As most of you know, I just got back from 10 days away, leading a group from the Unitarian Universalist Church of Annapolis on a pilgrimage along the St. Cuthbert’s Way, a 62.5 trek along the Scottish/English border. Now, generally on a walking pilgrimage, there is no wheeled transportation involved. Medieval pilgrims would have walked from town to town, carrying very little and relying on the hospitality of strangers. Modern pilgrims walk from town to town relying on booking.com reservations at local hotels. But with a group of 19, like I had, sometimes that’s not even a possibility in these small Scottish towns. So, at the end of some days of walking, we relied on a bus driver named Gary who would pick us up from the trail and transport us to a slightly bigger nearby town with room to accommodate our full group.

It is not the traditional pilgrim experience, but what we lose in authenticity we make up for in the unique and particular pleasure of a group bus ride as adults. In my experience, nothing brings out the inner child like having to count off for a group leader while you wait to be driven to your destination. It feels like a field trip. We resort to our middle school bus behavior and there’s often giggling and singing and a general air of mischief. Sometimes light ribbing of the stressed out “adult” in charge, in this case me.

But there is also something profound in the bus rides. Pilgrimage is a journey and often used as a metaphor for our larger journey through life. But so often on a pilgrimage, one finds themself walking alone. But when you are all on the bus, it’s impossible to forget that we’re on this journey together. That we’re getting there as a group or not at all. One day, I got the text I dread as a group leader on these trips, a group member was struggling along the trail, tired and injured and unable to make it the last few miles. Before I could begin to formulate a plan on my own, Gary was in the driver's seat, heading down the road to look for our struggling comrade. One of our fellow pilgrims who happened to be a doctor sat next to him in the front seat, messaging about symptoms and ready to help if needed.

Once we had all 19 of us on the bus, safe and more or less, sound- laughing, joking, sharing candy bars and cheering for Gary and his heroism, I was reminded of the lyrics from our opening hymn.

“Ours is no caravan of despair.”

I’ve preached about the “who” of these famous lines from Rumi. The wanderers, worshipers, and lovers of leaving. Those who have broken their vows a thousand times. I’ve preached about the message it offers of grace and forgiveness and radical welcome.

But it occurred to me I hadn’t given much thought to the where and the how- to that line that rang through my head on the bus. “Ours is no caravan of despair.” Where is this caravan headed? When we tell people to come, come, where is it we’re asking them to journey with us? And how do we get there?

I will not lie to you. There are plenty of reasons for despair in our world today. Despite advancements in science and medicine, average life expectancy in the US has fallen back to the level it was at nearly 20 years ago. Scientists predict temperatures and sea levels will continue to rise. Almost 14% of children in the US live in poverty. And those are just the big picture things, I won’t even begin listing the 27 horrible stories from this week's news cycle. In a world that gives us every reason to despair, what does it mean to invite people to join a caravan of hope? Are we being delusional when we sing, “our is no caravan of despair?”

I don’t think that we are. And I’ll get to why in a minute. But first we’re going to take an interlude for a little theological education.

Does anyone know the word, “eschatology?” I’m guessing you either took a theology glass or grew up in a tradition that read The Book of Revelation a lot? So eschatology is the theology of final things. Where does this all end up? What’s our human destiny? It is our ultimate vision of the universe. It gets a bad rap because it’s so often associated with end times theology- cults that try to predict the exact date of the end of the world, or the Left Behind books about the rapture that traumatized generations of evangelical children.

But that’s such a small sliver of eschatological theologies. Our own tradition has been deeply shaped by eschatology. Our Universalist ancestors wrestled with the concept, arriving at the idea that a loving God wouldn’t let people face an eternity of torment. We talked a few weeks ago about the cyclical nature of Buddhism. The idea that there are endless cycles of creation rather than a single line with an apocalyptic end point is a very different kind of eschatology than what we’re used to, but an eschatology none the less. And then there are lots of eschatologies that believe our destiny is human flourishing, justice, or reconciliation with the sacred. The Jewish concept of Tikkun Olam is an eschatological commitment. It holds that our broken world can ultimately be repaired to wholeness, but humans must do the work, even though we will not see it complete in our lifetime.

And in some ways, we all have an eschatology, whether it is explicit or implicit. We’re all operating with certain ideas about the future and those ideas impact how we behave in the present. Religious scholars would say that our eschatology informs our ethics.

Let’s take a modern, non-religious example to help demonstrate this idea: Elon Musk, Peter Thiel, Sam Altman and other silicon valley billionaires invested in artificial intelligence. Sociologist Liz Bucar wrote recently about how their eschatology was made blatantly clear in court filings related to Musk’s lawsuit against Altman and Open AI. Those court documents spoke explicitly about the inevitable dominance of AI. Their eschatology, she says, is that AI will surpass human intelligence, and humans will become obsolete as a species. And this is the eschatology that informs their ethics. Remember how Musk once called empathy the fundamental weakness of our civilization?

Bucar writes, “If you genuinely believe that human extinction is coming, why would you feel any obligation to the people around you right now? Why invest in public health, housing, schools, or anything that requires imagining a collective human future? The tech bros’ eschatology doesn’t just fail to motivate ethical behavior, it actively authorizes its absence.”

Where we think we’re going impacts how we act now. So you can get a pretty good idea of where someone thinks this caravan is headed by paying attention to their current actions. That’s true of Musk and Altman and Theil. But it’s also true of us.

And Ours, well, ours is no caravan of despair. Ours is a caravan of hope.

I know this to be true because we’re acting like it.

We are still in the process of shaping our mission and vision as a congregation, but I can see the shape your vision is taking based on how you’ve shown up this year.

You are open to new ideas in worship and willing to engage with me in real conversations about what worship means to you. That tells me you have a vision of worship that both embraces pluralism and honors tradition. That both welcomes and challenges. That enriches our imaginations and spirits.

You reinvigorated our social justice ministry and are weekly inviting one another into small, concrete actions to protect our neighbors, our democracy, our earth. That’s not something you spend time doing if you don’t believe another world is possible.

You ran an unprecedented stewardship campaign and put so much time and energy into the tour and parking fundraisers. That tells me you believe this is a community that’s worth growing and sustaining into the future. When news articles and pundits try to tell us that the church is dying and religion is becoming obsolete, it tells me you believe in a future where communities of radical belonging, mutual support and spiritual nourishment are cornerstones of our shared life.

You’ve cared for our children and youth, encouraging their leadership and answering their questions and welcoming them so fully and joyfully into the life of this congregation. That tells me you believe in a future where they will grow and thrive, inherit what we’ve built, hopefully improve on it and become stewards of this church, this community, our world.

You’ve provided meal trains, and rides to doctors appointments for members of our community. You’ve assisted at memorial services of departed beloveds and held one another in grief and fear and loss. Just this week you rallied around Billy in his time of need. That tells me that unlike the silicone valley billionaires we talked about earlier, you believe in a future where every human being is valued and cared for and holy.

Ours is no caravan of despair.

An eschatological vision of justice, equity, wholeness, and flourishing for all creatures is a hard sell these days. It seems improbable to many, a naively optimistic vision nearly impossible to achieve. But see, I don’t think we have to sell such a grand vision. When eschatology feels too hard, too impossible, too big to grasp, we can lead with our ethics. Because this caravan of hope is as much about how we get there as where we’re headed. Through small, everyday acts of kindness and goodness we can show, concretely, that we haven’t given up on that future vision. Every time we drive the bus down the road to get a struggling pilgrim back onboard the caravan, we show that we’re headed to a destination where everyone matters, everyone is valued, and no one gets left behind.

Liz Bucar writes, “We do not know what the future looks like. And yet, we have to act as if there is some version of us that endures, don’t we? As if what we do today will matter to people we will never meet? As if the world is worth repairing even though we won’t finish the job? Because if we don’t, the machines deserve to take over.”

Every time we write a poem, or plant a tree, care for our neighbor, teach our children we are showing that we are invested in a beautiful future, full of unrealized possibilities.

That’s what it means to be a people of hope. To behave, even in the face of uncertainty, like there’s a better future ahead of us. Like there will be a world worthy of our children’s inheritance.

And you are already doing it, fondly and locally, regularly and profoundly right here at First Church in Salem. I’ve witnessed it all church year and I’m so glad to be on this caravan with you.

Next week, we will wrap up our official church year with a service led by our children and youth and a celebratory picnic. Then our pace will slow, committees will take a break, we’ll head off on vacations and rest up for the year ahead. But let us commit now to returning, again and again, to this caravan of hope, where with every small act of kindness, justice, and love, we travel one mile closer to the future we believe is possible.

May it be so.
Amen.