"It was the best of times, it was the worst of times; it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness; it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity; it was the season of Light, it was the season of Darkness; it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair; we had everything before us, we had nothing before us; we were all going directly to Heaven, we were all going the other way.”

 

So begins Charles Dickens’ novel, the Tale of Two Cities, written just before the French Revolution. We are living in such times. We have “everything before us” in this part of the world: prosperity; increasing life expectancy; unprecedented freedoms; access to clean water and healthy food; meaningful work; unparalleled medical care; a virtual “spring of hope”. And yet we also face the prospect of having “nothing” before us: a planet with degraded biosystems; looming water shortages around the world; global warming; species extinction; wars and rumours of war over natural resources; economic disparity and a billion people living in abject poverty around the world; a virtual “winter of despair”.

 

We are facing unprecedented challenges as a species, and because we are so privileged in this part of the world, it falls to the citizens of the Western world to take the lead. We cannot wait for governments, because they are waiting for us. We cannot trust the future solely to transnational corporations, because they need us to cry foul when market forces do not serve the interests of the whole earth community. They may do, but not always. From an evolutionary perspective, these challenges actually become the engine of our development to a higher stage of human consciousness. A species meets these changing life conditions or dies out. Up to this point, we have found a way to thrive in the midst of our challenges. This gives us reason to hope, but the stakes have truly never been so high – the future of life on the planet. 
 

The Dawning of Personal Responsibility
 

At our Tuesday afternoon Bible study, Eleanor came in on her scooter with a burning question about the reading a verse from Psalm 119: Verse 109 presented a surprising twist from the rest of the Psalm

 

“I hold my life in my hand continually,” (Psalm 119:109), writes the Psalmist.

 

She was expecting it to read, “You (God) hold my life in your hand continually.” Isn’t that what the Bible is supposed to say? I have to admit that my first take on it was that it might be a typo! Aren’t we held in God’s hands? But no, it read: “I hold my life in my hand continually”. This led to a lively discussion about personal responsibility. We agreed that we cannot absolutely control the circumstances of our life. Eleanor had no control over contracting multiple sclerosis years ago. But how she deals with it she does hold within her hands. She can be bitter and cynical and cut herself off from community – or she can get on the handy dart and get herself to Bible study and assume responsibility for making it an interesting and engaging hour with her friends. She holds the seeds of her own future in her hands.

 

I begin each day be reciting my daily covenant, that I have written over the course of the last year. One of the lines reads: Nobody outside of myself has the power to make me unhappy or to make me happy, fulfilled or unfulfilled. I do not absolutely control the circumstances of my life. But I do have control over how I respond. “I hold my life in my hand continually, O God.” But this can be extended to the collective level as well. We are in the age of the global village, when immediate and worldwide communication is a reality. We have more power individually and collectively as citizens than we realize.

 

One small example is this week’s furor over Roger’s deciding to charge for text messaging upon the release of the new iPhone. The citizens were outraged, started text messaging each other and Rogers, and the policy was modified – within days mind you. We have a lot of power. We just have to care enough about an issue. It’s a little sobering that the issue that galvanizes the public is being charged 15 cents per text messages. What if got as worked up about poverty, global warming, and species extinction? Imagine.

 

Never before in the history of humanity have we so clearly held the future in our hands. It took the dawning of the modern era, four world Revolutions, and two World Wars, to wrest control of the future from ecclesiastical authority and from kings and queens, and dictators, and place it squarely in our hands. We have each been given a handful of seeds to sow and there is nobody else who can sow them for us. We can pretend to be helpless. We can allow others to sow their seeds and simply reap what they’ve sown. But if we choose this path, we do so knowing that we will have squandered the greatest gift of the modern era and wasted the blood of those who handed us this freedom to participate in the shaping of future.

 

Sowing the Seeds of the Future

 

Listen to me, says Jesus to the crowd. “A sower went out to sow” (Matthew 13:3). The parable could have ended with that line as far as I’m concerned. He was speaking to farmers who sowed seed a couple of times a year in Palestine, year after year. They knew that some of the seed would fall on rocky ground and some in shallow soil, but that some of it would hit pay dirt and produce 30,60, even 100 fold. Now before we get into any particular interpretation of the parable, even the gospel writer’s interpretation, let’s just stick with the original parable. I can understand why Matthew would have wanted to interpret the spreading of the seed as the spreading of the gospel. But let’s just put that aside for the moment and focus on the act of sowing itself. 

 

I believe Jesus was trying to get these simple peasant farmers to understand that the seed they were sowing was their own life energy. It won’t always bear fruit. There will be dead ends and droughts, but just keep casting your seed faithfully, because it will yield a harvest of a future that you participated in growing. I believe he was telling them that they weren’t powerless, even though Rome would like them to believe that. The situation wasn’t hopeless, even though for many it must have seemed the worst of times. The same power that produced the seed, that flowed through the plant, that caused the fruit to mature, and gave them the hope year after year to go out and sow the new seed, was flowing through their very lives.

 

These were subsistence farmers mind you. There ancestral lands were being expropriated by Rome. Yet Jesus was able to organize these oppressed peasants into a community that over the next 2000 shaped history. We do not claim that the shape of that history was always noble, but much of it was and continues to be. And when it wasn’t it was because the leaders of the church stopped following the injunction of the last part of verse 109 in Psalm 119.

 

“I hold my life in my hand, but I do not forget your law, O God.”

 

Reclaiming Divine Law

 

I’ve spoken about the dignity of the modern era as being the freedom it conferred upon us to be full participants in the shaping of the future. The shackles of a predetermined future were thrown off. Fate gave way to a destiny that we ourselves could shape. But there is a disastrous component to the modern period, best summarized as hubris. We exercised and continue to exercise our freedom outside of divine laws. When science dethroned religion, and economics trumped ethics, the cosmos was voided of Spirit. The market was given the status of divine law. Material ambition replaced the cultivation of virtue as the operative ethic of society. We came to believe that we could function outside any spiritual or natural law.

 

In the age to come, we will need to be guided by a set of transcendent laws. These spiritual laws will not be external laws handed down by a Divine Authority figure in the sky which we obey out of fear. They will be “written in our hearts” as the ancient prophet, Jeremiah, envisioned. The inner law of compassion and justice will provide an inner mandate for developing social policy that leaves nobody behind as we move forward, and we will know that vast gaps in wealth distribution are unconscionable. The inner law that flows from the awareness being children of the earth and kin with all creation will mandate that other species of plants and animals have an inherent right to not only co-exist with us, but also flourish. We will limit our own presence and our footprint in order to make room for them. And if we are Christian we will do this in the name of the one “who did not count himself equal to God, but emptied himself taking the form of a servant.”  

 

Friends, we hold our own life and the future of this planet in our own hands, like seeds ready to be sown. Most of us wouldn’t think of ourselves as creative. But the fundamental act of creativity as humans is the acting of shaping the future. I believe to do so in an act of participating in the work of the One who created this cosmos. This is not a time to shy away from this immense power we have been given. It is time to seize that power, as we internalize the divine laws that can be found in every religious tradition and in nature. This is our vocation as a community of faith, to summon from what we’ve been given, the future that needs us in order to be born. Whether that future represents the worst of times or the best is determined by what we do with that tiny, yet potent power that we hold in our own hands.