Rather than acting as a signpost to the strange new world of Scripture, the sermon all-too-often obstructs our view of the Bible’s terrain. We have lost sight of the strange; our pews remain fixed in the familiar.
Those who care deeply about the fate of the planet would do worse than to take Tolkien’s Elves as their model, building communities marked by artistry, craftsmanship, husbandry, wisdom, and delight. This will involve equal parts remembering, stability, humility, and self-denial.
We citizens of Technopolis believe fervently in the supremacy of the will. What we will is how things are. Nothing is chiseled into sacred tablets, nothing has any meaning that we can’t change, nothing is beyond our self-interested exploitation and tinkering. If by an act of collective will we deem something good, then it must be good simply because we’ve deemed it so.