Community Christian Church of Springfield, MO
Roger Ray, pastor
Isaiah 40:1-11
Comfort, O comfort my people, says your God. 2Speak tenderly to Jerusalem, and cry to her that she has served her term, that her penalty is paid, that she has received from the Lord's hand double for all her sins.
3A voice cries out: "In the wilderness prepare the way of the Lord, make straight in the desert a highway for our God. 4Every valley shall be lifted up, and every mountain and hill be made low; the uneven ground shall become level, and the rough places a plain. 5Then the glory of theLord shall be revealed, and all people shall see it together, for the mouth of the Lord has spoken." 6A voice says, "Cry out!" And I said, "What shall I cry?" All people are grass, their constancy is like the flower of the field. 7The grass withers, the flower fades, when the breath of the Lord blows upon it; surely the people are grass. 8The grass withers, the flower fades; but the word of our God will stand forever.
9Get you up to a high mountain, O Zion, herald of good tidings; lift up your voice with strength, O Jerusalem, herald of good tidings, lift it up, do not fear; say to the cities of Judah, "Here is your God!" 10See, the Lord God comes with might, and his arm rules for him; his reward is with him, and his recompense before him. 11He will feed his flock like a shepherd; he will gather the lambs in his arms, and carry them in his bosom, and gently lead the mother sheep.
You can confidently say that there are two kinds of people in the world. There are those who divide the world into two types of people and there are those who do not. It is somewhat more complicated to divide all of the religions of the world into two groups but for conversation's sake, I'm going to go ahead and give it a try.
Every world religion attempts to make sense of our experience of the world through certain beliefs and rituals. It is never a clean break, but religions tend to view time in one of two ways.... Generally speaking, religions of the eastern world tend to think of time as being circular, moving through repeated patterns. And religions of the west tend to think of time as being linear, going from creation to some kind of end.
Belief in reincarnation is more prevalent in eastern religions and, I suppose that the belief that you get multiple shots at life takes some of the urgency out of it.... You don't have to be afraid of going to hell for eternity, sure, you might come back as a cockroach but if you can be a really good cockroach then you have a shot at coming back the next time as something more interesting, like a dolphin or a hawk.
Religions that have a linear view of time view life like shooting an arrow... whatever direction the arrow is pointed at the moment of death, that's where you are going to go forever and so we Jews, Christians and Muslims are much more concerned about the afterlife, guilt and sin than are the eastern faiths.
This is, of course, a generalization. There are aspects of linear eternity in eastern religions and there are aspects of a circular view of time in western religions. Judaism, Christianity and Islam all have more or less annual calendars. Jewish and Christian calendars are based on a lunar calendar that is modified by solar equinox and solar solstice and the Muslim calendar is only lunar which means that Muslim holidays move in their time of year because the lunar calendar only has 354 days in it.
The observances of Passover and Easter can move back and forth but they are always in the spring. The Muslim observance of Ramadan is always moving 10 and a quarter days backwards each year so that Ramadan will, over a period of years, move from spring, to winter, to fall and then summer. This year, Ramadan started on June 29, next year it will start on June 18th. So, every 30 years or so Ramadan, Passover and Easter end up at about the same time and I am sure someone in retail marketing is already trying to figure out how to make that work as an interfaith spring buying season. I think that will be in 2021 so, remember, you heard it here first.
So, which religious tradition is correct? Is time linear or is it circular? It is not hard to find evidence in nature to support either one. Trees lose their leaves in the fall and get more in the spring. Our flowers and farm fields appear to die every winter and them come back to life in the spring. The earth itself grows dark and cold and then comes back long days and hot weather. And we go to sleep, and wake up. We get sick and then we get better.
But we also see linear aspects to the world. A tree will lose its leaves and come back in the spring for several years but eventually they do all die. When we are young, our teeth fall out and we get a whole new set....but when those fall out, Mother Nature doesn't really have a solution for that.
We grow old and we die and though people may have strong personal beliefs about their conscience living on in another form, what we see is that they die and though they may live in a heavenly mansion on streets of gold, they won't be showing up at the house for Christmas dinner.
There are aspects of time that are circular and there are others that are linear. Sometimes that line is fairly short, like the life of a single individual person, or it can be fairly long, like the life span of a species such as the dinosaurs or jellyfish.
I apologize for taking so much time in this introductory walk through comparative religions and you can be forgiven if you forget that there are 354 days in a 12 month lunar calendar by the time you get to the parking lot.
The larger point for me, at this point in history, is that both types of religious descriptions of time can be deceptive. If you believe that life is always circling around in every repeating cycles, then you can be relatively indifferent about what you are doing in this life, assuming that you have a virtually infinite number of second chances....when reality may be better symbolized by how many complete sets of teeth you can reasonably expect to grow in a lifetime.
And a linear view of time that ends up in either heaven or hell for eternity can also have its very deceptive implications. People will deny themselves the very joy of living at all, either out of fear of eternal punishment or out of lust for eternal reward.... Neither of which is known to exist outside of religious imagination.
Soldiers of all religious stripes have marched into the jaws of death under the promise of an afterlife reward. Perhaps even more deceptively, our current marriage of evangelical Christianity to politics and the corporations that profit from coal and oil, are destroying the earth in a lust for current profits backed up with the absurd religious assurance that Jesus will come back and usher in the heavenly Kingdom before the earth becomes uninhabitable.
When the new Republican majority takes over the Senate next month, Oklahoma's senator, James Inhofe will be the chair of the Senate's environment committee. Inhofe has repeatedly rejected climate change science and in 2012, defended coal and oil interests by quoting from the Bible. He said:
"My point is, God's still up there. The arrogance of people to think that we, human beings, would be able to change what He is doing in the climate is to me outrageous."
What is outrageous to me is that our neighbors to the west keep re-electing this guy but given our voting record and considering the senators who represent our neighboring states, maybe we shouldn't be too surprised, but the implications of this kind of denial of science is serious.... And serious in a lethal sort of way.
My favorite TV show is HBO's "The Newsroom." In fact, if there is a fictional character that I wish that I could actually be, it would have to be the prophetically courageous, truth telling, Will McAvoy. But in a recent episode, the leading character got set back on his own rump while interviewing a fictitious EPA executive who, in a very deadpan manner, basically said that we have already put so much carbon into the air that there is nothing we can do to reverse the damage done to the earth.
He predicted that the child has already been born who will die from a cataclysmic collapse of the environment and that within the foreseeable future, that sea levels could rise by 80 feet. Now, thankfully, this is a fictional TV show and not a documentary but, the truth is that we have done enough damage to the environment that even if we never started our gasoline burning cars again and never burned another lump of coal in our power plants, over the next few generations, sea levels are going to rise by several feet and many of our favorite vacation spots and costal cities will only be accessible to people who are wearing scuba gear.
This will cause mass migrations, and economic woes of potentially cataclysmic proportions and there is nothing we can do to stop it now.... But that doesn't mean that there is no reason to start living smarter now.
The world's major religions, the world's most powerful governments, and the world's largest corporations have all been guilty of treating environmental scientists as if they were Chicken Little going around screaming hysterically that the sky is falling. Now, it is too late to keep the sky from falling because time really is linear and we've been going in the wrong direction for most of the last century.
Many of us were guilty of using our credit cards when we were young as if the future was always going to be so bright, that our income was always going to be much larger in the future and carelessness in the present was of no great consequence. And we all took some unnecessarily draconian hits as we fought our way out of those imprudent mistakes.
Our relationship with the environment is no different. We have foolishly believed that our careless stewardship of the earth would always be corrected by a new wave of technology and if not something salvific out of the scientists and inventors whose warnings we so casually ignore, then at least God would step in and wind the clock back for us.
The sobering message of progressive faith is that the messiah we have been waiting for is looking back at us in the mirror every morning. We are the one we have been waiting for.
The people who can change the world for the better, who can lessen the impact of past mistakes and set the course of time in the right direction have already been born.... In fact, they all decided to go to church this morning. Let's hope that their spirituality is substantive enough to make real change in the course of history.
