WHAT HAVE WE LEARNED? III: A VISION FOR THE FUTURE
A Sermon by Kenneth W. Phifer, Delivered at First UU Church Ann Arbor, 
9/26/04


In a world of unremitting evil and unending goodness, a world challenged by 
threats to earth and society, by the failures of religion to curb violence and 
materialism, and by assaults on the intimate family and the national 
community, what kind of vision of the future can we have?

There are a number of different kinds of visions of the future, from the 
technological dream-worlds with wondrous new gadgetry to utopias and 
dystopias. There are science fiction extrapolations of current trends and 
religious visions of a life after death to recompense us for our sufferings and 
our sins.

The vision of which I shall speak is of a different kind. It is a vision 
grounded in a simple but rarely honored truth: the ends we seek and the 
means we employ to reach them must be consistent. 

Ends and means are two aspects of the same reality. To use methods that 
violate the spirit of the purposes for which we work undercuts our efforts.

We cannot seek justice by unjust means. We cannot curb violence by violent 
means. We cannot engender respect by rude and coarse behaviour.

Means and ends are inextricably interwoven.

The vision of which I shall speak is more prescriptive than predictive. It is 
more about the path into the future than what specifically that future might 
look like. 

It is about lessons humanity has learned that can help us to live well 
together. It is about means for shaping our future that are consistent with the 
ancient human yearning for a time of peace and justice.

First there is forgiveness. 

Bishop Desmond Tutu, in the midst of his work with the South African 
Truth and Reconciliation Commission, made the point that there is “no 
future without forgiveness.” 

Bishop Tutu speaks of the Commission hearing horrifying tales of murder, 
torture, and brutality. Then he tells of an officer testifying before the 
Commission, confessing that he gave the order to ambush innocent villagers. 
The room was full of angry survivors when that officer said, “Yes, we gave 
the orders for the soldiers to open fire. Please forgive us. Please accept my 
colleagues back into the community.” That room full of people terribly 
wounded by this man and his colleagues, a room full of hatred and tension, 
broke out into thunderous applause. Bishop Tutu then asked, “Please let us 
be quiet because we are in the presence of something holy.”

Forgiveness is holy. 

Forgiveness is holy because forgiveness is about love. Nothing is more 
sacred than love. Love exudes respect, caring, attention, hope, generosity, 
and the willingness to overcome the past with acts of forgiveness.

Forgiveness is holy.

This is why the most important day in the Jewish ritual calendar is Yom 
Kippur, the Day of Atonement, the day when all Jews are supposed to speak 
their sins and cleanse themselves of the guilt that attaches to these sins. It is 
a day when someone asking for forgiveness is to be granted that blessing. 

Yom Kippur, which ended last evening at sunset, is placed ten days into the 
new year. Each year Jews are to take these ten Days of Awe to look back 
over the previous year, to remember the weak and the wicked moments, the 
greed and pride and anger and jealousy and pettiness and hurtfulness. The 
faithful Jew is asked to repent of these sins, to find ways of atoning for them, 
and to seek forgiveness from those who have been wounded.

Before moving into the future, the new year, a Jew is asked to cleanse 
himself of the sins of the past in a ceremony of atonement and forgiveness 
that points the way to a future of hope.

It is not South Africans and Jews alone who understand how important 
forgiveness is. There are hundreds of books published about forgiveness. 
Articles appear regularly about the need for us to learn the importance of 
forgiveness. 

The philosopher Elizabeth Spelman in her book REPAIR points out that 
forgiveness is part of the process of repair that we need in human life. We 
make mistakes. We lose control. We say things we wish we had never said. 
To repair the damage requires the drama of forgiveness, from the one who 
has done wrong admitting to error to the one wronged welcoming the other 
person back into the fullness of the relationship.

Donald Shriver, in his AN ETHIC FOR ENEMIES: FORGIVENESS IN 
POLITICS, makes the point that forgiveness is as important at national and 
ethnic and racial and other communal levels as it is for individuals. 
“Forgiveness in politics,” he says, “has to do with how we manage our 
mutual relationships with the past without letting them manage us.”

The Buddhist Thich Nhat Hanh writes of CREATING TRUE PEACE by 
opening oneself up to the channels of love embedded in forgiveness. 

Kurt Vonnegut, a humanist as well as a humorist, proclaimed in an interview 
a few years ago that there are two really radical ideas in the world. One is 
E=mc2; matter and energy are different aspects of the same stuff. The other 
is to forego revenge and grudges, as exemplified in these words: “Forgive us 
our trespasses as we forgive those who trespass against us.”

Neal Krause of the Institute of Gerontology says that older people fare better 
if they have learned how to forgive and leave hurts in the past. Numerous 
studies at other universities—Miami of Ohio, Wisconsin, Northern Iowa, 
etc.—support this thesis but broaden it to include all ages.

The biologist and anthropologist David Sloan Wilson, in DARWIN’S  
CATHEDRAL, argues that “the basic capacity to forgive is a biological 
adaptation” fundamental to human society and family life. It is the way that 
we survive the fact of our imperfections.

Forgiveness is the path into the future and the way that future can be 
secured. 

I like the way the late Sir Peter Ustinov put it: “Love is an act of endless 
forgiveness.”

Secondly, we need to understand the world in which we live.

We need first of all to understand the natural world of which we are a part. 
We need to have some sense of how nature works on the grand macrocosmic 
scale. Things are interconnected: E=mc2,  “We are the stuff of the stars.” 

Out there somewhere, beyond the galaxy in which we live, is a vast universe 
that is sending us messages about the beginnings of time. To live well, 
agonized as we often are by questions about whence and whither and why, 
we need to know about our place in the larger cosmic saga, however minor a 
place that is.

We need as well to have knowledge of our home planet: how it operates, 
what makes it healthy and what harms it, where life came from and how, 
when and how human life began and how it has developed, and what our 
relationship is with other life on this planet.

We need to know about our own bodies. We need to know how human 
bodies in general function and even more importantly how our own bodies 
function. What is required for our health and well-being physically and 
mentally, emotionally and spiritually? 

Knowing the way hurricanes act helps save lives when they come. Knowing 
the physical laws of the earth has helped us to get off the earth in planes and 
balloons and rocket ships, a perspective that helps us to see that the earth is 
truly one and truly lovely. Knowing which plants are poisonous and which 
are good to eat and which are medicinal saves lives, nourishes our bodies, 
and heals us when we are sick.

The best way to gain such understanding is through disciplined scientific 
study in all the various fields of science, from medicine to physics, from 
biology to anthropology, from botany to cosmology. 

Unitarian Universalists have said throughout our more than four hundred 
year history that we must strive to understand our world, using every tool 
available to us. We agree with the assertion made by the great medieval 
Catholic scholar, Thomas Aquinas, that one cannot know and believe at the 
same time, and it is better to know than to believe. 

In order to know, we must study, look at the available knowledge, set aside 
prejudices, and think clearly with the facts at our command. This is the 
process of reason, one of the three great principles of our UU history. 
Thinking is our best human tool. We just don’t use it enough!

Being thoughtful is a way to make the future better than the past.

Tolerance can help a lot too.

Tolerance begins with freedom, with recognizing the importance for 
individuals of being free to choose the course of their lives. We need to be 
able to choose the kind of work that we will do, the person or persons with 
whom we will share our lives, the place where we will live, the political and 
economic and religious philosophies that will guide our lives, and hundreds 
of less consequential decisions that add to our daily joy or woe. 

There has been enough experience with totalitarian societies in the past 
century for us to appreciate how essential to human happiness freedom 
really is. Yelena Bonner, the wife of the Russian physicist and dissident 
Andrei Sakharov, reminded us on her first trip to this country of how 
precious freedom is. She noted how wonderful it was that people could buy 
their own homes and have property of their own where privacy was possible.

Because people are different, for freedom to flourish there must also be a 
generous spirit of tolerance, of allowing others to do as they think best for 
their own lives and even of learning from them ways we can improve our 
own.

That is one of the great teachings of the Unitarian Universalist heritage. 
From our martyred beginnings in Geneva, Poland, and Transylvania, 
through the dangerous period in England when it was against the law to be a 
Unitarian and the perilous early days of Universalism in this country when 
such theological views could earn you a coat of tar and feathers and a ride on 
a rail out of town, we religious liberals have insisted that the only 
worthwhile religion is one that gives scope for every individual to create or 
choose her own theology. 

The Minor Reformed Church in Poland, the forerunners of the Unitarian  
Socinians, taught the western world how to be tolerant. They were about to 
debate the to-them momentous question of whether infants should be 
baptized or this rite delayed until a child reached an age of discernment. 
They decided before they started arguing that whichever side won the 
debate, the other side would not, as was the practice in Christian 
communities and in others, be excommunicated or otherwise bothered. They 
would remain fully respected members of the church. 

A couple of years later, King John Sigismund of Transylvania issued a 
Decree of Toleration that carried the same message: we hear different 
voices, we interpret texts in different ways, we arrive at different 
conclusions. Difference should not threaten us. It should enlarge our sense of 
what it means to be human. It should make us humble in the awareness that 
there is more than one way to understand a situation. 

In the Gifford Lectures of 1985, the physicist Freeman Dyson said that 
diversity gives “scope to the infinite variety of human souls and 
temperaments…Without diversity, there can be no freedom….In the nature 
of God and in the nature of man there is a far greater diversity of spirit than 
any one church can encompass.”

That infinite diversity of human life, of religion, of science, of all existence 
is a source of wonder and awe that we ignore at our peril. What is wrong 
with intolerant people is that they strangle life, beauty, joy, discovery, 
invention, creativity, surprise because of the narrowness of their views. 

Tolerance is about opening ourselves to the world, even when we do not 
fully comprehend that world, even when we have deep disagreements with 
the way things are being done.

Because we live in one world, close to one another, interconnected with one 
another, we need to overcome the narrow parochialisms of the past, 
parochialisms of religion and nationality and ethnicity and sexuality and all 
the ways in which a portion of humanity has separated itself out or been 
separated out from others.

Tolerance is essential for our future.

UU’s. UU’s of AA. What lessons do we need specifically to remember for 
our own future?

One of these lessons is that we are one congregation among more than a 
thousand in this land and probably a couple of thousand more around the 
world. We are one member of a community of congregations living and 
promoting in our very diverse ways the Unitarian Universalist faith. 

We are well advanced on this future through our ties with the Khasi Hills 
Unitarians of India, especially with the children we support in their 
educational endeavors. That relationship goes back into the later years of the 
19th century. 

Our partner church bonds with the people of Kezdivasarhely, Transylvania 
in Romania and their minister, Maria Pap, have given us a better 
understanding of the roots of our movement. Transylvanian Unitarianism is 
the oldest continuous Unitarian movement in the world, dating from 1568.

Both of these connections to other places in the world as well as our ties to 
other congregations in the Heartland District and in the Unitarian 
Universalist Association teach us the importance of working together, the 
strength to be found in doing so, in order that our liberal message be heard.

A second thing we need to remember for our future at this magnificent 46 
acre site is the responsibility of stewardship for the land and property that is 
ours. We have the opportunity to show Lodi Township and Ann Arbor and 
Washtenaw County and the State of Michigan how to live well with the 
land, how to care for and beautify the earth, how to be good partners with 
the fauna and flora we share this land with. 

Our Green Sanctuary Committee, our Land Use Committee, and our Master 
Site Plan Working Group, with the strong support of our elected leaders and 
of the congregation are busy laying out specific ways that we can be good 
stewards.

A third thing to keep in our minds as we move into the 21st century is 
continuing to care for each other and for the society in which we live. 
Regardless of who are the professional or lay religious leaders, our task is to 
keep on building the peaceful and just community that is the ideal for which 
we strive. Our many and varied committees, task forces, projects, programs, 
classes, ad hoc commitments, and other involvements testify that we are 
busy about creating a worthy future right now.

The Involvement Fair at the Coffee Hour today offers further opportunities 
for everyone to find a way to join in.

UU’s in AA are on the path to the future.

Another thing that is important for the future of humanity is a new sense of 
the religious (or, if you prefer, the spiritual). 

Humanity for long ages mostly lived one day at a time, hoping for food to 
eat, shelter and clothes that would protect in bad weather, and the good 
fortune not to get sick or injured. In the last several centuries, for a sizeable 
number of human beings, many of these problems have been eased if they 
have not vanished. 

For those for whom water and food and clothing and shelter and medicine 
are a daily challenge, the task for the future is to develop ways in which 
these essentials for survival can be provided abundantly. There is enough, if 
the world will only learn to share. Gandhi taught that everyone should have 
enough of what they need; no one should have enough to satisfy their greed.

Sadly, we have not been able to figure out how to be sure that everyone gets 
enough of what is necessary. No small part of the reason for this is found in 
something Adlai Stevenson said a half century ago. “With the supermarket 
as our temple and the singing commercial as our litany, are we likely to fire 
the world with an irresistible vision of America’s exalted purposes and 
inspiring way of life?” Mocking what he called “the intellectuals disdain of 
America’s ‘consumer society,’” George Will used a recent column to 
celebrate all the stuff America has and point out how envious others are of 
all this stuff. Whether they get any of it is not important to him.

Descriptively, Will is correct. We are hooked on stuff, lots and lots of stuff. 
That is why our society struggles with obesity, struggles with homes laden 
with things we do not even know we have because we have so much, 
struggles with debt because we keep on believing that buying is a key to 
feeling good.

Morally, Will is wrong. Spirituality is being smothered by materialistic 
drives. The religions of this nation and others have not been able to stem this 
tide, often joining it. Sharing at a time of disaster is immediate and generous. 
But designing a world economic system that would insure that everybody 
has enough is just not part of the American Way. 

It is part of the human way. The human spirit cries out for ways of 
celebrating life and sharing the joy of life. The human spirit longs to hold 
hands and hug people and sing together and work together for good. The 
human spirit does not yearn for simply more things that take over our lives.

Look at the faces of people working on a Habitat For Humanity house or 
helping with the Interfaith Hospitality Network families or marching for 
peace. What you see on those faces is happiness, a sense of being with 
others in a good cause.

That is what religion—spirituality—is most deeply about. Putting 
materialism in the service of the human spirit is the meaning of religion, of 
the purpose-filled life that religion claims to offer, of the ethical life that 
religion inspires. The fact that the mainstream religions have not done this 
nearly well enough is no small part of the reason why so many people—
indeed, a majority in this land—belong to off-shoots of the major religious 
bodies, including our own growing, joyously heretical UU community.

Religion must be our spiritual and ethical guide if the future is to have hope.

One last comment: we need to develop a sense of the “eternal.”

Since science and technology replaced religion as the dominant influences of 
western society, we have lost a sense of the long term, the “eternal.” We 
think short term now. Politicians think only as far as the next election. 
Business people think in three and occasionally five year plans. Many 
workers think only of the coming of Friday. 

If we are really going to prepare for the future, we have to learn to think in 
“eternal” terms, that is, in terms of what Stewart Brand calls “the long now.” 
In a book about a computer clock/library designed by Danny Hillis, Brand 
writes that  “ideally, it would do for thinking about time what the 
photographs of Earth from space have done for thinking about the 
environment.”

This mechanical clock would be powered by seasonal changes. It would tick 
only once a year, a chime would ring out only once a century, and a cuckoo 
would come out once a millennium. The library would hold information 
useful for long term thinking and planning.

Such a clock/library would help us to learn that most things of merit take 
time. It would teach us patience and the long view, and thus a more accurate 
sense of our place on earth and in history, namely a very small one indeed. 
As the most impatient people the world has ever known, Americans in 
particular would benefit from such a “clock of the long now.”

Such a clock/library would be an ongoing reminder, in Brand’s words, “that 
nobody can save the world, but any of us can help set in motion a self-saving 
world—if we are willing to engage the processes of centuries, because that is 
where the real power is.” 

Thinking in “eternal” terms, terms of long stretches of time, is a way to 
demonstrate that we understand that no one can control the future. The best 
we can do is to be sure that our children and grandchildren for many 
generations to come will have the tools they need to help themselves.

The tools suggested here include forgiveness, understanding, tolerance, 
UU’s at AA, religion, and the “eternal.” 

Some of these words have been stretched beyond their usual meaning in 
order that I could make my six points begin with the letters F—U—T—U—
R—E=FUTURE. 

Even if the acronymic words are not neat and elegant, the ideas are good 
ones. Using these and other ideas and inspirations, let us join in trying to 
create the means and the ends that will bring a measure of happiness and 
hope to every person on earth. 

We could leave no better legacy than this.

Copyright 2004, Kenneth W. Phifer, All Rights Reserved


                                                   








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