The Ministry of the Future.

God’s future is always present; God’s Presence appears to us as a future that is always coming, impacting our lives and world, breaking in, breaking out, emerging.

In the last few months I have discovered the excellent science-fiction author, Kim Stanley Robinson.  His latest novel is The Ministry for the Future.  It takes place a decade or two ahead of us, and tells the story of an office set up by the UN to get greenhouse gases under control and reverse global warming.  This Ministry for the Future is designed to make sure that humanity has a future on a reasonably hospitable planet.

It occurs to me that this is something like what the Church is supposed to be.  The gathering of Jesus’ disciples represents and embodies his life and teachings, and serves as a kind of anticipation of the Kingdom of God, which always seems to be “coming,” but is also somehow also already here.  The Church is the Ministry of the Future in that it reflects and expresses the Light of God’s Kingdom, now.  It presents an alternative future for a humanity hell-bent on self-destruction.  It offers people a Way of life, peace, equality, and compassion, in contrast with the suicidal direction in which we are now headed.

More than anything else, proclaiming and anticipating this new future, in which God’s eternal Presence is revealed, is the Church’s true ministry.  It is the most fruitful way to follow Jesus’ final commandment, to “make disciples of all nations.”  Discipleship happens in a community that is consciously moving forward into an emerging, unfolding future, revealed in Jesus Christ.

In short, we are called to be today the Church of tomorrow.  God is calling us now to dwell in forever.  

This future orientation does not mean that we should indulge in the reflexive jettisoning of the past that is too often a feature of ecclesiastical reform movements.  It is taking us centuries to recover some of the good and useful things that the Reformers carelessly ditched from the Roman Catholic Church, 500 years ago.  We are discovering the beauty and depth of, for instance, Mary, the saints, liturgy, and some holidays and seasons.  It is a regrettable pathology of Modernity to think that every generation has to reject out of hand everything the previous generation accomplished.  

In God’s Kingdom there is no dualism between past and future.  These are effects of our temporal, mortal nature.  Embracing the future sometimes means locating and lifting up those historical expressions of faith that did indeed participate in or reflect God’s Presence.  There is a sense in which God’s future is always present and it is we in our egocentricity who are the absent ones, consumed with interpreting and managing memories, and providing for or against eventualities in an unknown future.

The divine Presence, the fullness of time, has emerged into history before, and those experiences and events need to be cherished and remembered.  Thus Christian tradition at its best is the story of these interventions of clarity when the future appeared.  Hence the lives of the saints are supposed to remind us that God was never absent, and the future has always had an impact in ongoing history.  Indeed, sometimes we find the future precisely by looking to the past.

What would it be like if we took this seriously?  What if we saw the Church as witnessing to God’s Presence, revealed in Jesus, as something to be lived into and anticipated in its present life?  I know that when we see our lives shaped by thanksgiving and joy, compassion and justice, equity and forgiveness, hope and love, we are really participating in the Truth that will be revealed and completed in the fulness of time, which is to say, what we experience as future.

I am reminded (again) of one of my favorite illustrations: the Magic Eye pictures that were a fad in the 1980’s.  The pictures are a jumble of patterns, shapes, and colors that appear to make little sense.  But if you contemplate one long enough, eventually a 3-dimensional image can appear to emerge.  The image is always there, of course, encoded in the ink on the page; it is our eyes and brains that have to adjust in order to see it.  While we are waiting for the image to resolve, we experience it as future.  As it starts appearing, we might even remark that it is “coming” into view.  The reality is that it is always present and available, our perception simply hasn’t caught up to it yet.

It is our perception and experience that slogs unconsciously through time.  But sometimes the fog clears and we get the momentary knowledge of a wholeness to be fulfilled in the future, even in our temporal existence.  It’s like we get a sense of the end of the story, even as we are living it.  Like when Paul says, “All things work together for good.”

The Church proclaims and lives in the light of that future, which is the Truth.  In the fullness of time, all shall see and know it.  For now, however, we proceed in trust that this is our destiny.  Now we serve as witnesses, testifying to what others cannot (yet) see, which they indeed dismiss as false.  

The Church is therefore the ministry of this future, which is to say, it is the living witness and responder to God’s Presence, which breaks in to our history, and into individual experience, from time to time.

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