Futures of Light and Futures of Darkness

Due to technical difficulties, we were unable to record the service. Below is the text of the sermon:

Today I will argue that in this season of Advent we are faced with two prophesied paths: futures of darkness and futures of light. And that it is our challenge and privilege to choose which one to believe, to act accordingly, and to begin a new world.

 

I make this argument in four parts. First, I argue that prophecy is relevant and, perhaps unexpectedly, all around us. Second, the prophecies around us threaten to paralyze us in anxiety or instill a false freedom of inaction, either because we are victims of forces beyond our control or because we get to sit and wait for God to simply come to our rescue. Third, in response, I propose that today’s readings—and some select German Jewish philosophers—offer an alternative understanding of prophecy that challenges us with a deeper sense of the weight of the world and a richer faith in our God-given, inherently, deeply human challenge to act and bring forth a new future. Fourth, I want to press on this challenge so that we can be emboldened in this time of sacred waiting to know prophetically that we must act, we can act, and we will prevail against futures of darkness. My argument today, what I will be trying to convince you of, is that it is our calling to defy the future the world gives us and play our part in bringing another to life. Let’s begin.

 

1. Prophecies of darkness

 

Prophecy is weird! Take a moment to think of how you define it. Most of us—mainline Baptist, modern, blue dot, college town—do not think of ourselves as living in an era of prophecy. It’s an odd concept. Outdated. For a different people for a different time. Or, at least, certainly for different people. Preppers; fundamentalists; etc. Because prophecy seems like an impossible, magical skill. It is a claim about the future that combines complete certainty about that future with total fog about its cause. It will happen! But we don’t know how. Not very scientific of you!

 

And we think we’re free from these mysterious forces. But in fact, prophecies of this sick world bind us constantly into futures rife with contradiction and fear. We just don’t recognize them as prophecies, so we don’t know how to react. Let me give you three familiar examples:

 

1. One prophecy of darkness is that economic growth comes inevitably, indefinitely, without violence. We feel like capitalist growth is natural so we put all our money in retirement accounts and hope our wealth grows new wealth automatically MEANWHILE capitalist growth in actuality must be violently protected—so advocates say we can’t risk unionization, nationalization, taxation, or other countries’ self-determination or else the economy will shrink and you will be personally harmed!

 

1. Another prophecy of darkness tells us we control the fate of the planet but compels us to let it burn! On the one hand climate change is inevitable and we must drastically reduce and pivot our energy use! MEANWHILE, despite this crisis we are told Artificial Intelligence is inevitable and you have to embrace the vast, immediate increases in energy use it requires! A supposedly inevitable race toward progress thrusts us into the nightmarish future but we are not supposed to connect these two things.

 

1. Finally, we turn internationally, where, if you remember threats and imagery from our President, Gaza “will” become a resort and we are given to believe constantly that the people will be slaughtered and they should get it over with already so we can start feeling bad // and alongside this, absolutely damning statements from writers like Omar el Akkad who laments that “one day everyone will have been against this.” Notice the construction of this prophetic sentence—one day (in the future) everyone “will have been” against the genocide. In the future, he critiques, nobody will have done it and nobody will have ever supported it! The prophecy of darkness here is the sense that extreme violence is so normalized that we have no recourse except despair and, eventually, denial.

 

I could go on. Trump says he’ll run in 2028. Many who just say “he can’t do that!” Will simply say “oh I guess he could…” when he does. Pathetic. Anyway, I hope that this clarifies that you are surrounded by prophecy constantly, and these futures that we consume make us inactive and unfit to respond. We must resist that impulse, and our alternative tradition—our futures of light—give us the power to resist, though here again you might need some convincing.

 

 

2. Recognition & Responsibility

 

Because a typical approach preached to meet these horrors of a fallen and falling world is to respond with blind faith. In this popular model, God will always make a way precisely because all of this is beyond our control and responsibility. Don’t worry about where wealth comes from—it’s manna from heaven! Don’t worry about climate—God wouldn’t abandon a planet that he created! Don’t worry about Gaza—it was foretold in our sacred book that the area must be conquered in order to bring about our salvation! Religion exists to make sense of the world; sometimes it backs us into a corner. We can’t act, but thankfully we don’t have to! There is no blood to wash off of our hands, so we have no need to wash. This is a great comfort.

 

It is also a lie; and it is one that I will both expose and embolden you to address.

 

We do not have to abandon prophecy in order to act in the world. In fact having visions of different pasts and different futures can move us to make a change by filling us fist with the appropriate horror and then with appropriate confidence.

 

First, the appropriate horror. Let’s turn briefly, break up my monologuing, to the image in your bulletin today. Meditate on this image while I read this reflection by the thinker Walter Benjamin, written in the early 20^th Century as he reflected on what it means to sit between the past and the future. He writes,

 

“A Klee painting names ‘Angelus Novus’ shows an angel looking as though he is about to move away from something he is fixedly contemplating. His eyes are staring, his mouth is open, his wings are spread. This is how one pictures the angel of history. His face is turned toward the past. Where we perceive a chain of events, he sees one single catastrophe which keeps piling wreckage upon wreckage and hurls it in front of his feet. The angel would like to stay, awaken the dead, and make whole what has been smashed. But a storm is blowing from Paradise; it has got caught in his wings with such violence that the angel can no longer close them. This storm irresistibly propels him into the future to which his back is turned, while the pile of debris before him grows skyward. This storm is what we call progress.”

Ok not so uplifting. Friends one way we can read this is to recognize that the inertia of prophesied futures is pulling us forward toward supposed progress but that this future pulls us forward like a powerful storm. The prophecies of darkness tell us to either only look forward into the abyss of the future and stand in awe of its power, or alternatively to close our eyes and feel powerlessness in response to that pull. Benjamin challenges us with the “angel of history” who, while being thrust violently forward in time, gazes backward to be made painfully aware of the heaping waves of destruction that feed the storm of inevitable historical progress and show it to be a lie. But of course, the “angel of history” only bears witness. The angel is not human and has no agency. The past itself is dead. A heap.

 

BUT! We are living! We can see and act. It is my admonition here that you should see that horror. Prophecies of darkness make the future seem like it comes out of nowhere! And out of nothing! Look at what you’ve done. Look at the world we have collectively made for ourselves and that some of us benefit from and many more suffer from day after day, wreckage upon wreckage.

 

Thankfully, this is just a first step. We combat prophecies of darkness first by realizing responsibility for the past; ours is a world that humans have made in our own image. The promise of our prophecies of light is that we can also make it new.

 

3. Prophecies of light

 

So from the horror…an alternative prophetic tradition—the future of light—invites us into the story. I encourage you to adopt this view as you interpret the world around you, appropriately informed first by that weight of the world from the last excerpt.

 

See, the ancients—the prophets, the psalmist, the blessed virgin—all saw prophecy differently. Not clearer to be sure, but certainly not as passive either. It remains an odd sense of time. As before, we know the starting point because we’re there; we know the end point because we’ve been told with profound, otherworldly, certainty; and we still don’t know the middle. But where the prophecies of darkness make the path seem automatic, our readings today defy that process. The future doesn’t just happen. You bring it about, often, admittedly, despite yourself. Our readings today proclaim our agency in defiance of the seemingly automatic chaos around us. Our examples know their present and know the future and find themselves in a middle space not of passive observation but of action.

 

Take our reading from Isaiah. We are told the future & we are told what we will do then. And this is a beautiful, wholly otherworldly future about how people will behave. God will “teach us his ways” and “judge between the nations”— in response the nations “will beat their swords into plowshares and spears into pruning hooks. Nation will not take up sword against nation, nor will they train for war anymore.” Things we will do. God will teach us and administer justice; we will listen and act justly.

And yet we hold the prophecy at arms length, now thousands of years after its first utterance, and in doing so we absolve ourselves of responsibility in the present to bring this future to fruition. If this is the prophesied future why are we so skeptical that we refuse to let it happen? We know that humble service in unity with all nations and the destruction of our weapons of war is the end goal. How irresponsible are we; how faithless are we that we act as if this is a lie. We know the formula. The sociologist WEB DuBois wrote that “the cause of war is preparation for war.” Stop preparing for war and watch as war stops inevitably coming. We are told the future and told how human actions create it.

 

Take our reading from the psalm: It highlights prophecy’s paradoxical inevitability and agency to guide it: The psalmist opens recalling God’s promise to lift up God’s people, but he then pulls back, lamenting line after line how God has actively turned away to cast them into the darkness and destruction of other nations’ violence. But God’s seeming change in the future did not come out of a broken promise or lack of control over the future! Early in the reading we get the “cause:” “if his sons forsake God’s law…violate God’s decrees…fail to keep God’s commands”…then God would “punish their sin with the rod & their iniquity with flogging.” The future was not changed. God was steadfast. But the paths were set in stone, as in Isaiah, as divine effect in response to human cause.

 

Finally take our reading from the Gospel: Cause and effect here appears not as a given historical path but as a miracle enacted through an unexpected choice. God would bring salvation to the world through an embodied human savior who, based on at least some rules of the world’s nature, would have to be born into that fallen world. But the Christ did not simply appear. He would come to us through the action of one of us. Of a human. In desperate and confusing and chaotic and violent times. And we are told by the Gospel writer that Mary, though curious about the middle point—the mechanics of the pregnancy itself—she would in no uncertain terms bear a child, that others would be call that child the Son of God, and that child would reign without end. We are told the future and told our actions create it.

 

Our ancestors in each story did not respond with “all will work out so we can let the world burn.” They did not respond with “a messiah will act so we don’t have to.” They say “we know the end point, and we know what to do to get there; and we have the knowledge of faith and hope that our actions in the moment will produce the future that they are destined to create.” Prophecy is weird. We know what to do. We just don’t know the whole story until the end. And that’s ok. Faith in the knowledge of the end point helps us to act—to do the small things that write the story as we are living.

 

4. What do we do now?

 

And so finally, what does this look like? What does it mean that the weight of prophetic responsibility and capability should embolden us? Well, if we were an altar-calling people I’d tell you to get your shoes back on right now. I’ll try to recalibrate my level of Baptist. I will leave you with two challenges and wrap up our time together with a quote from one of Benjamin’s intellectual descendants, Hannah Arendt.

 

First, in defiance of prophecies of darkness, remember the end point. Keep the prophecies of light at front of mind. Know that the kingdom, the beloved community, is the future. The futures of darkness are all around us. They exist to do you harm—to make you afraid, passive, or irresponsible. Be aware of these; remain awake. Make yourself aware of the reality of our situation. But don’t be overwhelmed by the false futures or the real weight of the past. You know the truth! Remember the end point and act accordingly.

Second, more practically, how do we act accordingly? Think right now about the thing that you should do to bring that ever-future beloved community into being. You know what’s right. If you sit in silence for too long it’s the thing that grabs hold of you and condemns the way we live right now. Advent, like Lent, is a time of silence in preparation for a time of action. Our hands are drenched in the blood of what we call civilization. Prophecies of darkness tell us that the stain is insoluble or that we can ignore or even embrace the stain. Act. Act because you believe in the reality of the prophecies of light. Act because you know redemption is coming and you are bringing it into being by doing the right, potentially radical, potentially seemingly irrational or overwhelming or impossible thing. And I can’t speak to what that thing is for you. Give money; give time; give labor; give skills; give it all away. I don’t know. But do it—with full awareness of the depravity of our world—because you know the kingdom of God is within you and among you. Defy the darkness; find good trouble to make; and make all things new one small thing at a time.

 

Third, we’ll wrap up here. Please bear with me in this extended reading from Hannah Arendt’s The Human Condition, which should propel you forward as we leave this place in the spirit of Advent. She writes…

 

“If left to themselves, human affairs can only follow the law of mortality, which is the most certain and the only reliable law of a life spent between birth and death…The life span of man running toward death would inevitably carry everything human to ruin and destruction if it were not for the faculty of interrupting it and beginning something new … Action, seen from the viewpoint of the automatic processes which seem to determine the course of the world, looks like a miracle. // The miracle that saves the world…from its normal, ‘natural’ ruin is ultimately the fact of natality (that is, of birth, rather than the fact of our mortality and the inevitability of death)…Only the full experience of this capacity [of birth as a creative being] can bestow upon human affairs faith and hope…It is this faith in and hope for the world that found perhaps its most glorious and most succinct expression in the few words with which the Gospels announced their ‘glad tidings’: ‘A child has been born unto us.’”