“Time and Our Place in It” Click here to watch the video

January 15, 2016       Community Christian Church    Roger Ray, pastor

Reinhold Niebuhr:   Nothing worth doing is completed in our lifetime; therefore, we are saved by hope.

Nothing true or beautiful or good makes complete sense in any immediate context of history; therefore, we are saved by faith.

Nothing we do, however virtuous, can be accomplished alone; therefore, we are saved by love.

No virtuous act is quite as virtuous from the standpoint of our friend or foe as from our own; therefore, we are saved by the final form of love which is forgiveness.

Though I love the escapism of a good science fiction movie, the genre is never on more shaky ground than when it suggests that there is some way to travel faster than the speed of light, whether that’s through a warp drive, hyperspace, or the really dumb things that some movies use like going through a black hole…. A body with such great mass that even light cannot escape its gravitational pull which, if approached would reduce a spaceship with several hundred crew members to a small dense object smaller than the point of a pin.

Time doesn’t really exist. Time is just what we perceive because things move. If everything, every molecule and atom suddenly stopped moving, we would say that time had stopped. Though fiction writers from H. G. Wells to modern comic books have talked about going back in time, there is no such thing. If you could make every atom, every molecule and planet move simultaneously backward it could seem like time was going backwards but, alas, even then, the concept is meaningless.

When physicists like Einstein and Hawking speak of variances in time or the possibility of time travel, they are talking bout going into the future but still, that’s not what you think of in movies.

The faster a thing moves, the slower the atoms in that thing move, so if you approach the speed of light, it is as if time has slowed to a near stop. If we could shoot a rocket at light speed around the earth, when it landed, the people on earth would have aged 10 years and the person on the space ship would have only aged less than a second.

Of course, they would also be dead because as speed increases, mass increases. At 90% the speed of light your weight would double, but after the 90% mark, mass increases much faster and you would weigh several tons long before you reached light speed. You could stop aging but your weight would kill you instantly so it still isn’t a good plan.

So, while time travel is hypothetically possible going into the future, it isn’t a very pretty sight.  We are prisoners of time. We cannot go back and we cannot meaningfully go forward any faster than one day at a time. We are mortals given a few years of productive adult life. Some get more than others but none of us get very many.  

That’s what caught my attention when I read Reinhold Niebuhr’s very matter-of-fact assertion that:  Nothing worth doing is completed in our lifetime; therefore, we are saved by hope.

We can all dispute the absolute nature of that claim… especially those of us who believe that we have successfully raised an amazing child into adult life. I can think of a few fairly substantial projects that I have seen from inception to successful completion but if we let the saying stand, especially now when it seems that news, and mostly bad news, is coming at us so fast.

We may see the Affordable Care Act repealed in the next week and I will add my voice in protest to all those who are screaming with their hair on fire as we watch this happening. I just want to say, as bad as it is, this is not the last word.

It is like Garrison Keillor said about a cat trapped on top of a tall fence by a pack of mean dogs… the cat knows that he just has to be patient because all of the barking and jumping won’t be the last word.

Not many of us will live a hundred years but let me remind you what a hundred years can mean in human history. A hundred years ago the average life expectancy in America was 47 years. In 1917, more than 90% of our so-called “doctors” had no college education. There were no antibiotics but you could buy either heroin or morphine over the counter at the corner pharmacy.

Nothing worth doing is completed in our lifetime; therefore, we are saved by hope.

My parents were born at home, carried water from a well, used an outhouse, did their homework by lamplight and attended a one-room school. The world changes but not at a predictable pace and the changes are not always in the direction of progress.  A hundred years ago there were about 200 murders per year in the United States… simpler times and yet somehow much less violent.  Still, Pneumonia was the leading cause of death, followed by tuberculosis and diarrhea.

I believe that in the next hundred years we will have all renewable energy sources. I believe that we will have solved the social ills of homelessness and hunger. And I believe that we will have universal health care and that it will be much better than what we have now. I believe that our cars will drive themselves, cutting traffic fatalities by more than 90% and allowing the elderly to continue to live independently without waiting for their kids to take them somewhere.

Of course, most of what life will be like in those decades many years after I am gone are not even within the realm of our ability to predict or even to imagine but the big stuff I can imagine. I can imagine a healthier planet and a more just society. The trick is that there are a lot of ups and downs on the way to getting there and it won’t happen in my lifetime and, it doesn’t matter.

That’s the part that’s hard to communicate to anyone who doesn’t already see it. These steps towards progress need to happen even though they will never benefit me and might not benefit my daughter but I hope it will help her children. It is that lovely concept of planting trees whose shade you will not live to see.

This is the philosophical problem around all of the Affordable Health Care Act debate. How can you explain to Mitch McConnell and Paul Ryan that they should care about other people? This is the bottom line problem in most of our public ethics debates.

About 15 years ago, when I was about the only pastor in town who gladly officiated over same sex weddings, a group of conservatives in my former church hired a private detective to find my gay lover. They must have paid that guy, John Snow, more than $50,000 to follow me for 8 months, go through my garbage and interrogate former employees and ex-girlfriends before finally giving up and accepting that though I don’t appear to be a very successful heterosexual, I am clearly not gay.

What those people could not understand was why anyone would risk their career, their reputation, and in some instances, their safety, to advocate for an oppressed minority of which I was not a part. The ability to feel empathy, to show compassion, is what defines what it is to have a spiritual life.

I think that perspective can be learned but it isn’t easy and it doesn’t happen quickly. I am afraid that it can be unlearned too. I think that cynicism can paralyze a formerly generous heart. I think that people can take enough beatings in the public forum that they can retreat into self-interest and public indifference. It is up to us to try to keep that from happening either to ourselves or in our community.

Niebuhr also claimed that:  Nothing we do, however virtuous, can be accomplished alone. I’ve raised the money for and chaired 14 Habitat for Humanity projects. 14 families in Springfield now live in homes of their own, all now entirely paid for and owned by the occupants. I am proud of that but it wasn’t all my money that built them and it sure wasn’t my construction skills. Other than a little insulation work and painting, it was a whole community of compassionate people who built those houses.

I chaired a drive to build 200 houses for the rural poor in Nicaragua. A picture of a hillside in Matagalpa covered in those little houses sits at the foot of my bed and that effort continues to be my greatest source of pride in my ministry but I only paid for one of those houses. I mixed some mortar and carried some concrete blocks up a mountainside but I was just one among many who sacrificed and got those houses built.

Nothing we do, however virtuous, can be accomplished alone.

My single greatest complaint about liberals is that we have a hard time ever sticking together long enough to get anything done. As long as management can keep their workforce fighting with each other, there will never be a strong union. As long as the rich can keep poor whites fighting with poor blacks and poor Latinos, no one ever looks up to see who is really turning the crank on the organ grinder. And as long as progressive religious folk keep dissecting one another in petty ego battles then monstrous prejudices and greed that has ushered in the most dangerous government ever seen in this republic will continue to rule.

But they didn’t get my vote and they won’t get my surrender either and I hope that they won’t get yours. Together we can eventually change the world, as long as we can realize that it isn’t all about us.