Let us begin. I open this morning with some words of Dag Hammerskjold:

"Offspring of the past, pregnant with the future, the present moment, nonetheless, always exists in eternity — always in eternity as the point of intersection between time and the timelessness of faith, and therefore, as the moment of freedom from the past and the future.? Let us celebrate today this present moment, the richness of it that derives both from all that has happened to bring us to this place and time and from all that will come from the present and lead us into the future.

I would like to begin with a few words by Sara Moores Campbell:

"We receive fragments of holiness, glimpses of eternity, brief moments of insight. Let us gather them up for the precious gifts that they are and, renewed by their grace, move boldly into the unknown."

As I’ve been thinking about the New Year (which this definitely is) and the new decade, century, millennium (which this is or is not depending on who you talk to), I’ve been struck by the imagery of standing on the edge of the future. My Bachelor’s Degree was in History and I have always struggled with the concept of teaching historical events as though they happened in a vacuum. This means that the whole interrelated notion of history and the complexity of human interactions is somehow set aside and historical events are treated as though they happened in a world where nothing else was going on. An offshoot of this thinking to me has always been the breaking of history into discreet eras or ages or centuries that have a finite start and a finite end like the Dark Ages, the Black Death, the Renaissance. And here we stand at the brink of one of those times which is going, in all the textbooks, to be set apart from the year just ended. Because this is the 21st century and it will in some way be defined as distinct from all that was happening 2 days ago. Now, we all know that nothing magic happened to the ongoing history of the world on Friday night. The stock market will open where it left off. The peace talks scheduled in the Middle East are still scheduled and will take place soon. It is only a matter of time before the first school shooting, the first plane crash, the first earthquake, the first major court case? of the new millennium and all of these events will have more in common with last year than the mythical boundary into the 21st century.

On the other hand we have had a wonderful time to reflect on people and things of the year, decade, century, and millennium and this has given us glimpses of things that have really lasted over time. We have been able to focus on the people whose decisions, discoveries, and inventions have profoundly impacted life in the last 1000 years. Some were predictable and some were surprising, but our world would be a different place if they had not lived.

There were, of course, many omissions. Some of these are George Marshall, Queen Victoria, Rachel Carson, Michelangelo, Florence Nightingale, Lord Baden-Powell, Dorothea Dix, Albert Schweitzer, Jane Addams, the many tireless workers in the womens’ suffrage and labor movements, Marie Curie, the Gershwins, Maimonides, the Leakeys, Margaret Mead, Chaucer, Giotto, Charles Dickens, and so many more that between us we could fill the rest of the day.

So here we stand together on the edge of time in the footsteps of people great and small from the past, not knowing who the famous and the infamous will be for this new time. But there is another edge I want to talk about this morning. That is the edge of our lives, the edge of our knowledge and our understanding of ourselves and our understanding of where we exist and the relationship between those two. In my little blurb in the newsletter about this sermon, I said the following: "It was common practice among medieval cartographers that when a mapmaker had reached the edge of his geographical knowledge, he would write in to the unknown area the phrase ‘Here be dragons.’ Just as with the mapmakers of old, at the edge of our knowledge and understanding lies the unknown, the dragons."

There is a fine line between what we know as individuals and as a culture and things we are discovering or have yet to learn. We stand always close to that edge in the constant awareness that there remains an infinite as yet unknown beyond our reach. As we learn new things, we sense that there is still more to learn, but it takes time and commitment to keep approaching the edge of our understanding and to want again to wander into the unknown. What lies beyond that edge includes science, technology, philosophy, art, medicine, theology, exploration, invention, discovery. Each of us is in a different place in relation to that unknown. On our own map of the world the place of the dragons, marking the unknown territory will look different than anyone else’s map and yet what we experience as we learn, as our map changes and the unknown shifts is universal.

Children live more easily on that edge than the rest of us. Children seem often to live more gracefully than we do. There are two reasons children can balance on the edge of knowledge and understanding more easily than we: first, they are new to this and they are learning all the time — it isn’t a conscious decision for them, they just do because it needs to be done in order to make sense of the world and to interact with it. Second, they don’t know what we know about how overwhelming knowledge can be. One of the by-products of our technological age is the sheer quantity of information that surrounds us. Gone are the days of the Renaissance man, when all the important knowledge of the world could be learned by a single individual.

We live bombarded by new information every day. Most of us can barely assimilate one day’s worth of information in time to move on to the next. It’s no wonder that so many of us back up from the edge and begin to live complacently within the knowledge we already have and feel comfortable with. But is all that information really important or is someone just shouting it louder to get your attention. Is this knowledge or is it just noise? Are we really getting to the things we need to know or are we getting lost in the volume of factoids that swirl around us all the time now. And just how much faster can we learn to process the differences and pick and choose the things we need to understand? We are now balancing our need for knowledge differently than past generations. What we need to understand to live our complicated lives is more than it used to be and yet, also, somehow less.

I am reminded of a couple of interviews on surviving Y2K that I heard several months ago now. In the first they were talking with an Amish worker who was building some electricity-free appliance. He was being pressured to build more and faster because the demand was far out-pacing the supply. He was told he could name his price since people preparing for the inevitable disaster would pay anything. But he was more concerned with the quality of the product and his need to balance the demands of making this thing with his other responsibilities. He simply wouldn’t be pressured. When he was done he was done, simple as that. And, of course, he wasn’t facing the same disaster. The very nature of his lifestyle made the whole panic somehow unreal.

The other interview was with a shop owner selling wood-burning stoves, another top-seller in pre-Y2K preparations. He had received a call from a customer who was shocked to learn that in addition to the trouble and expense of buying the stove she would need to buy a chimney and cut a hole in her house to let the smoke out. She was much put out by the inconvenience of that concept but replied that if the seller was sure it had to be done that way she guessed she’d find someone to do it.

Add to these the one I just heard at work about a friend of a friend who proudly announced to all and sundry that she had successfully maxed out every credit card she had, so that when the credit card companies crashed she would have gotten all those goods and services for free, and wasn’t she clever? These stories are somewhat humorous, but they also serve to show us how far we have come from the periods in our past when we were more self-sufficient, when we understood certain realities about our limitations in controlling the world around us. We have always been an arrogant species, but in spite of steady reminders that we are not in complete control of anything we are becoming if anything more arrogant as we become less prepared to deal with the consequences of giving up self-sufficiency in favor of the great global interconnected complexity we now call life.

One of the most important things to me about the path I am on now is the chance for me to explore my unknown, to look at my own dragons and to make conscious choices about what kind of knowledge I am looking for. Because I have a specific goal now it has become easier for me to look for the specific things I need to know and reach out in those discreet areas. I know that I walk far behind many others who have long known the things I am just discovering. But the wonder of it is that it doesn’t matter whether everyone else knows the things I am just learning. They are still magic to me and they fill in holes in my map that a few years ago I didn’t even recognize.

So what do you see when you look out across what you know and what you understand and what you believe? What are the unknowns to you. What are the things that you want to understand? And if you walk up to the edge of your unknowing and face that vastness what do you see there? Some time after my mother was diagnosed with cancer, she became aware of the fact that she would never be able to read all the books she wanted to read. She would have to pick and choose. That realization was very difficult for her and yet she was just putting words to a reality we all face. We can’t know everything. We can’t learn everything. About some things we may not have the skills, about others we can honestly admit we haven’t the interest. We need to cut through the noise and choose from among the wealth of knowledge. As with so many things the more intentional we can be the more successful we will be. I confess I find myself a little on the fence about this. On the one hand, I really do believe that we often bite off more than we can chew in our enthusiasm. And sometimes this overabundance becomes overwhelming and in spite of good intentions we slow to a halt under the weight of it all. On the other hand, one of my greatest pleasures is to pick up the dictionary or the encyclopedia and read. I always have a specific fact I’m looking for, but I never put down one of the those books without thumbing through it and looking up all sorts of other things. And those digressions are a pure joy to me, partly because I’m learning just for the fun of it.

Now, a word or two about all those great people of the century and millennium I mentioned earlier. I find myself wondering what do visionaries, and prophets, and explorers see when they stand on the edge of their unknown? Do they see the same unknown that we see? I don’t think so. They see something out there and they are willing to walk out across that unknown toward that something that only they can see. A little taste of this can be found in the book The King of the Castle by Gai Eaton:

"Let us imagine a summer landscape, bounded only by our limited vision but in truth unbounded; a landscape of hills and valleys, forests and rivers, but containing also every feature that an inventive mind might bring to thought. Let us suppose that somewhere in this measureless extension a child has been blowing bubbles for the sheer joy of seeing them carried on the breeze, catching the sunlight, drifting between earth and sky. And then let us compare all that we know of our world, the earth and what it contains, the sun, the moon and the stars, to one such bubble, a single one. It exists. But it is a very small thing, and in a few moments it is gone.

This, at least, is one way of indicating the traditional or — taking the word in its widest sense — the religious view of our world and how it is related to all that lies beyond it. Perhaps the image may be pursued a step further. The bubble’s skin reflects what lies outside and is, at the same time, transparent. Those who live within may be aware of the landscape in quite different ways. Those whose sight is weak or untrained may still surmise its existence and, believing what they are told by others who see more clearly, have faith in it. Secondly, there are some who will perceive within the bubble itself reflections of what lies outside and begin to realize that everything within is neither more nor less than a reflection and has no existence in its own right. Thirdly, as by a miracle of sight, there will be a few for whom transparency is real and actual. Their vision pierces the thin membrane which to others seems opaque and, beyond faith, they see what is to be seen."

They are the visionaries, the people who see further and clearer. They know there will be a price for their vision partly because it is theirs and only they can see it and only they can make it real. And what they do for us is to move the edge forward. They turn the image they see into reality for all of us to step forward into. And a few of them create by their vision and tenacity a new reality, a new paradigm. As we move forward after people like Columbus or Einstein or Gandhi, we move into a new world. The world we see has literally been transformed by these people and the vision they have shared with us. There is no going back from Galileo, from Newton, from Guttenberg.

In his book Art & Physics Leonard Shlain has this to say about one of these reality shifts:

"From antiquity to the 1860s, all scientific discoveries of moment were based upon sharp-edged black-and-white numbers and measurable quantities. Then within the next sixty years, a few physicists stared in childlike wonder at the spectrum of colors and discovered the following: the composition of the stars; the fusion of magnetism, electricity, and light; the genesis of quantum mechanics; the structure of the atom; and the expansion of the universe. These five discoveries rank among the most profound insights in the history of science. Einstein’s realization that light (which is color) is the quintessence of the universe paralleled the apotheosis of light by the artists. Before Einstein made his discovery, Claude Monet announced that ‘the real subject of every painting is light.’ Echoing this sentiment, Einstein later commented, ‘For the rest of my life I want to reflect on what light is.’ Both artist and physicist confirmed a great Biblical truth. In Genesis, God’s grand opening act was the creation of light. God did not say, ‘Let there be space’ or ‘Let there be time.’ God said, ‘Let there be light.’ "

In conclusion, I would like to say a word or two about the dragons I would hope we will all push back a bit as we move forward into this new year. We need to learn how to be in harmony in with our home; this fantastic gift, our planet. We need to learn how to live together with justice and honesty. We need to learn about teaching; in so many ways our methods are broken. We need to look out there for new thoughts and new methods to teach the new things we need to know. We need to explore so many things from the richness of earth, to the boundless expanses of space, to the inner workings of our bodies and our minds. Finally, we need to set aside our arrogance and our complacency, to recognize that we don’t know it all. We have so much to learn and we have so many choices about where and how. We stand together in the present moment between the past and the future: the intersection between time and the timelessness of faith. Let us savor the wonderful opportunity surrounding us in this present moment.

I would like to take a few moments of silence to reflect on the richness, the complexity, the simplicity, and the wonder of our unknown.

Again from Dag Hammerskjold:

I am being driven forward

Shall I ever get there?