Toward Tomorrow

Exodus 3:1-15
Psalm 63:1-8
1 Corinthians 10:1-13
Luke 13:1-9

In the summer of 1978 my mother went off to a summer camp to play Renaissance music, so my dad and my three brothers and I left our home in Vermont and went on a road trip to Boston.  One of our stops along the way was the University of Massachusetts campus in Amherst, where they were having an event called the Toward Tomorrow Fair.  It was a kind of trade show, featuring alternative energy and other forms of what was being called at the time “appropriate technology.”  I remember walking onto the grounds and being amazed at the sight of a large oval wind turbine, kind of like an egg-beater, spinning around and around on a vertical axis next to the duck pond.  There were displays about composting toilets and solar food dryers, backyard fish farming and geodesic domes, and the basic premise seemed to be that this was the near future.  The folks at the fair were confident that the recent Arab Oil embargo, and the population bomb, and all the problems associated with big, hard, industrial technology meant that the future would need to be local, versatile, efficient, soft and small. 

And they weren’t alone.  A month after the Toward Tomorrow Fair, the Bishops of the world-wide Anglican Communion came together for The Lambeth Conference.   Every ten years the Archbishop of Canterbury invites them over for three weeks of prayer and worship and conversation.  Each conference passes resolutions on matters of common interest and concern, and in 1978 they approved a total of 37 resolutions on topics ranging from Women in the Priesthood to An Association of French-speaking Dioceses.  But the only one I’ve read is Resolution One, entitled Today’s World.  In it the bishops say that they have found “a new dimension of unity in our intense concern for the future wellbeing of all [human]kind.”  They write of the choices that we face, of the promise of advance in human well-being, on the one hand, and on the other of the “real possibilities of catastrophic disaster if present attitudes and the expectations of individuals do not swiftly change.”

The resolution goes on to list 11 areas where change is needed.  Number 5 includes this statement:

We must direct our efforts to the achievement of a kind of society where the economy is not based on waste, but on stewardship, not on consumerism but on conservation, one concerned not only with work but with the right use of leisure. We may need to contemplate a paradox: an increasing use of appropriate technology, while returning, where possible, to many of the values of pre-industrial society. In some places this can include home industries, the local market, the fishing village, and the small farm.

That was 35 years ago, half a human lifetime.  That’s long enough ago that we can’t think of that summer as contemporary—it is part of the past.  And if the Toward Tomorrow Fair and the Lambeth Conference of 1978 are part of our history, we have to decide how to remember them, and whether they should be remembered at all.   What will we make of that historical moment?  Was it an opportunity that we missed, and is lost forever?  Was it an early warning of lessons that it’s still not too late to learn?  Or was it an irrelevant sidetrack of history, a case of drawing the wrong conclusions from events, that it is better to forget?

The Apostle Paul raises similar questions about the uses of history.  In his 2^nd Letter to the church in Corinth he recounts the familiar story of the Exodus, which was the great defining event of history for the Jewish people.  But, for Paul, there is more than one kind of lesson to learn from this story.  On the one hand are God’s awesome deeds of deliverance on behalf of our ancestors.  There is the cloud that sheltered them and led them through the sea.  There is the miracle of the food that God gave them in the wilderness, and the water that sprang from the rock to supply their thirst.  These wonders, says Paul, should remind you of your own redemption from sin and death by the grace of Christ in Holy Baptism.  On the other hand, he goes on to say, the Exodus was also a trial of our ancestors’ faithfulness, and most of them were found guilty.  The question Paul presses on the Corinthians is, how will you use this history?  Will you let it instruct you on how to live in the freedom that your own baptism has given you?  Will you learn its lessons and apply them to the trials of your own present circumstances?

When people tell Jesus about a big, newsworthy current event, an atrocity of the kind that would dominate the airwaves for days, if not weeks, in our own world, it’s not clear what kind of response they’re looking for.  Whatever the case, Jesus cautions them not to draw the wrong conclusions.  He counters with another example of sensational headline-grabbing news, a disaster of what is often called today “crumbling infrastructure.”  It seems that, like today, people in ancient times tried to draw moral lessons from these kinds of events.  And Jesus isn’t arguing against moral lessons.  But, as still happens, the moral lessons that people drew were for other people. 

If you think about a recent atrocity like the Newtown massacre, or a disaster like the breaching of the levees in New Orleans, the public policy proposals and legal remedies and preventative measures that we put forward generally are directed toward somebody else.  But Jesus points us in a different direction.  When you hear about those kinds of calamities, he says, think about yourself.  Any one of us could fall victim to something like that, anytime.  Every one of us is implicated in the sufferings of the world, whether we feel like we deserve it or not.  We are all in the same boat, and that boat is as unsinkable as the Titanic.  So when you hear about some crime or disaster happening somewhere else, to some other people, the only really important question, the only morally responsible question, is “How must I change my life?”         

Which can feel pretty bleak, even for the 3^rd Sunday in Lent.  So I like what Luke does with the parable of the fig tree.  Elsewhere in gospels when we hear about a tree that doesn’t bear fruit, the jig is already up for that tree.  But in this version there’s that nice gardener, with his wheelbarrow of manure.  The overall lesson seems to be that if the world really operated according to a consistent moral law, we’d have been done for already.  But, thanks to that gardener, and God’s grace, there’s still hope.  

Now, a stay of execution is not the same thing as a pardon.  It’s been 35 years since the Toward Tomorrow Fair and the world is using more oil than ever.  Big, hard industrial technology has found fossil fuels we didn’t know we had, or could ever use.  So now we face a kind of challenge they weren’t thinking about in 1978.  Now we have to choose to leave oil in the ground, because now we know that if we burn it all up, the earth that we know and love will burn up with it.   It’s a huge test of our capacity to change, not just our technology, but our values.  But St. Paul reminds us that being tested is nothing new:  “No testing has overtaken you that is not common to everyone,” he writes.  But he adds, “God is faithful and he will not let you be tested beyond your strength, but with the testing he will also provide the way out so that you may be able to endure it.”

When our ancestors faced the test of ending racial segregation, or defeating Fascism, or gaining women’s suffrage, when they were being tested by slavery, or persecution, they must have wished that someone else would take that test for them.  Their challenges must have seemed every bit as daunting and unprecedented as the problems we face today.  Their solutions won’t work for our problems, but we can learn from their courage, and from their mistakes.  And there’s still hope.  God is still faithful.  But we have to take the test.  It’s our turn to look the world square in the face and to let it press us to the question, “How must I change my life?”