"Y2K Or Why Not 2K?"
I don't know if everyone has had the opportunity to experience the end of the world, but I have. It was in 1959. I was in the fourth grade. I wasn't expecting the world to end at that particular time, but my generation had been taught that the end was a possibility that could occur at any time.
I was walking home from school one day with a classmate. On this pleasant sunny afternoon the air was suddenly shattered by the scream of the air-raid siren. Now, the siren was normally tested every Tuesday morning at 10:30. We were then instructed to get under our desks, cover our heads and prepare ourselves for a potential nuclear attack. But those drills happened on Tuesday mornings. This wasn't Tuesday and it wasn't morning.
My friend and I looked at each other, and all we could see was the magnification of our own fear in each other's eyes. And then we ran, probably faster than either of us ever had. We flew over fences, down alleys and across fields. If we were about to be annihilated, both of us wanted it to occur within the loving comfort of our own homes.
I got to my house first and burst through the door. By the time I reached my mother, I was out of breath and couldn't speak. "Everything's alright," she said. "It's not the Russians, just a special test. They've been announcing it on the radio."
Okay, so I exaggerated a little at the beginning. I didn't really experience the end of the world. But, I did experience what it's like to have the sure feeling that the world is about to end.
In only 96 days it will be January 1, 2000. Throughout Christendom, and as a result throughout much of the world, thoughts of the new millennium including much of the hulla-baloo over the potential Y2K melt-down have fostered an apocalyptic atmosphere. Anticipation of an apocalypse isn't necessarily the mainstream reaction to this milestone calendar event, but it is certainly a formative undercurrent that has and will have a substantial impact on the culture and on the world.
This morning we'll look at the phenomenon of Y2K. What I want to particularly focus on though, is our response to it. What meaning does all this end-time frenzy have for us especially within the context of liberal religion? And what can it all mean for us, what can we learn from it, as we step into the 21st century?
I'm not going to start off by saying that, as a non-tech person, I don't know much about the technical ramifications of Y2K and then go ahead and talk a lot about those things anyway. The truth is though, that I'm not a high-tech kind of guy, and I don't know much about the technical aspects of Y2K. So I'm going severely limit what I say about what I don't know.
Our own church member, Barnaby Feder, a top correspondent on the subject of Y2K for the New York Times, has written much on this topic in the Times. I happily refer you to his articles for hard information. Barnaby also served as a valuable resources to me for this sermon.
For those of us who may not be engaged in the process of disarming the Y2K threat, it's still important to know what's at risk so that we can be better prepared. To that end, we've ordered a couple of hundred copies of a brochure produced by the American Red Cross that will be available in the narthex over the next several weeks.
So, here is the technical part of what I want to share. (It's very brief). As far as what exactly might happen as a result of reaching the end of 12/31/99, the most definitive information available is that some things are going to work just fine, and some things are going to break down. Nobody knows exactly what's going to function properly and what's not.
Ten years ago the scenario was fairly grim. Our post-modern, information oriented culture was being supported by an interdependent web of computers which, by and large, could not recognize the date 1/1/00. A great deal of work has been accomplished since then, and many of the glitches have been remedied, but not all. And nobody knows how a few little glitches might affect the networking of our huge systems.
It's not likely that the Rose Bowl Parade will be preempted on New Year's Day by Armageddon. It is however, as likely as not that some commodities and services, which we normally depend upon, may become temporarily scarce and disrupted. Knowing that ahead of time ought to help prevent panic. We'll see if it does. This concludes the technical portion of the sermon.
There may well be some very real needs that emerge from Y2K that may call upon us for some earnest and religiously motivated responses. I'll talk more about those in a a bit. At this point though, we might want to ask what all of this‹the big ado‹might mean to us, a liberal religious community which claims to affirm and promote the interdependent web of existence of which we are a part. Isn't the information super highway just an extension of our interdependent web of existence?
In an e-mail message Barnaby Feder wrote: "People everywhere, from 'inside the establishment' to all social levels are seeing Y2K as a symptom, not a problem. How often are we in the presence of a teacher that can impart the same wisdom to those who do not benefit from the system as to those who do? Y2K is such a teacher. Will its ultimate lesson be that we are not all so far apart as we feel?"
Let's look at some religious questions that the teacher, Y2K, might raise for our consideration.
From the beginning of time, religions have incorporated questions and issues of eschatology. Eschatological thinking assumes that there is an end-time. It provokes us to consider the relevance of our everyday actions and inactions in relation to the knowledge that we will not always be here.
Eschatology is a natural response to a universal human need to make meaning of our lives by prioritizing and ordering experiences and events. Doctrinal eschatologies often employ metaphors of a supernatural nature, while more organic eschatologies can create doomsday scenarios out of just about anything, supernatural or natural. All of them, though remind us that life is precious.
What personal relevance does our eventual death have in our day to day choices? What community or cultural relevance does an appreciation for an end of the earth scenario have on the way the community or culture proceeds in the establishment and the maintenance of its institutions, mores, its systems of communication and the support of its members?
We live in an age when the means of supporting our survival are so secured that they are often taken for granted. In this environment, the urgency of the eschatological impulse fades under the shadows of temprocentric and even egocentric clouds. This is the most important moment in history, we continually assure ourselves. And in a culture of materialism, we presume that we deserve the rich harvest of the luxurious offerings that surround us. Marcel Proust wrote that with the potential for the world's end in front of us, "...life would suddenly seem wonderful.: And without the threat, "...negligence deadens [our] desire [for it]."
What might we learn from Y2K? What might we learn from the scientists who fear there may well be something to fear? What might we learn from the millennia frenzy the secular backwoods survivalists, the religious fundamentalists and the multitude of other extremists who purport doom? What we might learn is that, if we fail to connect our eventual end-time with our current time, with the way we live our lives, our spiritual need for this connection might manifest itself in the creation of artificial (human created) scenarios in which we pit ourselves against an imaginary end-time. Perhaps if the gap in this connection becomes too severe, we might even push these artificial scenarios toward, and even into, realms of reality.
We are not going to live forever. As Rabbi Hillel said, "Say not, 'By and by, when I have leisure I will care for my soul,' lest perchance you may never find leisure." As the longevity of our life expectancy increases, we have cause to be ever more mindful of the need for intentional, purposeful living. Life requires a greater purpose than the pursuit of comfort. We proceed at our peril when we fail to connect with those larger meanings in life.
When an individual loses the capacity to make meaning out of their life, we might call that depression or mental illness. When an entire culture loses that capacity we might call it the fall of the empire, or Armageddon, or nuclear disaster. We might even call it Y2K, or the new millennium.
It's this cultural, corporate aspect of our failings that leads to perhaps the greatest lesson that Y2K might have to offer. It's not a lesson that necessarily has an answer; not yet. But it is one that has a compelling question. It is a question of connection.
If the computer age with its world wide web has created a new layer to the interdependence of this planet, to what extent does that layer support our ability to sustain and promote life and the quality of life? To what extent does this layer of human made interdependence threaten the well being of the planet?
The information super highway is a human creation with proportions of interdependence that stretch beyond previous imaginings. It's also the technology upon which we have made dependent most, if not all, of our other technologies. When we use this super technology, or any technology, as a vehicle to extend our interactions and connections, we enrich our experience as human beings. When we use them as an end, to replace our meaningful relationships, to hide from them, then we replace connections with things, and substance with noise.
It will be interesting to see how and where the problems from Y2K arise. Will they begin in remote regions of cyberspace and then slowly spread through the web? Will they amount to nothing more than other viruses have, viruses that have maliciously but controllably infected various parts of the web?
It will be even more interesting to see what our responses to those problems will be. Will our responses indicate that we have deepened our human interconnections? Or will they indicate that we have allowed our technology to distance us from one another?
Perhaps as it draws near, we need to be ever more vigilant, ever more religiously intentional in the way we prepare for the new year, the new century, the new millennium. Last week in our Yom Kippur service we talked about human interaction‹the acts of forgiving and being forgiven‹as our surest approach for experiencing the divine, and for achieving atonement.
The late Unitarian theologian, my favorite, Henry Nelson Wieman, spoke in similar terms when he described God as a process through which creativity is born and reborn within the transformative interchanges‹not of machinery or surrogates‹but the transformative interchanges between and among people. It will be these kinds of creative, redemptive interactions that we will need to pursue and to rely upon in order to find our way through this, or any storm.
In the biblical story of Revelation, John writes to his readers that the end is coming. The evils of the world would not be able to withstand the torrent of the apocalypse. The people he was writing to understood that John was using very mythical and metaphorical language to indicate that the political principalities of his day would fall.
Since then, religious fundamentalists throughout history, have often made confused attempts at applying this message, in a literal way, to their own day. There have been unfulfilled predictions forecasting the end of the world every 25 to 50 or 100 years for the past 2,0000 years. While they haven't come true, it doesn't mean that the story has no validity. The validity is in the human need being expressed.
In the passage from our reading, it said, "God's home is now with his people." Again, we can get hung up on that literally, or we can understand it to mean that somehow, by letting go of the past and by embracing our future death, we can step into a new age. We can step into an age where God's home, the presence of creative interchange, is among the people because God need be no more or less than the loving compassion every human being feels and acts on toward every other human being, and toward the world around us.
The message of Y2K is that the world is indeed interconnected, that nothing happens in isolation, and that we are called upon to be responsible to and for each other because we are always in one another's space and in one another's time. The lesson is that we cannot depend on virtual love. We need to develop and count on virtuous love.
In all of the stories of end-time, time never actually ends; everything always starts over. We never come to the end of time, but we are always on the edge of time. Apocalyptic stories, while they may have a lot of gloom and doom in their content, aren't as much about destruction as they are about recreation. In the end, they are always about the beginning. They are always about hope. About being on the cusp. About being on the edge of time.
So what might we hope for out of our Apocalyptic story of Y2K and the new millennium? This is the dawning of the Age of Aquarius; the New Age of human potential. Perhaps it is the time for the creation of the New Jerusalem, or the Kingdom of Heaven on Earth. If it is, it will not happen as a gift from some cosmic force in sympathy with our longings. If it is, it will be because humanity has seized the opportunity created by this age in which our connectedness has become tangible, palpable and inescapable.
We don't need to fear that Y2K will ride in the place of the Four Horsemen. We need to be prepared to fix what is broken, and then to continue moving into our new age promoting the humanity and the human rights of every man, woman and child. That is the opportunity at the dawning of this age, and it will not be deterred by what ever glitches may come of the Y2K problems that we are sure to face.
Perhaps this all sounds somewhat grandiose, but a new age warrants great expectations.
I mentioned early on that there may well be some very real needs that emerge from Y2K that may call upon us for some earnest and religiously motivated responses. I'm talking about some concrete issues here. Maybe they can serve as baby steps on our way to the larger picture.
If we've learned anything from our own experience and from headlines in the papers over the last couple of months, it is that preparation can greatly decrease the pain of disaster. Hurricanes, flooding and earthquakes have taken incredible tolls, but the tolls have been reduced when supplies have been laid in ahead of time, and when construction has been completed sound enough. We also know that storms are sometimes forecast that never materialize. Do we want to be on the safe side or the sorry side.
Since we don't know if certain materials will be in short supply, we might do well to make sure that we have a little extra on hand for the holiday weekend, just as we might for any potential major storm. That might include staples and water and a little extra cash. But even more important, especially if a storm hits, is the opportunity we'll have to check on one another to make sure everybody's doing okay. There will surely be those who would find it difficult to lay in an extra stash. So we'll do well to check on each other in our neighborhoods, and in our church community.
Maybe it would be a good idea to form a buddy system among our church members. Perhaps today after the service, or in the weeks to come you'd like to approach a buddy with whom you will be in contact at least a few times over the first couple of weeks of the new year, no matter what. This may be a great opportunity to get to know someone you don't.
If there are hard times, the connections may prove to be vital. If Y2K is mostly a false alarm though, perhaps some wonderful new friendships could be the result of having made the most from the opportunity to live intentionally and religiously. If anyone does not establish a buddy, and wants one, please call me at the church, and I'll be happy to make the arrangements. No one should be without a buddy.
One never enters into anything new without letting go of something old. We are indeed entering a new day. Knowing that our days are numbered, what will be the choices we make this day?
by Charles Blustein Ortman
September 26, 1999