Call to Worship
[This
call to worship was read by a member of the youth group.]
Good
morning. My name is Reverend Thom
Belote.
Today
I was going to preach about the future.
So I built a time machine to see what the future would hold. I made a mistake and crossed the wires by
accident, and sent myself twenty years into the past.
This
is me in 1992, twenty years ago, a youth saying the opening words at a UU
church.
Twenty
years ago the United States was withdrawing troops from Iraq following a war,
just like today.
Twenty
years ago the Rodney King trial showed us that racism and the criminal justice
system were serious issues in our country, just like today.
Twenty
years ago the Rolling Stones went on tour, even though they seemed to be
getting a little old for touring. They
are touring North America right now.
Twenty
years ago there were one hundred and fifty thousand Unitarian Universalists in
the United States, the same number there are today.
But
some things have changed in the last twenty years.
Today
twelve states recognize gay marriage.
None did twenty years ago.
Today
there is greater diversity in politics, business, and education.
Today
smartphones, Facebook, Skype, and Twitter change the way we communicate.
Today
our church is more than twice as large as it was in 1992 and worship is held here
instead of in the Barn Chapel.
While
you think about what the next twenty years will hold, while we worship
together, I’m going to see whether time travel is reversible.
Sermon
My
thanks to Jim C. for purchasing the right to assign me a sermon topic at last
November’s Auction. Here is what Jim requested
from me in the sermon. He wrote, “I've
been thinking about the sermon I purchased at the auction and I have an idea
for your consideration: ‘Welcome to the Year 2038.’ I'd like you to consider what life will be
like 25 years from now. What will life
in the U.S. look like? Will current
trends of income inequality plunge us into a land of nobles and serfs, or will
we have overcome our greed-based economic system? What will the religious and racial makeup of
our society look like? Will SMUUCh be a
mega-church, the rest of the world finally realizing that loving support of our
individual paths is the way to true spiritual growth and fulfillment? Will there be air to breathe, or will we be
purchasing it in portable tanks in order to survive? Think you might get out your crystal ball and
have some fun with this?”
A
funny thing happened right around the time that I received Jim’s sermon
idea. Right around that time I picked up
a copy of a book by Nate Silver entitled The
Signal and the Noise: Why So Many Predictions Fail – But Some Don’t. Nate Silver began his career as a wayward
mathematician, spending his nights earning a living playing on-line Poker and
his days mostly failing to devise a better mathematical model for predicting
the performance of baseball players. In
2008 Nate Silver started a blog using math to predict the outcomes of
elections. He was wildly successful. In the 2008 presidential election, he called
49 out of 50 states correctly. He missed
Indiana. He went back to the drawing
board, improved his model, and went a perfect fifty for fifty with the 2012
presidential election. In my circle of
friends a saying emerged, “Keep calm and trust Nate Silver.”
Silver’s
book looks at a number of fields that are in the business of prediction,
everything from meteorology to seismology, from sports betting to investing in
the stock market. One of the main
take-aways from Silver’s book is that for the most part human beings are abysmally
bad at making predictions. Sorry,
Jim. I have a favorite example of
prediction folly. Starting before the
year 2000 the New York Times paid a so-called football expert to predict the
exact final score of every NFL game. In
the year 2000, a journalist began tracking these predictions. That year the author went a perfect zero for
256 with his predictions. The next
season the column returned and he went zero for 256 a second year in a
row. The third year he still had a job
and in the middle of that season he finally made one correct prediction. For a period of several years Nate Silver
tracked the political predictions of a panel of talking heads on The McLaughlin Group, a political talk
show. He found that they were all very
bad at making predictions. Any of them
could have just flipped a coin and not done any worse. So, I hope that you are at least entertained
this morning by my misguided predictions.
I certainly won’t be giving you hot stock picks or telling you to lay
your money on the Spurs in the NBA playoffs.
Turn
on the news, open the paper, or read a book about current events and you may
find yourself convinced that the world is doomed and that humanity is utterly
hopeless. Or do the same and you may
find your spirits buoyantly lifted as you regain your faith in the progress of
humankind. I wonder if this happens to
you. You hear about a shocking act of senseless,
wasteful violence and you despair for the human condition. You learn that marriage equality wins in Delaware
and Minnesota and your faith in humanity is restored. Then a ridiculous law is passed in Topeka or
Jefferson City and you swear the world is ending. But then great piece of legislation is passed
and you allow hope to creep back in. You
learn some catastrophic information about global poverty or global climate
change but then you learn about a groundbreaking development in medicine or
clean energy. Which way do the signs
point? Towards a world going to hell in
a hand basket? Towards a nobler world
than we have known today? Or do the
signs point to the status quo, nothing new under the sun, same as it ever was?
Historically
speaking, Unitarian Universalists have tended to embrace a more positive view
of the future. Writing in 1886,
Unitarian James Freeman Clarke wrote his answer to what Unitarians
believe. He said Unitarians affirm “the fatherhood of God, the brotherhood of
man, the leadership of Jesus, salvation by character, and the continuity of
human development in all worlds, or, the progress of mankind onward and upward
forever.” Theodore Parker claimed that
the moral arc of the universe is long, but it bends towards justice. Search our hymnal and you will find an entire
section of hymns under the theme “In Time to Come.” The time to come imagined by these hymns sounds
pretty good to me. “These things shall
be: a loftier race than e’er the world hath known shall rise, with flame of
freedom in their souls, and the light of science in their eyes.” “Hail the glorious golden city, pictured by
the seers of old: everlasting light shines o’er it, wondrous things of it are
told. Wise and righteous men and women
dwell within its gleaming wall; wrong is banished from its borders, justice
reigns supreme o’er all.”
This bright optimism is one of the distinguishing
characteristics of liberal religion. It
is one of the many things that differentiates us from the brand of religion
that declares the end is nigh, that the rapture is coming. We have hymns called “Now is the Time
Approaching” and “Soon the Day Will Arrive,” but the future they imagine is
cheerful, not doom and gloom. It occurs
to me to ask, are we as a religious movement still as sunny in our disposition
as our forebears from decades and centuries ago? Does their faith in “onward and upward
forever” strike us as naïve, or does their hope still inform our own?
In my own life, I am a person who tends towards
optimism. But what about you? Where do your predictions lie when it comes
to the future of humanity? Are you a
person who imagines things getting better – do you imagine human well-being
improving on our planet and human suffering diminishing? Are you a pessimist – do you see things
growing worse for more of the world’s people? Do you predict an increase of human
suffering? Or, are you one of those
people who believe that past is prologue?
Do you think that the amount of misery and happiness in the world will
stay more or less level in the future?
And, when it comes to the future of faith, do you see liberal religion
as a vanguard, actively moving the world forward, or as a rearguard, doing what
we can to hinder the inevitable rising tide of injustice, dysfunction, and
destruction?
In his chapter on predicting the weather, Nate
Silver makes an interesting observation.
He says that despite the jokes we make at the expense of meteorologists,
computer models that predict weather a few days in advance are actually among
the best predictions we have. However,
these models take into account so many variables, so much chaos, that more than
a handful of days out the predictions become very inaccurate. Silver points out that the best predictor of
weather more than a week away is actually the long-term historical average for
that day. So, if we can’t predict the
weather more than two weeks in advance, except to say that the best we can say
is that it will be an average of what came before, what chance do any of us
have of predicting the future twenty five years from now?
As
I was researching for this sermon I ran across a number of predictions that
seemed hopeful and positive, as well as a number that were much less so. Nate Silver recently updated his projections
about marriage equality in the United States. Four years ago he predicted that all 50 states would support marriage equality by 2024. I also encountered several
studies about war. These authors claim
that there is less war today than at almost any time in recorded human history,
that warfare has been steadily declining for the last six decades, and that a
world without war is a likely possibility within our lifetime. These predictions were so fascinating that I
decided to make them the subject of my sermon next week for Memorial Day weekend.
That’s
the good news. The bad news, as Jim
pointed out in his questions, is that recent trends in the environment and in
economic inequality show us heading in the wrong direction, trending towards
increased suffering for more of the world’s people.
In
environmental terms, here is what I see in the next 25 years. I see an increase in the frequency and
severity of extreme weather and I predict this will have a harmful effect on
different populations across the globe.
I see a rise in movements of environmental counterculturalism, of
backyard gardens and urban farming. And
I see some of the more cataclysmic possibilities being mitigated in part by new
technologies and human adaptability. We
are very flexible creatures and we’re going to have to be. Many future crises could be lessened or even
averted if we saw immediate major behavioral changes among the populations in
developed, developing, and third world countries. Unfortunately, it is really hard to change
human behaviors.
As
far as economic inequality, the widening gap between rich and poor, I predict
that if this trend is to be slowed down or even reversed, it won’t happen
because of a sudden spiritual and ethical awakening of those who hold and
control gross amounts of wealth. If it
is to happen, it will happen through a sustained and serious revolution on the
part of the poor, lower class, and the declining middle class. It will take a movement exponentially larger
than occupy Wall Street. It will require
organized resistance and organized non-compliance. What if the victims of predatory home loans
refused to move out of their homes? What
if students refused to pay back their loans?
For such a revolution to succeed public perception would have to change;
the media must no longer serve the interests of the corporate state. And, for such a revolution to succeed, the
agents that serve corporate interests would have to decide to side with the
people. I do not see massive
restructuring of the economic systems of our country happening except through
revolutionary dissent. [Note: the shape
of these remarks more than likely has to do with the fact that I’ve been
reading a book about the rise of socialism in Russia during the first half of
the 20th century. To quote Leo Tolstoy, “It
is not necessary to kill Tsars Nicholas and Alexander… but only to leave off
supporting the social condition of which they are the product.”]
But
Jim also asked about the changing face of religion in America and about my
predictions about America’s religious future.
Probably the biggest religious story of the last decade has been the
decline of religious participation in America.
Most historic denominations are shrinking. Presbyterianism and Congregationalism have
each shrunk by 25% over the past decade.
The Episcopalian Church and the Lutheran Church have each shrunk by
nearly 20%. Membership in the United
Methodist Church has declined by 7%.
Even the Southern Baptists are shrinking. Meanwhile, Unitarian Universalism has stayed
pretty much exactly the same size. Only
a handful of religious traditions are growing.
Roman Catholicism is growing slightly.
Pentecostal denominations, Mormons, and Jehovah’s Witnesses are also
growing.
Some
might predict that this trend will continue and that the decline of the
mainline will continue. Evangelical and
mega-churches may already be showing similar signs of decline. Some might see the trends and predict that in
the coming decades American religion will move in the direction of religion in
Europe, will be more and more tiny and mostly ignored.
My
prediction is that the decline in American religion that we’ve seen is not a
sign of what is to come. Rather, I see
religion continuing to play a major role in the American landscape although
some religious movements are sure to thrive while others decline. Religion will still be a big thing in 25
years and the reasons for this are several-fold. For one thing, the contemporary American
landscape is designed to promote private space and commercial space and to
minimize community space and civic space.
Human beings, however even us individualistic American loners, long for
connection and community. We want to
escape isolation and loneliness and we can’t do that in our homes and we can’t
do that at strip malls. Churches,
synagogues, mosques, temples, gurdwaras, and Zen centers are leading institutions
for providing civic space focused on questions of longing and meaning. They are also significant providers of social
services in a nation that is radically underinvested in the services it
provides to its citizens. There is a
need, but there is also a need for congregations to understand what that need
is all about.
So,
what of Unitarian Universalism? Jim asks
will we become a mega-church when our community realizes that we offer a path
towards personal fulfillment and true spiritual growth? Unitarian Universalism is doing better than
the Presbyterians, Congregationalists, Episcopalians, and even the
Methodists. However, there are pretty
much just as many UUs in the United States today as there were a decade ago. In fact, there are pretty much as many UUs in
the United States today as there were 50 years ago. Unitarian Universalism, on the whole, has
been frozen in place for the last half century, a fact that has proven vexing,
frustrating, and upsetting to the national leaders of our faith.
Our
church, at least for the past decade and a little more, has been one of the
congregations that has bucked this inertia.
As far as I can tell there are three UU congregations in our district
that have exhibited significant growth within the past decade. Three congregations out of more than fifty. One of those congregations, in suburban
Minneapolis, the fastest growing, has grown from around 400 members to around 800. Another, the UU church in Des Moines, Iowa,
has grown from around 300 to more than 450.
And, in the past decade or so, we’ve grown from a little under 200
members to a little over 300. We’re the
only three.
About
six years ago I participated in a UU growth consultation held in
Louisville. I was one of twelve
ministers of growing churches from all around the country selected to be a part
of the gathering. (Then afterwards I
edited a book on what we had learned.) I
remember a couple of things vividly. One
thing was that we were different in all sorts of ways. Some of the congregations were more humanist,
others more theist. Some had an organ;
others had a rock band. Some were social
justice leaders in their community, really out there on the front lines. Others emphasized community and spiritual
growth more than social justice.
What
they all had in common, what we all had in common, was that we resisted seeing
growth as a technical problem to fix. As
Rev. Christine Robinson of Albuquerque writes, “My congregation in Albuquerque has doubled in size in
the past 25 years, outperforming the Methodists (30% decline), the UUA in
general (flat), and the population of the city (up 50%) And could I tell
you, even in retrospect, how my budgets each year contributed to that growth?
I cannot. The best I can do is make some educated guesses.
Bringing on a second minister, for instance, was clearly a part of our
growth, although it had to be not only the right line item but the right
minister to work. Funding a church band
was probably helpful. On the other hand, our numbers of children have
gone up and down without regard to the money we have poured into our RE
program. All my prospective guesses about what might bring those elusive
guests, growth and vitality, into our church have been just that.
Guesses, Hopes, Optimistic plans…”
Rather,
when the twelve of us gathered we talked mostly about attitudes that growing UU
congregations need to embrace. Those
attitudes, among others, include the belief that the church is offering something
important and promoting the type of transformation needed in society, an
attitude of radical hospitality and welcome, an embrace of change and
innovation, and a sense of pervading love.
[These themes are echoed in the book of essays I edited following the
growth gathering.]
Twenty
five years from now may seem like a long time, but I happen to believe that the
spiritual issues with which we wrestle are perennial and universal. Transformation and welcome and change and
love will be needed in the future as much as they are needed today. Amen.

