthur Krystal. Here’s the first paragraph:
“It’s a mite soon to start grieving, but scientists now project that life on Earth will probably end in about a billion years. A Monday in February, 1,000,002,025, would be my guess. On that inhospitable day, give or take a few million years, the sun will become so hot that the oceans will boil, Earth’s oxygen will disappear, and photosynthesis will cease, as will all living things. We should be so lucky. There’s a pretty fair chance that life could be wiped out well before then—say, in early June, 2034, or on a cloudy Sunday in November, 3633. Then again, who knows?”
And then Krystal answers his question by saying:
“Plenty of people do, as it turns out, and, if you want to know who they are, Dorian Lynskey’s “Everything Must Go: The Stories We Tell About the End of the World” (Pantheon) is a good place to start. Lynskey, a British journalist and podcaster, has assembled biological, geological, archeological, literary, and cinematic permutations of existential finales, leaving no stone unturned, be it meteor, comet, or asteroid. If a book, a song, a story, a film, a headline, a title, or a study has “world” and “end” in it, Lynskey has unearthed it. Just about everyone who’s had anything to say about the world’s demise, from John of Patmos to Doris of Lessing, seems to warrant a mention.”
John of Patmos is a reference to the author of the book of Revelations, which is a very detailed description of how the world will end, or at least this current phase of the world’s history.
Coincidentally again, or should I say “fated to be”, there was an article in the New York Times this week about an asteroid, dubbed 2024 YR4, that has a 1.3 percent chance of colliding with earth in 2032. It wouldn’t be a world extinguishing event, but it would do a lot of damage if it happened to hit a city. A meteor strike in 1908 in Tunguska, Siberia, decimated an 800-square-mile forest. That’s about twice the size of New York City, and this asteroid is three times larger than that one. On the Torino scale, a tool for communicating how concerned the public and policy makers should be about an asteroid (who knew we had such a thing?) on a scale of one to ten, 2024 YR4 is a three, which is the second-highest rating ever given to an asteroid.
The Torino scale gives probabilities but if the future is closed, there’s no doubt. That asteroid is flying through space controlled by gravity, not by free will. It’s a law of gravity, not a suggestion. If we had more complete knowledge and faster computers we could say with certainty whether 2024 YR4 would fly harmlessly by earth in December 2032, or land in the ocean, or make a direct hit at 12355 Moorpark Street in Studio City.
Among all of those apocalyptic scenarios gathered in Dorian Lynskey’s book, Everything Must Go, some are fanciful, but some, like the Book of Revelations are prophecies. They will happen, so the believers believe, because since the beginning of time, designed by God, or by the laws of physics, they must happen.
That’s a picture of a closed future.
Against that picture, here is what I said in my sermon last October:
“But to me, belief in a fixed future is a horror. I crave not certainty, but freedom. The freedom to dream whatever I dream, and to work with the possibility that my effort might make a real difference. I find more comfort in regarding the future as an open space full of possibilities that I can make actual, than in a future that could be seen with certainty, but can’t be changed.”
And then I qualified my belief in freedom:
“Our choices are not entirely free. The givenness of the past does constrain us. We arrive at church with a building that was already built. The resources of this particular congregation allow us to do some things, but not all things. Our church’s character is shaped by our past, and our future will be shaped by who we are today. But I say “shaped” not fixed. We are the creators, and with the clay we have been given, we can create many different future shapes.”
After thirty years in ministry, considering the question of free will many times and preaching about it often, my belief is that we are free, free to make real choices, free to participate in creating what the future will be, not merely destined to live out a pre-determined future. Against the theologians, I argue that belief in an all-powerful God introduces an unsolvable problem of evil, so I believe in a god that shares power with humanity and other choice-makers. Rather than an eternal god, I believe in a god that experiences time with us, as a partner in creating the future. Against the physicists, I follow the Buddhist conception that places consciousness at the foundation of reality, rather than material objects.
But more than rationalism, I stake my belief in free will on faith, in the common meaning of that word, not because I have objective proof, but because the belief that we are free to shape our own lives and create our own future, individually and collectively is essential to my spiritual health.
To make sense of important spiritual categories like purpose and meaning, we must be free to choose. To judge actions as right or wrong and to hold persons accountable for their choices, we must be free to choose differently than we do. To be proud of what I’ve done, I must be free to have not done what I did. To be free to love who I love with my own romantic energy, not because my emotions are manipulated by a chemical reaction or follow an automatic psychological response, is what makes love real.
I may be wrong. But as you’ve heard me say several times this year, we judge our beliefs not as right or wrong, but on whether they are useful. Is a belief helpful to your spiritual health, or is it spiritually unhealthy? Belief in free will is essential to my spiritual health, and so I believe.
So then, if the future is an open field not a set path, where shall we go and what are the chances we’ll get to the place we desire? With no path marked out for us, will we stray, lose our way, fall into a ditch, or find darkness descending before we’ve reached our goal? Or might we, by our own power, navigate the trackless expanse, and meet the future we hope for?
Last weekend I heard a quote that has stayed with me and given me some comfort in these first extremely unsettling weeks of our new Presidential administration, and as we assess the extent of the damage done to our city by the recent fires and the magnitude of the job of rebuilding.
The quote is this: “Human beings overestimate what they can accomplish in a day, and underestimate what they can accomplish in ten years.”
I heard that quote in a documentary about Brian Eno, the musician and record producer, but Brian Eno was quoting someone else and I didn’t catch the name. Googling the quote, it seems most often attributed to Bill Gates, which may or may not be correct.
But the statement is true, isn’t it? We overestimate what we can do in a short time, and underestimate what we can do in a long time. The list of tasks we assign ourselves in the morning is seldom completed by the time we go to bed. And when the future looks bleak, as maybe it does to you today, nothing seems possible. Generally, we give too much weight to the present, and not enough flexibility to the future. When times are tough, the descending path to doom seems inevitable. Or when present times are good we feel we’re at the dawn of a new day that will never end. But then, looking back ten years, or analyzing any ten-year period of history, it’s astounding how much the world actually does change.
Two weeks ago in worship I read several passages from a talk Martin Luther King gave in 1967 on the tenth anniversary of the founding of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference. He did exactly that ten-year review I’m talking about. Remember that list of accomplishments? Who could have imagined in the legally segregated Jim Crow south of 1957, how much America would change by 1967 because the SCLC got itself organized and got to work?
If the future is open, then all we can say about it is, “We don’t know.” Which means, if all we know of the future is that we don’t know, then glory is just as likely as doom, although no more likely either. Success or failure are equally possible. A happy day or heartbreak. An asteroid in a few years, or a boiling ocean in a billion years, or the four horsemen of the apocalypse sometime in between.
So why choose hope?
Well for one, hope is a virtue. Hope is one of the three theological virtues along with faith and charity that I mentioned in my sermon last week, along with the four cardinal virtues of wisdom, justice, courage, and temperance.
And hope is a reasonable choice, because optimism is a hallmark of our Unitarian Universalist tradition.
Yesterday we started our Harvest the Power class. One of the readings was from the Unitarian Universalist theologian James Luther Adams from an essay of his titled, “Five Smooth Stones.” In his essay, Adams lays out five principles of liberal religion. The principle that “revelation is not sealed”. Nothing is complete. The principle of mutuality in human relations. The principle that we are called to build just and loving communities. The principle that we are called to work in historical and social contexts larger than our own time and place.
And Adams’ fifth principle of liberal religion that we looked at in class yesterday, is the defining feature of Unitarian Universalism I wanted to lift up today. In Adams’ words: “Finally, liberalism holds that the resources (divine and human) that are available for the achievement of meaningful change justify an attitude of ultimate optimism.”
Though the future is unknown, Unitarian Universalists have a hunch that glory is more likely than doom. Ours is an optimistic faith.
Our optimistic faith is justified because we know that human beings are not all good, all wise, and all powerful, but our faith teaches us that human beings are good enough, smart enough, and strong enough to create lives of health and joy for ourselves, for each other, and for the world we share.
Our optimistic faith is justified because we see not just the open future, we also review the evidence of the past. We know from experience that shorter spans of history can be dismal, but longer spans of history show improvement. And we know, because we’ve lived through such times, that even ten years can make incredible difference.
Our optimistic faith is justified because our faith teaches us and our history shows us, that the moral arc of the universe is long but it bends toward justice. Not because it has to be that way, but because we set ourselves to bend it.
By optimistic faith, in the words of Leonard Mason we used as our Call to Worship, “We affirm the unfailing renewal of life. Rising from the earth, and reaching for the sun, all living creatures shall fulfill themselves.”
By optimistic faith, “We affirm the steady growth of human companionship.”
By optimistic faith, “We affirm a continuing hope. That out of every tragedy the spirits of individuals shall rise to build a better world.”
The future isn’t certain. But that gives us room to work, and we are ready for the job. We have the vision, the passion, the skill. We don’t indulge in despair or catastrophize a bad couple of weeks or months into a lifetime of gloom. We don’t sing songs of doom and doubt. We sing “From all that dwell below the skies, let songs of hope and faith arise.”
There are no prophecies of apocalypse in our scriptures. And when we’re told that there’s a 1.3% chance of an asteroid hitting Earth, we can quickly calculate that means there’s a 98.7% chance that it won’t.
Ours is the faith that sings: “Stand we now upon the threshold, facing futures yet unknown.”
Ours is the faith that sings: “Well it looks like it might be a hard road but I’m gonna walk it with you.”