“Faith in the Future”

(James 4:13-15)

         One of the things most of you don’t know about me is that I am a big fan of Star Trek.  In recent years, Star Trek has become much more than just the original television series that was on in the late sixties, the one with Captain Kirk and Mr. Spock.  “Space, the final frontier.  These are voyages of the starship  Enterprise.  It’s five year mission: to explore strange new worlds, to seek out new life and new civilizations, to boldly go where no man has gone before.”  You gotta love it.  Well, since then there have been four additional Star Trek based T.V. series, and something like a dozen movies.

        In the midst of all these Star Trek stories, inspired by Star Trek’s creator, Gene Roddenberry, they have created an interesting narrative of the future of humanity.  Looking back with the eyes of the 23rd century, when the original Star Trek is set, we know that from 2026 to 2053 Earth was engulfed in World War III, marked by nuclear holocaust, biological and genetic attacks, and genocide.  At least 600 million people died in this war, and it caused global chaos and massive suffering for decades after.

But slowly, out of the carnage of World War III, came a new era of human history.  Horrified by the suffering and destruction of war, and inspired by their first contact with beings from elsewhere in the galaxy (the Vulcans, in 2053, if you are interested), humanity managed to achieve things that today, in the real world, we long for, but mostly think are impossible.  By the middle of the 22nd century, through a combination of technology and a commitment to universal human rights, cooperation, peace, and reason, humans finally achieve what we have always longed for – an end to poverty, disease, hunger and war – with hopelessness, despair and cruelty relegated to the past.

And that is why I love Star Trek.  It represents a breath-taking faith in the future, a stunning hopefulness about the future of humanity.  Less than 200 years from now, we finally get it right.

Well, sort of.  There is the little matter of the future of religion in the Star Trek story.  Or lack of religion I should say.  In the 23rd century, there is no religion on earth.  One of the key people in shaping the Star Trek narrative said that,

In Gene Roddenberry’s imagining of the future [...] religion is completely gone. Not a single human being on Earth believes in any of the nonsense that has plagued our civilization for thousands of years. This was an important part of Roddenberry’s mythology. He, himself, was a secular humanist and made it well-known to [Star Trek] writers…that religion and superstition and mystical thinking were not to be part of his universe. On Roddenberry’s future Earth, everyone is an atheist. And that world is the better for it.

Whoa…  While that sentiment may cause some folks to reject the Star Trek world altogether, I actually wonder if, in some ways, we don’t deserve it.

I think I learned a lot during my sabbatical, and not all of it was terribly uplifting.  One of the things I learned anew is just how easy it is to live life completely disconnected from “religion” or the church in the world today.  Even though I attended worship somewhere most Sundays I was away, it was still very easy to see the world from the perspective of people who are not connected to any organized religion or church, and see the world in totally secular ways.  It was very easy in other words to see God as completely irrelevant to much of modern life.  And you know, that’s probably a good thing for a pastor to experience, because it may be more like the world many of you live in than I normally think.

I got the impression that the religion-less Star Trek world Gene Roddenberry envisions is not of a completely different category than our world today, but that it is simply a difference of degrees.  Roddenberry carries it to the extreme over the next 200 years, but, wow, it is not hard to see how the world could go in that direction.  That is probably not one of the things that you envisioned your pastor learning during his sabbatical, but it may be one of the most valuable things I carry with me.

Obviously, the question becomes, then, what are we going to do about it?  Presuming we have an alternative vision of the future, a vision in which religion, and Christianity in particular, is not happily relegated to the past, is not seen as a scourge on humanity, something to be overcome, like poverty, disease, and war – supposing we have a vision of the future in which these things are overcome at least in part because of our faith, through our faith, not in spite of it – how are we going to make our alternative vision reality, rather than Gene Roddenberry’s?  This congregation has been around for 160 years.  160 years from now in Gene Roddenberry’s world this congregation won’t be here and the world will be better for it.  How can we, and Christians around the world, instead not only be here 160 years from now, but be instrumental in creating the better world Star Trek envisions?  What should faith look like in the future?

I believe that the answer is as ridiculously simple, and as frustratingly difficult, as this: we must trust God.  We must entrust the future to the God made known to us in Jesus Christ.  That’s why I chose this little passage from the book of James today.  It calls into question our presumptions about controlling the future on our own terms, with our own goals and priorities.  “Today or tomorrow we will do such and such,” we say.  But we do not even know what tomorrow will bring, says James.  Instead, we ought to say “If the Lord wishes, we will live and do this or that.”  That is a very clear, simple way, to express the profoundly important belief that the future is, not in our hands, but in the hands of God.

But, let’s be sure we are listening to the Bible hear, the real Bible, not the one we sort of create in our minds to make things easier for ourselves.  When James advises that we entrust the future to God, he is not saying that if we just sit back and relax, God will make everything alright.  James is saying that the way to entrust the future to God is to live, in the nitty-gritty grind of everyday life, following the way of Jesus.  Exactly because we are to entrust the future to God, we have to live each day in Jesus’ way.

James is the same book of the Bible, remember, that has these challenging words:

What good is it, my brothers and sisters, if you say you have faith but do not have works? Can faith save you? If a brother or sister is naked and lacks daily food, and one of you says to them, ‘Go in peace; keep warm and eat your fill’, and yet you do not supply their bodily needs, what is the good of that? So faith by itself, if it has no works, is dead.

        Entrusting the future to God is darn hard work.  It is the hard work of actually doing what Jesus calls us to do. “Supplying bodily needs” as James puts it, is a lot more complex today than it was in James’ day, but if we are not entrusting the future to God by living as God has called us to live, then the world Gene Roddenberry envisions, rather than the world we envision, is a lot more likely.

        I believe that in order to entrust the future to God, we are going to have to be much more intentional about our faith.  The nature of faith in the future is intentional faith.  Christianity as a whole, and our faith individually, is not going to survive on auto-pilot.  Our faith, not to mention those already shaped by the secular world in which we live, is not going to survive unless we intentionally seek to develop and grow in lives of following Jesus.

        You know, I passionately want a world very similar to the one envisioned by Gene Roddenberry.  I want a world in which humanity has come to work together to end poverty, disease, war, and hopelessness.  But I am just enough of a Jesus freak to think that that world is far more likely, if we entrust the future to God by intentionally growing our faith and doing God’s work, than if we trust in our own intentions and plans.

        If the Lord wishes, for the next 160 years, let’s work to create that future.