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On Not Living in the Moment
Sermon by Cynthia A. Jarvis August 13, 2006, Presbyterian Church of Chestnut Hill Isaiah 38:16-20 Romans 8:18-25
“The human being is the only animal” contends Harvard College Professor of Psychology Daniel Gilbert, “that thinks about the future.” The only animal? Abbey goes outside first thing every morning and returns in expectation that she will receive a treat for her efforts, thereby exhibiting what would seem to be an imagination for something that is going to happen. Gilbert is quick to concede that nonhuman animals often act as though they have the capacity to think about the future. Nevertheless, he insists, “as bald men with cheap hairpieces always seem to forget, acting as though you have something and actually having it are not the same thing, and anyone who looks closely can tell the difference….[Therefore] until a chimp weeps at the thought of growing old alone, or smiles as it contemplates its summer vacation, or turns down a Fudgsicle because it already looks too fat in shorts,” Gilbert will persist in believing that human beings “think about the future in a way that no other animal can, does, or ever has, and [that] this simple, ubiquitous, ordinary act is a defining feature of our humanity.” What makes us think in this way, technically, is the gray matter that, about 70 million years ago, evolved into the frontal lobe of the human brain: the “critical piece of cerebral machinery that allows normal, modern human adults to project themselves into the future”, the true meaning, perhaps, of intelligent design! Therefore it must be the case that while you are listening to this sermon, no doubt you are also thinking about what you are going to do with the overgrown ivy in the backyard this afternoon, or planning a trip to Target for school supplies, or you are going through a check list of what you will need for the camping trip the family be taking this time next week. These things that “will be” are things we reasonably can control. But your mind also may be thinking about the plane routed through London that you will need to board in order to get to the mountains where you will be backpacking; or you are thinking about your so-called luxury apartment being turned into a condominium just when retirement investments are plummeting in response to rising gas prices; or you are thinking about your firstborn about to go off to college innocent, as far as you know (ha!), and ill-prepared to deal with the temptations of late-adolescence. These things that “will be” are things the same part of your brain anticipates with some degree of anxiety, because you know you cannot control the outcome. So whether you are thinking about your trip to Target or your boarding an airplane bound for London, that is to say in both your careful planning and your anxious anticipation, you are doing a distinctively human thing: you are thinking about the future. Sometimes when anxiety predominates, we wish we could shut down our overactive frontal lobe, turn the switch on our brains off in order to sleep, perchance to dream. Or when planning predominates, we wish we were more able to live and move and have our being as creatures fully alive to the moment at hand instead of always looking ahead. Yet we should be careful about the things for which we wish. Gilbert cites the case of a patient who had sustained extensive damage to his frontal lobe in an accident and now is serving “a life sentence in the prison of the moment, trapped forever in the perpetual now, a world without end, a time without later.” This, Gilbert reminds us, is where most brains are trapped, where our brains were trapped until “our ancestors began a great escape from the here and now…their getaway vehicle…the frontal lobe—the last part of our brain to evolve, the slowest to mature, and the first to deteriorate in old age.” That said, what concerns us this morning is how our human thinking about what “will be” is given content and direction, especially when our collective anxiety in the present tense would seem to preclude the best laid plans of mice and men, of women and nations. In fact what concerns us specifically is how Kate and Anna, when they are old enough, their brains mature enough, their frontal lobes developed enough to understand what later means, how will they think about the future? Which of all imaginable futures will occupy their minds and hearts and to what end? Or asking the same question theologically, what account will they give one day of the hope that is in them? The answer is obvious if on one hand, out of all imaginable futures, our human thinking about the future is directed by the market and the media…is defined by political ideologues or self-appointed spiritual gurus. With promises of more and better, with techniques offered to assure control and eclipse anxiety, with tangible assurances of salvation just over the rainbow for those privileged enough to be born here and not there, our thinking about the future is destined to devolve into an imagination for the shallow, the sentimental, the secure, the self-serving. We will be as those who live in great expectation of being rewarded for our efforts; but as regards the hope that is in us, our lives will be no more than an observable act. Anna and Kate, on the other hand, have been baptized into a living hope that, even when their frontal lobe latches onto the meaning of later, will defy merely human seeing and grasping and controlling. In a word, their hope is God and it is in this hope alone, writes Paul, that they and the whole human running race are saved. God is the future for whom they were made, about whom they may think and from whom nothing in the moment can separate them. What does he mean? “I reckon,” he writes in the first place, “that the sufferings of this present time are not worthy to be compared to the glory which shall be revealed in us.” I think he means in part that we are saved from the prison of the moment and the perpetual now--to which so many on this globe have been subjected--by a hope that forever contradicts the world ordered according to those in power who only act as though they hope. Put another way, “Faith, wherever it develops into hope, causes not rest but unrest, not patience but impatience [a present not worthy to be compared with the glory!]. It does not calm the unquiet heart, but is itself this unquiet heart,” ” says German theologian Jurgen Moltmann. “Those who hope in Christ can no longer put up with reality as it is, but begin to suffer under it, to contradict it. Peace with God means conflict with the world, for the goad of the promised future stabs inexorably into the flesh of every unfulfilled present.” That is why, in his provocative new book entitled Thy Kingdom Come, An Evangelical’s Lament, Randall Balmer orders fellow evangelicals to think about the future by juxtaposing the Sermon on the Mount…with the platform embraced by the Religious Right. Impatiently he asks, “How do we reconcile reckless consumerism and tax cuts for the affluent with Jesus’ warnings against storing up ‘treasures on earth, where moth and rust destroy, and where thieves break in and steal’? Is the denial of equal rights to anyone—women or Muslims or immigrants or gays—consistent with the example of the man who healed lepers and paralytics and who spent much of his time with the cultural outcasts of his day?…The Bible I read,” writes Balmer and therefore the future his frontal lobe thinks about because that future has come to him in Jesus Christ, “tells of freedom for captives and deliverance from oppression. It teaches that those who refuse to act with justice and neglect the plight of those less fortunate have some explaining to do.” The hope into which we have baptized these little girls, my friends, if it is hope in the living God, will become by the grace of the God who is their hope, “the goad of the promised future stabbing inexorably into the flesh of every unfulfilled present.” Such hope will bear witness to the truth that the sufferings of this present time will not be worthy of comparison to the glory which shall be revealed in us. The second word to speak about the hope in which we are saved is that this is not an individual hope but is the hope of the world. “For the creation waits with eager longing,” Paul writes in his next breath. And again, “For the creation was subjected to futility, not of its own will but by the will of the one who subjected it, in hope that the creation itself will be set free from its bondage to decay,” that is, set free from the prison of the moment. Baptized into this hope for the sake of creation, you and I, Kate and Anna surely are sent as signs of hope to those who have no hope, to those who are imprisoned by systems and the sins of the present moment, sent as those who hope on behalf of all creation. We “will not let [our] hands fall and simply wait in idleness for what God will finally do,” says Karl Barth. “On the contrary, strengthened and encouraged by the thought of what God will finally do, [we] will take up [our] ministry on this side of the frontier…” because even as “[we] hope for the ultimate and definitive, [we] also hope for the temporal and provisional. Just because [we] hope with joy for the dawn of the great light, [we] hope with provisional joy for the little lights, which may come and go, but which will not come and go in vain.” So in the second place, hope is public. “The Christian does not think or act as a private individual. It is only last of all that [we] hope for [ourselves]….In the service of God [we] hope in and with the community, and in and for the world.” And hope is action: we hope as we serve or as Barth says, “Hope takes place in the act of taking the next step!” Bound neither to optimism or pessimism but to an imagination for the incomparable thing God is doing in the world to make and keep human life human in the meantime, hope—like faith and love—never quits. Though the final word to speak about the hope into which we have baptized these two little girls is simply that their lives lived in this hope will not be something they must accomplish. Rather their thinking about the future in this way will be a gift of God given form and content, flesh and blood, in the face of Jesus Christ. The future has come to them in him. Though it is not yet, though their lives will be lived behind the veil of a world where creation still waits with eager longing for adoption, they may hope for what they do not see. And they may wait for it and work bravely for it with a great assurance because we are those who this day have promised to convince them that neither life nor death nor angels nor principalities nor powers nor things present nor things to come nor height nor depth nor any other creature will be able to separate them from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord. Thanks be to God. Amen. |