Pastor's Letter

Dear Friends in Christ,

One of the great traditions of all ages is to think that one's age is the final age and that the world is coming to an end. The prophets often thought it, the many apocalypses in the New Testament expressed this conviction (in fact, scholars discuss how one of the great crises in the early church was "the delay of the Parousia," i.e. the end did not come as expected). Luther was sure that the end was imminent in his time. Remember the frenzy around the year 2000? People always seem to think that the end is near in their peculiar period of history.

I think they all may be correct. Life is always coming to endings, some of them pretty scary, and then starting again. Nothing is permanent, not the Roman Empire or the British Empire or even the hegemony of the world's greatest Super Power ever—us. Some are already predicting Asia and Southeast Asia (China and India) as the next locus of world empire.

Environmentally, we also may be facing such a watershed. It would not be the first time. There have been ice ages before, the shifting of the earth's tectonic plates, mass extinctions. And, also, intellectually and spiritually there have been great shifts that changed fundamentally the way people think and perceive the world. I think of Karl Jaspers' theory of the axial age.

As a pastor, I have come to suspect that we are riding on top of a huge tidal wave of change in world history—politically, environmentally, and spiritually. I see political and religious fundamentalism (so dominant right now) not as the wave of the future, but as a desperate, last ditch effort to stay in the old world, to refuse the new thing that is coming. I think such behavior is futile and dangerous. A lot of people are being hurt, even killed, by the ferocity of our fear of change. I think a better strategy is to ride the wave and to get creative. I would like us to ask ourselves: how can we embrace what is coming in ways that will enhance human life, make us better people, fulfill human promise?

Marcel Proust once wrote, "One must never be afraid of going too far, for truth lies always beyond." Thoreau ended his greatest book, WALDEN, with this same thought. The unknown future is scary and everyone seems to have decided to be scared. Fundamentalists are not the only ones gearing up for apocalypse; have you seen those movies, read those books (Pat is reading Cormac McCarthy's THE ROAD, "Children of Men" was recently in the movies) about secular versions of an apocalyptic future? New ones come out every day. Chicken Little is in the ascendant right now.

In the face of all this (I hope you have noticed), I have been preaching about being a Church of Hope. I believe, with Proust and Thoreau, that more truth lies beyond where we are now. I believe that counsels of despair and fear can only become terrible self-fulfilling prophecies, but that we can do better. I believe in what I call Homan Capacity (the traditional theological term is Imago Dei, the image of God in us). I believe that faith can save us. Hope can guide us. Love can fill us.

Christianity will not only survive all this, Christianity can lead us through all this, but only if we renew Christianity for our age as Luther did for his. I think it will require great courage and creativity from us. We will realize, for one thing, that the word "God" is too big a word for any human language and that our God is too small. We have reduced God to a supernatural deity tied to old mythologies that will no longer suffice. We will see the critics of religion as our best friends, calling us beyond all schemas that no longer work to new thoughts toward the fullness (which we will never reach) of God. It will all be Christian because we will hold onto our bedrock—Jesus of Nazareth as, not a concept of God, but as an encounter with God. In Jesus and his love, I experience the reality of God and this tests all my concepts, ideas, knowledge; this alone will lead me home. So when we go too far, beyond where humankind has ever dared to go before, what we will discover is that a Galilean carpenter got there long before us. God is always a "truth that lies beyond." We so not need to be afraid of that truth. We do need to fear our fear, we do need to fear those things that keep us locked in old thoughts and patterns—for the old work is ending. All we have to fear is fear itself (who said that?). Faith, hope, and love will cast out all fear and lead us safely to the Truth that lies beyond.

Yours in Christ,

--Pastor Bastien