We’ve been pondering, in recent weeks, through our The Days Are Surely Coming worship series, who among us actually believes in God’s promises to bring about the completion of God’s promised, peaceful future. You may remember I mentioned a conversation with a skeptic who emphasized the “absence of any evidence in support of that being where we’re headed”!
I’ve thought a lot about that statement. I’ll admit there’s a lot of evidence that the grasping, violent, controlling parts of our human nature are alive and well, wreaking havoc in stories we’ve followed and many we haven’t, and amassing wealth and power in publicly celebrated ways and countless hidden ones. There are few signs that we’re learning, on the whole, a kinder, gentler way of living in love with our fellow human beings, working as much for their ability to receive their daily bread as for our own.
Still, taking a longer view, I see progress. There’s evidence that, as Martin Luther King, Jr. reminded us, “the arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice”—even if sometimes the movement along that arc is uneven. I don’t think even that glorious arc gets us all the way to the Biblical vision of the lion lying down with the lamb. It will take an inbreaking of God, something unforeseeable like the life and death and resurrection of Jesus—as I mentioned on Sunday was Jurgen Moltmann’s contention—that gets us from the life we’ve known to the “there” of God’s completed purposes.
But in the meantime, we have overall moved in the right direction along that arc during our collective lifetimes. I’m no historian, but let me introduce a few items of evidence to support that claim.
First, during many of our lifetimes, we’ve taken some important steps away from the Jim Crow, segregationist, lynching-laden country that had racism embedded in many of our institutions, laws, practices, and opportunities. The organizing and advocacy of countless individuals that brought the end of “separate but ‘equal’” through Brown v. Board of Education and the Voting Rights and Civil Rights Acts in the 1950s and 60s changed the landscape, in the right direction. Our collective horror at the murder of George Floyd in 2020 and the reckoning that followed took us further on that arc of acknowledging and counteracting the often implicit racism that has been as present in our culture as the air we breathe.
Not that the work of antiracism is complete. The current demonizing of Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion and the claims that it’s whites who now suffer from racial discrimination can be seen as a backlash—the lamentable but ultimately foreseeable “two steps back”—in the wake of the forward movement we’d like to have taken us further. But we collectively have seen things we can’t unsee that will sustain this work in the years and decades ahead.
Second, I’ll tell you a true fact that blew me away when I heard it. I learned it in a seminar on trauma several years ago. At the time I was serving Women at the Well, a church inside the Iowa women’s prison, where most of my parishioners were survivors of trauma in one form or another.
This seminar included a number of participants who had been trained in the field of psychology and therapy in the 1970s. When the subject of childhood trauma came up in one of the sessions, one of these professionals said, “We were taught that if a child spoke of any kind of domestic violence, we were not to go there. We should just leave that alone.” Others in the room nodded, agreeing in retrospect that the underlying assumption seemed to be that whatever happened in the home was nobody’s business outside the family.
Thankfully this has changed in the decades since. We are more aware of the incidence of abuse and we have better—though still imperfect—methods for responding to it, preventing it, and bringing healing in its wake. (Remember that Sunday last winter when we lamented—with the help of feathers dropped from the balcony– that a report of abuse is made about every ten seconds? Many of these aren’t corroborated, but many more instances of abuse are never reported. Lord, have mercy.)
As we know better, we do better. As we do better, our homes, our schools, and all our people become less subject to improper behavior (as victims or as perpetrators), and we move closer to being ready for that time of shalom that God is bringing.
For my third piece of evidence, let’s think for a minute about COP30. COP stands for the Conference of the Parties (technically, “of the Parties to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change). Tomorrow the 30th of these annual gatherings will wrap up in Belém, Brazil, a rather remote location in the Amazon region. Hosting this conference of some 50,000 attendees (I actually heard on a podcast that the number was a staggering 100,000!) was a stretch for this city, so they had to supplement their available hotel rooms with accommodations on cruise ships anchored in the harbor.
Think of that: Tens of thousands of people from nearly 200 countries on this planet gathered for the 30th iteration of a ten-day conference where leaders discuss how to accelerate climate action around the world. While I realize COP’s work hasn’t always been successful, and the hoped-for limit on our rising global temperature has not been achieved (and of course this year the U.S. did not send a delegation) (sigh), something noteworthy is happening when nations and leaders meet up, again and again, to tackle this serious, important work.
Do you see MLK’s arc in that story, bending toward sustained, concerted action that limits the deleterious impact of climate change, especially where populations are most vulnerable?
I could submit a lot more evidence of changes during our collective lifetimes that suggest we’re making real progress for the sake of the world.
- Just since about 1960 the world began to produce enough food to feed everyone on the planet. Even though we haven’t solved distribution and access, this is a historic shift. People no longer HAVE to be hungry, simply because there are more people than we have the capacity to feed.
- It’s impossible to watch even an episode or two of sitcoms from the 1980s, like Cheers or Night Court, say, to notice how far we’ve come in changing mores around sexual harassment and the role of women in the workplace. Although there are forces today that would send us backward, this progress is real. #MeToo changed things. That arc has moved in the right direction.
- The sometimes fraught welcome of LGBTQIA+ persons into public life and advocacy, and advancing recognition of their rights (aside from Iowa’s removal of transgender protections earlier this year), including to recognition of their marriages is a huge step out of the darkness of closeted and silenced persons in our midst. Again, this work isn’t done. And there are those who would return to the mid-20th But I see in this one more piece of movement toward the kind of world I’m certain God wants for us. Where we (all!) get to be our authentic selves, to love who we love, without having to answer to a vocal but misguided perspective that would push all that back into hiding.
I could go on, but we have a Current to send and I’m hoping that you see what I’m noticing, in all this. I wonder, what would you add? Where do you see progress? The slow bending of the arc in the right direction, even while still incomplete and not fully settled. I trust that God will get us there, in God’s time. And I’m glad to be part of a generation that isn’t entirely losing the ground we have long hoped to hold.
