I love coming across news stories that open my mind to new ways of seeing something. This morning it was the quick image of a new commode for NASA. The caption underneath it identified the toilet seat and the storage container that would convert urine to potable water… then there was a comment from an astronaut: “Yep, today’s coffee is tomorrow’s coffee.” Eeew! At the same time, it is mind bending to think that technology is moving toward the stuff that I remember reading in science fiction novels in high school (the book Dune).
This week also brought stories about China landing a rover on Mars. This happened just shortly after we landed a rover on Mars and even flew a drone in the thin atmosphere of the planet. Researchers keep talking about encountering signs of frozen water that may at some point have supported life. How many of us grew up with stories imagining life on Mars and what it might mean? Then another story really piqued my curiosity, and this one was right here on earth. I was reading about researchers applying computer processing power and language learning software to listen to the communication of whales to try to decode their language. As researchers understand the whales’ language, the next step will be to try to communicate with them directly… it’s hard to imagine. But the comment that really caught my attention in the interview with the researchers was that they had all discussed the importance of listening to what the whales might have to say to them. They needed to agree that if they learned how to communicate with whales, then they would have to be willing to hear what these largest brained animals on earth might have to tell us, no matter how critical or unexpected. A willingness to hear the perspective from another species is a truly humbling notion. Imagine a 200-year-old bowhead whale being able to offer a perspective on how our world and our planet has changed and how they may perceive our role in those changes. What could we learn? Would we be willing to hear and try to grow as a result of the insights? Or would we simply double down on our own perspective and dismiss anything that was an unwelcome word, or a word that challenged our already defined perspectives?
The story of our faith often casts a vision of what might be, of how God's vision of the world might be very different from ours. I think of that simple line from the book of Revelation 21:1: “Then I saw a new heaven and a new earth” that echoes the last verses of the book of Isaiah. In each case, the vision is of a world that realigns itself with God's ways instead of the destructive and self-serving ways of the world. That poetry and those visions emerge out of times of weariness and oppression. At their heart, each of them pleaded with the faithful to be open to seeing with new eyes.
I have spoken often in the last year about the experience of living through this pandemic as placing us in a liminal time, a time that exists between the departure from the old normal but before our arrival into the next normal. In that space there is the challenge of naming what has not worked before, and of what we long for in the next space. There is an opportunity to listen for what new and surprising insights or wisdom might emerge. And there is a necessity in the attentiveness for patience to learn how that which is beyond ourselves will unfold and invite us into new possibilities.
For years there have been conversations in The Church about all that has been changing and how it seems that there is another reformation before us. Many in the church see a pattern of the church needing to re-imagine and re-form every 500 years. Whether we were ready for that or not, it seems that this global pandemic has awakened a host of questions of justice, equity, relevance, and vitality for the future of The Church and for our local congregation.
We regularly pray “thy kingdom come.” As we pray, we should be doing so with a longing that we could see our world as God sees it… to imagine that new heaven and new earth. But then again, would we really want to see the world that way if it meant that something would need to change in our lives, in our world, in how we embody the faith as a church?
My prayer is that together we might cultivate the curiosity to imagine beyond what we have always known. Maybe it is in the midst of summertime’s long days, or in some other liminal glimmer of different visions that we hear God's voice leading us forward into tomorrow. Our church and our nation are poised in anticipation of the possibility of reopening to a new or next normal.
As we draw close will we be willing to be bold in our imagining, hungry in our curiosity, and open to see beyond our known past toward tomorrow’s coffee or the insights of a whale?
We are called to look, listen, and discern together where God is calling us.
May God bless us abundantly on our common journey,
Pastor Eric