Imagine living in Europe in the year 999 of the common era and trying to predict the way we are living today. The scientific approach to truth has yet to be discovered. The industrial revolution hasn't happened. The earth is flat and clearly the center of the universe. What happens every day is not understood by universal laws of chemistry and physics but rather by the influence of magic, spirits and divine decree. Few can read or write. Almost everyone works with their hands and only occasionally with their brains.
This gives you a sense of the hubris on my part of feigning to formulate a vision for the new millenium that might endure to the year 2999. It also gives one appreciation for the wisdom and insight, thousands of years old, we inherit in our scriptures and philosophical texts. While our technology is vastly more complex, while our thinking much broader, and while our breadth of understanding and appreciation is much more global, the characteristics of human behavior and feeling have changed very little.
Will the year 2999 resemble the science fiction of Star Wars or Star Trek? Will we be using the Julian calendar at all or will we be measuring time in star dates? Will we have discovered and altered the gene for aging giving us eternal youth? Will we have gone beyond war and eliminated poverty, injustice and racism? Whether we are zooming around the galaxy at Warp 9 or are still struggling to recover from an apocalyptic world war, human nature is unlikely to have changed significantly.
There is a sense of hopelessness about human nature that dominates our age. Unlike one hundred years ago when many believed the advancement of science would solve all our problems, there is great pessimism today about our future. We face threats that will only get worse with the passage of time. The biodiversity of our planet is collapsing right now. With increasing human incursion into the last remaining wilderness areas in search of raw materials and agricultural land, species are becoming extinct at an alarming rate. The increase of carbon dioxide and other green house gases threaten to raise the average global temperature enough to melt the polar ice caps and make Albany an ocean resort flooding all of our coastal cities. Ozone holes open up each year letting in ultraviolet light further damaging plant and animal life as well as threatening human beings with cataracts and skin cancer.
Terrifying as these ecological ills are, they pale before the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction fueled by technological innovation. The menace of nuclear weapons can only grow as the nuclear club inevitably expands. As we continue to figure out more and more ways to kill and maim, such weapons of mass destruction cannot be completely contained. Using stolen germ, chemical and biological warfare techniques being developed right now, smaller and harder to find units of resistance, here and abroad, can accomplish more devastating global terrorism.
Paradoxically, at the same time that the threats appear so ominous, the opportunities for peace have never been more abundant. Whether you like globalization or not, the expansion of multinational business investment around the world discourages warfare as a solution to international tension that might potentially destroy that investment. If AT&T has invested 100 billion dollars in telephone equipment in China, it is far from their interest to bomb them. Bill Gates doesn't care who is running Russia, only that they buy his product. He wants happy customers who will want to continue a profitable business partnership into the indefinite future. International business is breaking down national borders creating one world.
Via the continually accelerating speed and capacity of communication mediums like the Internet, cinema, television and radio, we are moving quickly toward a pluralistic society. The free flow of information is making understanding between people of different languages, religions, traditions and cultures possible in ways we have never seen before. It is quite likely the coming millenium will be a time of working toward a global consensus of values. And don't think for a minute that Jewish and Christian belief will dominate that world. Asian, African, South and Central American values will have currency as well. This clash of values is already an underlying tension between the Western and Islamic nations.
Do we as religious people have anything to say about all this?
This century has seen an increasing marginalization of the religious voice in defining the values we will carry into the new millenium. In fact our national identity is rooted in "self evident truths" established by constitutional law, independent of specific religious root. If this were not true, we couldn't separate the church and state. The rise of the religious right dedicated to amending these truths to conform with a literalist interpretation of Christian values can be seen as a reaction against this attempt to secularize values.
The religious right is on to something. Increasingly, people are dissatisfied with purely secular values. People are returning to houses of worship because they are discovering that the state, by itself, cannot transmit the values that give meaning to life. The state exists to share power justly and sustain its population, not to give individuals meaning beyond communal survival and the prosperity of the state. People have always needed more meaning to thrive than the survival of their family, their tribe, their nation state, their race, or even their planet.
This evening I wish to share some images that call forth from us the values that find their support in our religious faith and belief. These are values that find their root in world scripture, sacred and philosophical text. These images symbolize the values we will need to bring into the twenty first, twenty second, and into the twenty ninth century and beyond.
The first image I wish to share with you is the image of a homeless, parentless child roaming the city streets wearing tattered clothes in search of food and shelter. This image stares at us through the television screen, the magazine cover, and the mailbox appeal for charity funds. The child could be a refugee in Thailand, a street urchin in Sao Paulo, Brazil, a famine victim in Ethiopia, an orphan in China, just about anyplace in the world today.
In these children's eyes and in their innocence, we witness most powerfully the imperative of the inherent worth and dignity of all people. In each of us there is the potential for great goodness. The place of our birth, our gender, our native tongue, our religious views, our sexual orientation, our occupation, our ability or disability, and any of our acquired unique characteristics cannot remove this worth and dignity from us. If we are to have any hope of co-creating a world without poverty, prejudice, racism and genocide, we must begin by affirming this non-negotiable value in the other as well as the self. Values derived from love of blood and soil will never be able to fully embrace the inherent goodness of those who appear to be different.
The second image I invite you to bring to mind is the image of the Vietnam Memorial in Washington DC. The memorial is composed of a black marble wall partially sunken in the ground with thousands of the names etched into its surface, the names of those who lost their lives serving their country. The memorial has tremendous power because it blends the individuals into a whole that communicates the human cost of war.
The lack of an uniting whole that brings individuals together is one of the major crises of our times. Individualism and the worship of the self are ever strengthening values of our times. The inherent worth and dignity of the individual must be paired with a recognition that there is more, much more than the individual. We participate in a much greater reality than we can ever imagine. The paradox of celebrating individual worth while fearing cosmic insignificance is the conundrum of our age.
A transcendence of the paradox is suggested by an awareness that is new to the twentieth century. It is the picture of the earth rising over the moon as viewed by the Apollo astronauts and the many pictures that are now taken routinely of our planet from space. The human mind needs more meaning than seeing life as an accident of recombinant amino acids. There is more going on here in this universe than the random combinations of protons, electrons and neutrons. Whether one sees the glory of life as the handiwork of Jehovah, Vishnu, or Zeus, the design of the eternal, immutable One, the unfolding of Truth, the Force, or the urge of evolution, existence is full to overflowing with meaning much larger than our traditions, our nations, our species, even our atomic makeup. Any attempt to capture this truth will always fall far short of its splendor.
The final image I offer this evening is the image broadcast on CNN of a man standing alone in front of a tank trying to stop it from entering Tianamen Square ten years ago. The most important role of religion in the centuries to come will be to speak truth to power. There is an unique role for us to be the moral voice countering the tyranny of government, the military, business, and increasingly medicine. The distribution and exercise of power, the production and distribution of wealth, and the access to health care is likely to be unjust. The voice calling for justice is ours. When we neglect this responsibility, we put the social good of the world at risk.
As we cross the threshold of a new millenium, we must recognize that none of us can face it alone. The entire world will not be saved by becoming Christian, Jewish, Muslim, Buddhist, Taoist or Unitarian Universalist. Each of us can serve well those who find meaning in our religious paths. And we are united in universal human values that spring from our faith. These universal values are the unifiers we have to offer as an alternative to narcissism and materialism, to the fascist obsession with nationalism and race.
Such interfaith cooperation brings us here together this evening to give thanks. The sure path to find inherent worth, meaning and justice is to begin with gratitude. Whether we read the Torah, pray to Jesus, or search within for truth and meaning, the love we find is not unique. That love knows no creeds, no racial identity, no national origin. When we can come together to share the love we find rather than judge the differences in the way we find it, we can become expressions of a greater wisdom to save this world.
It is my fervent hope and prayer that the love in which we are born, grow and find our meaning, will become, for all of us, the source of the vision we each take into the 21st Century.
So be it and amen.