If you’ve heard any of my sermons this summer, you know that I’m feeling both anxious and fascinated about the future. I wonder what’s in store for our communities, our country, the climate, the economy, health care, education, and so on and so forth. I’m curious about what kind of world we’re leaving to our children and the generations to follow.
It’s hard to read the newspaper and not start one’s day with some combination of anxiety, curiosity and fascination. I’m no different from those who have come before. People have been wondering about the future for much, if not all, of human history.
In 1980, a group of Episcopal clergy began imagining a national network of congregations that could think together about the Church’s future. In 1985, they founded what became the Consortium of Endowed Episcopal Parishes. Nancy Deppen, a longtime member of this chapel and mother of our current vestry member Nick Deppen, was one of its early executive directors.
In 2007, the Consortium—now called the Episcopal Parish Network—engaged the Institute for the Future, a respected research organization in Palo Alto, to help the Episcopal Church think about the future it was facing.
Their forecast, published in 2008, suggested that by 2018 we would be a society under stress and, to some degree, under siege. We would be living in what the authors called a VUCA world—one marked by volatility, uncertainty, complexity, and ambiguity.
The report anticipated acute climate variability, growing income gaps, polarizing political and religious extremes, health insecurity, boomers reinventing aging, digital youth, and seemingly unresolvable dilemmas of difference. Sound familiar?
The report was aptly titled The Book of Provocation. Its purpose was not simply to predict what might happen. It was intended to ask how these emerging realities might affect the Church, and how the Church might faithfully respond.
In 2025, the Diocese of Texas commissioned the Institute for the Future to take another look, this time toward 2035. The new report introduced another acronym: BANI—a world that is increasingly brittle, anxious, nonlinear, and incomprehensible.
This ten-year forecast imagined some of the challenges we may face in the coming decade: artificial intelligence woven throughout society; the growing inequities of an increasingly hot planet; and a public-health crisis of loneliness and social isolation. It warned that such a future may prove overwhelming for people who crave certainty – making them vulnerable to those who offer simple answers to problems that are anything but simple.
The report challenged the Episcopal Church to become bendable rather than brittle; attentive rather than anxious; neuro-nimble – capable of learning and improvising – in a nonlinear world; and inclusive in the face of the incomprehensible.
In other words, when the world changes, the question is not simply: What is going to happen? The question is: Who will we become?
And that brings me to this morning’s scriptures. They offer some provocations of their own about what kind of Christians – and what kind of Church – we need to become in order to live faithfully in the landscape before us.
Three words might help us: sentinel, prophet, and provocateur. A sentinel watches. A prophet interprets and speaks. A provocateur calls forth a response. And Ezekiel, I think, is all three.
The First Provocation: Pay Attention and Turn
In this morning’s reading from the Hebrew Bible, God says to Ezekiel: “So you, mortal, I have made a sentinel.” The sentinel does not control what is coming. The sentinel does not stop history. The sentinel watches, pays attention, and tells the truth about what can be seen on the horizon.
Ezekiel lived during one of the greatest catastrophes in Israel’s history: the Babylonian conquest of Judah, the destruction of Jerusalem, and the exile of its leaders to Babylon. His world had fallen apart. The institutions that had anchored his society had collapsed.
Into that world God gives Ezekiel a message: “Turn back…turn back…and live.” That is the heart of Ezekiel’s provocation. It’s not: be afraid. Nor is it: the future is doomed. But rather: pay attention, turn and live.
At their best, that is what these provocations from the Institute for the Future are intended to do. They are not threats. They are invitations to look beyond our assumptions so that we might change direction where necessary and live faithfully into the future.
One of the great temptations of the Church is to look backward when God is calling us to look around. We remember when the pews were fuller; when Sunday school classrooms were crowded; when Christianity occupied a more privileged position in American culture; and when church seemed simpler.
But nostalgia isn’t the vocation of the faithful. Our work begins by paying attention to the world as it actually is. God does not call us to live in what was; God calls us to be faithful in what is.
The Second Provocation: Learn How to Walk
The author of Psalm 119 doesn’t ask God to explain the future either. Instead, the psalmist prays: teach me the way; give me understanding; incline my heart; turn my eyes.
Faith doesn’t give us a crystal ball. We don’t know exactly what 2035 will bring. We don’t know what next year will bring. For that matter, we don’t know what tomorrow will bring.
But we can ask: How do I walk faithfully into what I cannot know? How do I keep my heart open? How do I resist fear? How do I distinguish what matters from what merely clamors for my attention?
This morning’s Psalm offers a profound spirituality for uncertain times. We don’t have to know where the road will take us. We have to learn how to walk it.
The Third Provocation: Wake Up
Paul writes to the Christians in Rome: “You know what time it is…it is now the moment for you to wake from sleep.” Paul doesn’t say, figure everything out. He doesn’t say, protect yourselves from change. He says, wake up. And what does being awake look like? Paul answers: “Owe no one anything, except to love one another.”
The future may indeed be brittle, anxious, nonlinear, and incomprehensible; but our Christian vocation is neither brittle nor incomprehensible. We know what we owe one another. Love.
The Fourth Provocation: Love Is Something We Do
In the eighteenth chapter of Matthew, Jesus becomes very concrete about what love your neighbor means. “If somebody sins against you,” Jesus says, go to them. Don’t just talk about them. Don’t gather allies against them. Don’t post about them. Don’tsimply cut them off. Go. Speak. Listen. And, if that doesn’t work, try again. Bring somebody else. Keep working at the relationship.
This is difficult Christianity. Yet, in our increasingly divided culture, it may be one of Christianity’s most important countercultural practices.
We live in a world that constantly sorts us into camps: left and right; red and blue; believer and unbeliever; friend and enemy; us and them. Jesus provokes us to think and act differently by insisting that the person with whom I am in conflict remains someone with whom I am called into relationship, someone whom I am called to love.
Love isn’t merely affection. Love is having the courage to enter a difficult conversation. Love is listening. Love is speaking an uncomfortable truth. Love is admitting that we were wrong. Love is staying at the table. Love is trying one more time.
I know how hard this is. Sometimes I simply don’t want to do it. But that is what it means to follow Jesus.
Then comes the last line of this morning’s Gospel passage: “Where two or three are gathered in my name, I am there among them.” We usually hear those words as reassurance when not very many people show up. But notice where Jesus says them.He has just been talking about conflict, truth-telling, and reconciliation.
Perhaps, Jesus is saying something even more profound. When people who are divided find the courage to come together, Christ is there. When estranged people sit down and talk, Christ is there. When someone listens instead of preparing the next argument, Christ is there. When someone says, “I was wrong,” Christ is there. When someone says, “Help me understand,” Christ is there. When people refuse to give up on one another, Christ is there.
Love in the name of Jesus is really hard work. The nineteenth-century Danish philosopher and theologian Søren Kierkegaard spent much of his life provoking the Church about precisely this.
Kierkegaard looked at the Christianity of his day and saw an enormous contradiction. Almost everyone considered themselves Christian. The Church was respectable. Christian doctrine was accepted. Christian institutions were strong. In this context, Kierkegaard essentially asked: Is anybody actually following Jesus? He distinguished between Christianity – that is, following Jesus – and Christendom – a society that simply assumes it is already Christian.
Kierkegaard’s provocation was that it is entirely possible to admire Jesus without following Jesus. We can admire his compassion; quote his teachings; sing hymns about him; build beautiful churches in his honor; and, still avoid doing what he asks us to do: love your neighbor, especially, perhaps, the neighbor with whom you disagree.
And so we return to the future. The question isn’t what will happen in 2035. The futurists can awaken us. They can point toward the horizon. They can provoke our imaginations. They will be right about some things and wrong about others, because nobody knows exactly what is coming. However, our faith has never depended upon knowing the future. Faith is knowing how we intend to walk into whatever happens
next.
Perhaps, the question for the Church isn’t: What will happen in 2035? Or even: Will our institutions survive? The question is much simpler—and much harder: Will we follow Jesus?The Church doesn’t need to have the future figured out. We need to become the people Jesus has been asking us to become all along: people who are awake; people who pay attention and tell the truth; people who remain teachable; people who listen and reconcile; people who love their neighbors; people who are willing actually to follow Jesus rather than merely admire him.
Perhaps, the great provocation isn’t: what will the Church look like in the future? Perhaps, the great provocation is: what kind of Christians will we become as we walkinto that future? And whatever that future holds, we can walk toward it trusting the promise of Jesus: “Where two or three are gathered in my name, I am there among them.”
Perhaps, the most important thing we know about the future is simply this: Christ will already be there; waiting to meet us; and ready to walk the road with us.
Proper 18A 2026
The Very Rev. Tracey Lind
St. James the Fisherman, Wellfleet, Massachusetts
September 6, 2026