Waat'S TO BECOME OF US? John M, Buchanan
Isaiah 66:18-23, Hebrews 12:1-3, 12-14 Broad Street Presbyterian Church
September 18, 1977 Columbus, Ohio

Back in the summer of 1961, in the middle of Divinity School, I took a job
as a Production Worker with the Ford Motor Company at its large Stamping Plant in
Chicago Heights, Illinois. It was one of the most instructive and memorable experi-
ences I have ever had. In college I had studied Labor Law and Labor-Management
Relations, In Divinity School I had studied the psychological stress which is gener-
ated both at the management and labor levels of major industry, But none of the books
I had read, lectures heard or papers written was quite as instructive as a summer on
the "production line'’, The moncy, by the way, was very good, It enabled us to
continue another year of school and I will always be grateful to Ford for that. The
day shift began at seven: for eight hours, with time out for lunch and two coffee
breaks, I worked on a production line, operating a welding machine: which is to say
pushing a piece of metal between the electrodes, pressing a button, and then pushing
the piece of metal out of the machine. There was not even the remotest resemblance
between the particular piece and the automobile or truck of which it was destined to
become a part. In fact, it took an act of intellectual will to remember that we were
building automobiles, that there was, indeed, a final product, In slightly grander
language, it was easy to become so immersed in the tedium of the immediate task that
the final vision was lost, the purpose toward which we were working.

I was as fascinated with the behavior of my fellow workers as I was bored
by the work, There seemed to be a great deal of anger and hostility in the air
constantly, mostly directed toward "them'' which meant management - the company. On
occasion a worker would damage a part or a machine intentionally. I had read about
that sort of thing, but I was startled every time I saw it happen, The aggression
and hostility level was quite high, and studies confirm that assembly line workers
suffer from an abnormally high amount of stress-related ailments.

Now, one summer does not qualify me as an expert on the complexities of
labor-management relations,but part of the problem, I thought, was that workers
could not see what it was they were building. There was no vision of the final
product, the end toward which the whole process was moving,

We need a vision to survive. We need a goal toward which we are moving;
a grand sweeping scheme that gathers up our individual lives and gives them meaning
and purpose, We need, that is to say, a measure of hope. That has been the function
of religion - the provision of hope in the form of the final vision; the answer to
that eternal question, “What's to become of us?"

The Bible is full of hints. I shall return to both texts but for now
please recall the soaring promises of Isaiah:

"Por as the new heaven and new earth which I will make shall
remain before me,"says the Lord: "so shall your descendants and
your name remain. From new moon to new moon and from sabbath
to sabbath all flesh shall come to worship before me," says
the Lord,

For thousands of years the Jews lived under the vision of the "Day of the
Lord", the coming of the Messianic Age when all nations would bow before the God
of Avraham,

wi 2 x

Jesus kept before His disciples a vision of God's Kingdom coming on earth,
growing silently - like a mustard seed, proceeding like leavening in bread, a
Kingdom in which God would reign and His will be done on earth as in Heaven,

We live in a time that has laid to rest many of its grandest visions, From
the outset the American mentality has been the most hopeful, the most optimistic
about the prospects for humanity, But today it is a very difficult time for hope,
Camelot in Washington came and went, never, apparently, to return, We lost a war,
thousands of miles from home, against an elusive, determined enemy: and we lost
another war domestically against the equally elusive and determined forces of poverty,
The rich idealism and optimism which fired the souls of young people in the sixties
and sent them overseas in the Peace Corps, or into the Ghettos in VISTA or into the
streets in the Civil Rights movement has evaporated and once more we find ourselves
talking about apathy, cynicism, and college graduates whose noblest goal is a two
story house, two cars and a bank account, In two decades we have seen the slowing
of our world dominance and the emergence of an ugly anti-American attitude in the
emerging nations in Africa, South America and the Far East. We have experienced
disillusionment with science and technology once thought to be our saviors. We have
had to face the fact that our resources are not inexhaustable, that our environment
is fragile and already badly polluted, that our cities are becoming uninhabitable,
that our educational structures cannot remedy every problem, There is, that is to
say, a crisis of hope in our land; a monumental amount of hand-wringing: a lot of
plaintive wailing about "What is to become of us?" A favorite parlor game - perhaps
the favorite game - is "Ain't it awful?" Everybody plays it: the world is going to
hell in a handbasket and a truly competitive player will outdo everyone else in
holding up the most dramatic illustrations and expressing the most long-faced
skepticism,

“Without a vision the people perish" the Old Testament suggests. Without
hope, people behave in predictable ways, Anger, hostility, ageression form one of
the behavior patterns of hopeless people. I learned that at Ford, and we should
know the lesson well after persistent Ghetto violence, I was interested to read
the Time Magazine cover article several weeks ago on the "Underclass", that rela-
tively new segment of our population which is S80 low on the economic ladder that
even the welfare state loses track of its members, The numbers are growing in
large cities. Their major characteristic is the total absence of hope. There is no
dream, no vision, no possibility that tomorrow will be better than today. As a
result the underclass lives by an entirely different set of rules: there is no
loyalty to common values which provide the cement for our society such as hard work,
cleanliness, ambition, integrity, respect for life and property. The goal of
existence is simply survival.

An alternate form of hopeless behavior known to psychiatrists who work with
depressive patients is despair and cynicism and apathy, Recent studies with sur-
vivors of Nazi concentration camps sugsest that hope made the difference: that the
human spirit is indominatable so long as hope remains, But when the vision perishes,
so does the will to live. Ernest Gordon, Chaplain at Princeton University, in os
Through the Valicy of the Kwai describes the disarray and apathy in a Japanese POW
camp - until American bombers were sited one day, and hope was reborn, Men began
to live and move and organize and feel better, Hope made all the difference be-
tween the dogged determination to live and simple submission to death,

ia Be

At the entrance to hell in Dante's Divine Inferno there stands a sign
which reads, "Abandon hope, all ye who enter here," If you are looking for a
definition of hell may I suggest that there is none better than “trying to live
life without hope''?

We live in a time that has witnessed a crisis in the glowing hope of
American society and we are reaping the results, Beneath societal hopes, however,
Christian Hope has faired no better, Ernest Campbell, until recently Pastor of
New York's Riverside Church, writes: "A minister may now presume, no matter where
he preaches, that the congregation gathered before him is beset with a sense of
discouragement,..I am convinced that the main cause of discouragement, whether
personal or corporate, is the inability to believe in a future we can reach,"
“Locked in a Room with Open Doors, p.55)

Let's think for a minute about tvo of the hopes we can remember, At the
beginning of this century the church was inspired by the hope that the whole world
would be won to Jesus Christ within a generation. The hope, and the Missionary
Movement which accompanied it, was one of the most dynamic phenomena in the entire
course of Christian history, Thousands of young people answered the call and
entered the mission field, The Gospel was planted and took root in exotic lands
overseas and church life in America vas dominated by missionary activity: congrega-
tions - this one included - gave money, clothing, goods, prayed and provided the
fuel for the day of victory. But it didn't come. In fact, the rise of nationalism
was often accompanied by a resurgence: of native religion: missionaries were no
longer welcome, Christianity was identified with the hated colonial powers, No one
is talking about winning the world for Christ in this gencration,

At home, the early days of the Social Gospel movement were a result of a
hope that education, liberal legislation, fair labor practices and hard work would
produce the visible Kingdom of God in this continent, Walter Rauschenbush believed
it and up in Rochester wrote the definitive book which everybody read. So did
Washington Gladden, at First Congregational Church down the street. But that didn't
work either - at least in the forms and models conceived by its adherents.

The two most dramatic hopes of church in our time were not realized, ‘The
result is that ve have simply stopped talking about the future in the church, Things
have not worked out the way we planned; we have retreated, retrenched, drawn in our
flanks, concentrated on the immediacies of the present and forgotten how to use the
future tense, The German theologian Jurgen Moltmann, perhaps the most widely read
living Christian scholar, has identified the loss of hope as the theological crisis
of our generation: "Eschatology" (the doctrine of last things), he writes, "has been
reduced to an irrelevant appendix on our agenda," Moltmann has correctly seen that
if you don't belicve God is doing something in history and guiding the whole process
you don't really have a God at all. But we don't talk about it and we are profoundly
embarassed by those who do, Dr James McCord, President of Princeton Seminary, said
it in a speech this summer: "We must recover the future in terms of our vision ~ a
liberated, redeemed, reconciled humanity. We are so overwhelmed by the present we
don't preach about the future: our theology ends with the Cross and we miss the
triumph of Easter. So our people follow the wandering 'swami' and the eschatological
freak because they talk about the future."The fact is that ideologies which point to
the future with hope have taken the initiative away from the church, Che Guevvara
talked about a new society, and middle class Christian young peonle made him a hero,

- 4 =

The power of Marxism in the third world is precisely here: Christianity seems to
have given up on the future - but the resident Communist appears to believe that the
future is worth vorking for and dying for.

In the middle of the Sixth Gentury B,C, the Neo-Babylonian Period was
coming to a close, The Northern Kingdom of Israel had long ceased to exist and the
remnants of Judah were languishing in Babylonian captivity, For the Jews the time
was anything but hopeful,

Someone wrote them a letter - a letter to a group of miserable exiles ina
foreign land, Tt occupies the fortieth through the sixty-sixth chapters of the Book
of Isaiah, Zt holds up a grand and glorious vision of all nations - ail people -
worshipping Jahveh, the God of Israel..,"I am coming te gather all nations and tongues:
and they shall come and see my plory...", says the Lord. How do you suppose that vas
read by a Jewish prisoner in Babylon? His nation was gone: he - and ail his people ~
Were tottering on the very edge of extinction, How in the world co you make sense
of a vision like that? Sensible people were betting on the Persians or at Least
settling in and becoming comfortable Babylonians, But the hepe survived, And some-
how those people nurtured and loved it until they made their way back across the
desert and reneved their kingdom, And when disaster came again, in the farm of Reman
Legions and the Jevs were dispersed, the vision and the hope were remembered and
celebrated and nurtured and passed on in Synagogues around the Passover Table
throughout the vorild right up into the Twentieth Century, It doesn't take a vision-
ary to look at Israel today with a new theological awe,

t chose for a New Testament text several verses from the Book of Hebrews,
another letter, this one written to Jewish Christians in the First Century. The
earliest Christians expected the imminent return of Christ and the end of the world.
When it didn't happen they had to adjust and settle in and redefine the hope, The
problem at the time the text was vritten was twofold, First, it vas becoming
apparent that Christians were to be persecuted: and second, Jewish Christians were
tempted to return to the certainty and simplicity of their old religion. The writer
admonished: “stiffen your drooping arms and shaking knees, and keep your steps from
wavering.‘!' And somehow they did. Somehow the tiny Christian communities survived
the full onslausht of Roman persecution - because the hope did not die..that through
them God was doins something important in the life of the world.

We Christians have been accused at times of being "Poilyannas": of a
senseless optimism in the face of contrary reality, TI think it vas Woody Allen vho
quipped that when the lamb lies down with the Lion he's going to have a rough time
of it, But the Bible camnot be painted with that brush. Jesus sav the Kingdom of
God coming ~ in spite of His stumbling disciples, and reluctant countrymen, and the
brute power of Rome, He saw the Kingdom coming, slowly, surely, imperceptably in
the lives of men and women, And if Easter morning means anything to us it is that
the power of His Kingdom is invincible: the gates of hell wili not prevail.

What is the content of our hope? Personally, it is that God has made us
for more than death: that our lives, our accomplishments, loves, relationships will
be gathered up by God and woven into His acheme by a way that vill make us laugh
for joy when we sce it. Corporately, it is just this: someday people will live
in harmony with God and because of that in harmony with one another and their en-
vironment. Someday swords will be pounded into plows and the combined efforts of
humankind will be turned to healing instead of destroying. Someday the truth of

-~5-

Jesus Christ will be acknowledged universally and every knee will bow and every
tongue confess His Lordship. That ig the vision - the hope that will not die and
which commands our allegiance,

Ernest Campbell writes, “I think it is time for more of us to get up into a high
place to remind a staggering country and a reeling world that history has a future,
and that because that future is in the hands of God it is good." (op cit. p.58)

How do you know that for sure? You don't. You can't, You Look inside your-
self: you trust your own deepest longings and needs and identify your dearest hopes
and conclude, as I have, that they were planted in you by Gad, You look around with
eyes of faith anc sce it happen, like a mustard seed groving or yeast silently
leavening a whole toaf. You see the individual act of unselfish love, the cup of
water given in love and you thank Ged for His Kingdom: you watch the countless famin~
lies making it against all odds: you wonder at the power of love between a man and
woman te overcome hurt. With eyes of faith you see a society groping for the way to
be fair and honest and good, sometimes almost coming apart at the seams, but always
moving forward, You see God's glorious freedom break out ~ in Africa, or South
America or in a Black Ghetto, as men and women stand up and affirm their personhood
and you know that atl the missionary activity wasn't lost at all, The Kingdom is
coming! You experience and see and read the signs in strange places, In the concen-
tration camp vhore a good and kind chaplain was executed and the Christians assembled
secretly, not ashamed of their tears and deep need, and prayed the ancient words
of the 56th Psaln:

‘This I know, that God is fer me,,.
Tn God I trust vithout a fear.
Uhat can man do to me?"

Or you see the selfless dedication of the scientist to rid the vorld of cancer and
you know there is hope, Or you stand, as clergymen do regularly, by an open grave
and look into the faces of dear people carrying the heaviest burden Life offers -
and you see the hope in them - in their courage and faith,

Rolle Way writes: "We are called to do something new, to confront a
no-man's-land, to push into a forest where there are no vell-vorn paths and from
which no one has returned to guide us.,.To live into the future means to leap into
the unknown, and this requires a degree of courage for which there is no immediate
precedent and which few people realize." (The Courage to Create, p,2)

That is that our time demands of us - a courageous leap into the unknown,
it is a hard time for hope, But we know a secret. In Jesus Christ we have seen it,
In His church we have stumbled onte it on occasion, In followine Him we have
Witnessed it breaking into the world,

Jesus shall reign wherc'er the sun

Doth His successive journeys run;

His Kingdom stretch from shore to shore

Till moons shall wax and vane no more, Amen,

Father ~ sive us courane for the Living of these days, Give us the eyes
of faith to see Your Kingdom in our midst, Give us hearts big enough to welcome
it and join, In Jesus Christ our Lord, Amen,