FAITH FOR THE FUTURE Jehn M. Buchahan

Luke 9: 28-36 Broad Street Presbyterian Church
Numbers 13:1-3, 26-14:4 Columbus, OH

February 27, 1983 .

I was fortunate to be one of the people to spend an evening tast week
listening to an 87 year old physicist, architect, mathematician, philosopher
refiect on the human condition and the human prospect.

Buckminster Fuller was in town: inventor of the Geodesic Dome, brilliant
intellectual who sees more clearly and more deeply than most of us, a true
futurist, a man celebrated internationally for thinking and speaking about
Spaceship earth..

Near the end of a remarkable two-hour presentation, Fuller began to
talk about the future. We are on the brink of an era of unimiadineable progress,
he said. We are capable of a peacefully, fulfilling, human future. Me
have the tecnhology, Fuller said - we know how - now to feed, clothe, and
shelter humanity... The problem is that our technology, our steel, our resources,
our brain trusts and think tanks are tied up. Since World War Il, the inha-
bitants of spaceship earth have invested seven trillion dollars in the project
of perfecting the capability of killing all life in 30 minutes.

God, Fuller said, is trying very hard to make a success out of humanity.
Human beings, he said, are sitting for final exams....to determine whether
or not they were a good invention. To survive - we must decide to survive,
he said, and he concluded very poignantly, I thought, by rasping "I hope
you make it."

Sometimes the past seems altogether more inviting than the future.
Sometimes nostalgia seems more appropriate and feels more pleasant than
anticipation. Sometimes it seems that the best any of uS can do is cling
tightly to some reality out of the past - the nation's, our community's,
our social group's, or our own personal past, and force that piece of history
to retain its identity and power in an increasingly alien present and almost
forboding future.

[I sat in a meeting two weeks ago with several Presbyterians from Michigan,
Kentucky, and Ohio. We had been asked by cur Synod to discuss and make
recomendations on a relatively complex matter..,The discussion was lively:
it was the consensus of all that the prablem is a new one for us. It didn't
exist twenty years ago. Near the end of the meeting one of the participants
said something so interesting that I wrote it dawn. He said: "I live in
two worlds. and I'm tempted for the years I have left in this life - which
really aren't many - to stay in the old world and just not deal with the
complexity of the new world: abortion, nuclear weapons, muitinational corpor-
ations: marriage and family deteriorating, long-term unemployment in indus-
trial cities. I'm too old for any of it and I wish I couted just retreat
into my old life.”

He didn't mean it, of course, but we all laughed knowingly, particularly
me - hecause I had just chosen a text for this sunday and my friend sounded
for al} the world like a latter-day Israelite peering into the promised Tand,
wishing he could go back to the safety of Egyptian slavery.

have suggested - he translates “poor:" inte “poor in spirit". In any
event, it seems fair to conclude that Jesus did not reject wealthy seaple
Simply because they ware wealthy. Yet he clearly seemed to have a pre-~
ference for poverty, for poor pacple. He spent most of his life among
them. They, in his way of seeing things, are the blessed - the truly
happy ~ which ts what the Greek word means. The poor, throughout the
Bible are God's favorites. And determining the reason why is a scholarly
project of Tong duration.

“The poor people heard him gladly", the New Testament says, What
he said was good news for them. He was one of them. Some have suggested
that. Jesus preferred poverty because it was his own experience. His
home was poor: his parents and their friends were poor. Historians
point out that with the exception of the elite, all the peopie of the
world at the time of Christ, snent nearly all their time working on the
basic problems of survival: food, shelter, and clothing. And sa, while
he seemed comfortable enough with people of all stations, desus knew
personally, what it meant to be poor,

More to the point, scholars suggest that Jesus’ affection for the
poor, came from the attitudes, the world view, which always seems to
accrue to the not-poor the affluent. Walter Russell Bowie, commenting
on this passage years ago wrote: "He never condemned wealth as such,
but he saw how wealth might encase men in a hard shell of their seeming
sufficiency so that they were no tonger sensitive to the spiritual values
of life." (interpreter’s Bible, Voi. 8, p. 117)

self-sufficiency, the sense that one needs no-one, is near the heart
of the matter here. And nowhere is that subject more eloquently explored
than in those marvelous New Yorker cartoons: gently puncturing the self-
sufficient posturing of the affluent: the cigar chomping tycoon surveying
his vast manufacturing plant from his elegant office window, and saying
something like "you may not be able to serve God and marmion but it doesn't
hurt to have a little back for a rainy day."; the chairman cof the board,
presiding in front of a dismal sales chart and saying “Ali in favor of
a stiff upper jip say Aye.” It's not wealth that is evil: it is the
attitude toward Tife which it seems to foster. I was delighted te discover
a quotation from Martin Luther - 450 years old. He wrote: "Kich folk's
children seidem tucn out right. They are complacent, arrogant, and con-
ceited, and think they peed to learn nothing because they think they
have enough tu live on." (ibid.) Theology, chilosophy, sociclogy have
always understood that self-sufficiency can be the enemy of human retations.

The futurists, interestingly, are warning us that we have elevated
the idea of self-sufficiency and personal independence to the level of
religious truth and that it will do us in if we do not alter it. That
will not be easy because the self-sufficient, totally independent, lone
individual, needing no one, has always been a kind of ideal for us.

And the dream of a nation, totally independent, totally self-sufficient,
while true for us for a brief time, is not true now and never will be
true again.

~j-

There are major obstacles ahead of us. Sometimes they appear gigantic.
And the moment we, as individual citizens, conclude that compared to those
problems we're Jike grasshoppers, we have lost faith in the future, in fact,
just plain lost faith in any meaningful sense whatever,

There are obstacles ahead of this church. Sometimes they appear gigan+
tic. We have set some goals and we are privileged today to celebrate the
accomplishment of those goals. [t is a time for gratitude and as much pride
as seems decent and orderly. But, as we peer across the border, into the
future, there are some giants up ahead. There is a neighborhood, which
while looking and feeling a little better than it did, is stil] full of
sub-standard houses, and unemployed people, mostly black people and mostly
young. [It is stil] a city which proclaims us public policy that the care
of the homeless indigent is not a matter for public concern, but private
charity - which means quiet and discreet, which means out of sight. There
are more hungry people out there than ever, and if you read the same news-~
papers as I do you know that the hunger and unemployment aran't going to
change much in the near future. When the smoke clears from all our celebra-
ting this week, we will still be a downtown church, in a tie and place
which is not kind to downtown institutions.. When this day Ts over, we
will still be here, perched on this corner, surrounded DY vacant lots, marginal
business and lots of crime, with a century-old building and contrary roof
and inadequate heating system. But, thank God, people who were here before
many of us were born dectded that this church would stand here whatever
the future brought,

J. Harry Cotton, the pastor from 1928 until 1940, wrote a very enthusias~
tic letter to me in January of 1982. He was delighted that his old church,
just when inflation and interest were soaring and unemployment increasing:
just when prudence would seem to dictate hunkering down, cutting back, and
playing it close, decided to rebuild. It reminded him of 1937, he said,

"when our repairs had hardly started it became clear that the building would
extend up to the property lines. So I went to Mrs. Qrton, she lived in a
house where the present education building stands, and asked her to give me
for two dollars an option to but her property for $30,000. She agreed.

She really wanted the church te have that land. The option was about to

run out. The Board of Trustees was reluctant to buy, for we had already
obligated ourselves for almest $200,000 and the money for that had not been
raised. So when Jack Hislop saw what was happening, he was a member of

the Board, he asked, ‘Would you men mind if I picked up that option.’ Everyone
knew that he was one of the sharpest real estate men in the city and if

he wanted the Jand, then the church should buy it. and they did - and saved
the future life of the church!"

So today, as we dedicate these facilities, we are in a sequence, a
tradition of walking into the future with courage and hope. They were $206,000
in the hole, hadn't raised it yet, and had enough vision to purchase a piece of
property. And without that purchase, my quess is that this church would never
have survived inte the 1970's.

There are giants up ahead! Who among us hasn't felt like that personally?
Robert M. Hutchins, legendary Chancellor of the U. of C. used to advise
students: "Get ready for anything, because anything is what's going to
happen." (Martin Marty, By Way of Response, p. 338} The future: its

th

sufficient global power. ror a moment, we needed no one. the day is
long gone, but the mentality isn't. Naisbitt has written a good chapter
on the Worid Economy in Megatrends which is very informative, particularly
for those who see our economic future in terms of restoring the good

old days of swashbuckling independence. We are no longer number one

in terms of Tiving standards, for instance. We trail Sweden, Denmark,
West Germany, Switzerland. {(p. 57} The economics of the nations of

the world, ta the meantime, are intimately related and very dependent

on one another. For instance “Ford's world car, The Escort, is betng

put together in the United States, Hrilain, and Germany from parts made
in Spain, Italy, Japan, and Brazit;..... 93% of the baseball mitts used
in the great American pasttime are made in Japan. Bul they are made
from American cownfde, which is shipped to Brazil for tanning before

it goes ta Japan to be made inte mitts." (p. 67)

The point is that in tarms of the life of tha whote world, tne peace
of the world, self-sufficiency is a liability and dependence on one another
is an asset. Naisbitt suggests that the hest hope for world peace is
a thoroughly interdependent worid economy.

"Blessed are you poor, for yours is tha kingdom of God." The Gospel
of Jesus Christ is tilted in the direction of the poor. And the reason
is that the affluent seem to forget how ta be human. Thus the historic
fliytation with poverty as a moral good, in and of itself. St. Francis
of Assissi demonstrated the sheer, unadultered potential of humanity
apart from riches. And, of course, the monastic orders acupted vows
of poverty which, 7t was assumed, was a holy and good thing to do. The
Bible itself, is warmly and compassionately interested in poor people.
Sometimes if is righteously angry at injustice and the exploitatian of
the poor by the rich. There is no getting away from that in the Bibie.
The Old Testament prophets railed against the gap between rich and poor
and urged the whole nation to assume the burden for the care of one another.
Jesus echoad that and there is a sense in which the whole Guspel story
is told from the perspecstive of the poor, the weak, the social outcast.
Not to understand that about Christianity is to miss something fundamental
about the entire enterorise. To expect Christians not to care about
economic justice in the Third World, simply because Marxist revolutionaries
line up on the same side - is to exhibit an incredibie naivete. One
wishes the peonie at Reader's Digest would simply read the Bible and
then cali the faiks ever at "50 Minutes” ana tell them what it says.

It is goed news for the poor. It is not a prescription for social
reorganization. Economic justice is nat synonymous with the redistribu-
tion of wealth according to Marxist formula. Buc the Bible is concerned
about poor people, and it celebrates some characteristics of poor people
which wealthy people have a tendency to lose in the process of becoming
wealthy.

Simplicity, for instance: the ability to be happy, within onesei?,
instead of as a result of owning things: a sense of ona's humanness,
one's potential and gifts as well as one's limits: and, above all, a
sharpened sense of interdependence, a willingness to acknowledge and
celebrate the fact that people need people in order to be human ~ arid
happy: that to be wealthy and alone is to be very, very poor.