The Theology of Not-Yet

It happens this way …

I just finished reading Nine Essential Things I’ve Learned About Life by Harold S. Kushner, the author of Why Bad Things Happen to Good People. Each chapter was a revelation about God’s nature, Nature’s nature, and human nature that stopped me in my tracks. Admittedly, I will have to go back and read the book again in order to internalize the wisdom and Biblical insights of this compassionate rabbi who writes to the heart as well as to the mind.

But for now, I wanted to share the book’s closing words. They  brought me to tears. Given the political and theological insanity that has been ripping apart our nation, I needed to hear these words:

               This world is not the world God intended it to be. Some human beings have made it  worse and continue to do so, while others have made and are making it better. I am sustained by the words of Martin Luther King Jr., quoting Theodore Parker, an abolitionist who died in 1860: “The arc of the moral universe is long but it bends toward justice.” And it bends toward honesty and toward forgiveness and toward generosity.

Kushner aptly calls this perspective the “theology of not-yet.”

One of the lessons I learned when we visited Philadelphia in July was that the vision of the Founding Fathers – so revolutionary, so world-shaking for its time – was still evolving in the not-yet history of America.

The huge sign on the side of the American Jewish History Museum was a poignant reminder of that fact. Writing to the Jewish community in Newport, RI, in 1790, George Washington said, “Happily the Government of the United States … gives to bigotry no sanction, to persecution no assistance.”

Today, all I can summon up is “not-yet, not-yet” while cultivating the hope that we will all bend toward honesty, forgiveness, and generosity so it “will be” in a future we are creating together.