2016 Top Ten

The New Year us dawning. As I write this week's blog, I am looking forward just a few days to 2016. Frankly, it scares me. This post was to have been about my top ten wishes for 2016, but I find myself unable to write it. Instead, these are my top ten fears about the coming year.

In 2016, I am afraid that:

10. Politics and economics will continue to divide us. The level of name-calling, intolerance, personal attacks and outright lies that pass as truth will increase instead of diminish. We will become more divided.

9. Violence and hatred will increase, especially against Muslims, who are the coming year's enemy of choice. While it may be true that much of the violence being done around the world belongs to Muslim extremists, the key term here is "extremist" not "Muslim." It's just easier to lump all Muslims together, you know, kinda like all Christians are the same.

8. More mass killings are on the horizon. It seems so easy now for persons to take out resentment, anger, exclusion or affliction on others that killing all of "them" seems reasonable. The more divisive we become, the more I can imagine these kinds of attacks.

7. War in the Middle East is inevitable. I see no end to the extremism that we see in the Middle East, much of which we, as a nation, have caused. As the tension of the political season mounts, I can imagine greater vitriol and even sterner warnings of annihilation. I see that such threat can be used, by groups like ISIL, as a recruitment tool for extremists. The more hateful and exclusionary the rhetoric, the more the U.S. sets itself us as "the enemy."

6. People will continue to struggle and suffer here in the United States. Homelessness will continue to increase, as will food endangerment. While we increase giving to ASPCA and other animal rights campaigns, we experience a continual increase in the numbers of men, women and children who lack proper shelter, enough to eat and a living wage.

5. Body image will lead to rejection. People will increasingly be judged according to their body shape and their "fitness" capabilities. Good fitness may allow us to live longer, but we may well live by hating our own bodies and criticizing the bodies of others. Here is yet another tool for social divisiveness.

4. We will continue the trend toward individuality, away from personhood. What matters most now seems to be what an individual has to gain from something. Others are in competition with my self for goods, positions, power, affluence, success, fame and esteem. People are commodities, things to be used to attain my own ambitions. Personhood, that which ties us together as a single entity, will continue to wane.

3. Protectionism will continue to scale upward. Protectionism is personal, cultural, political, economic, and social. If I spend all my time, energy and talent on getting and protecting my things, my ways, my assumptions, I close myself off from the open experience of encountering others. I am too afraid. The experience may require a diminishing of my "stuff, " my position, my power, my time, my energy, my safety. The mind set seems to be, increasingly, "I have gotten my stuff. Let everybody else get theirs. Oh, but they can't have any of mine."

2. Gun sales will increase. Do not get me wrong. I believe that guns can be used for protection of others, as safety against destruction. Increasingly, however, we are seeing mass murder that is committed by persons who use guns to perform acts of destruction instead of defending against them. While guns are not the causal factor, their prevalence is an ever-present danger. I fear some who carry guns, precisely because they seem so eager to use them in destructive ways.

1. Churches, that could be the locus of social discourse about all these issues, will continue to shrink and disappear, mainly because they refuse to be sites of such discourse. Churches will be seen as increasingly irrelevant, institutions of archaic practice of meaningless rite, ritual and liturgy to which only the ignorant melancholy few cling.

You see, I also think that we can turn all of this around. I think that 2016 holds great promise. In order to fulfill that promise, however, the Church must alter its purpose and behavior into a means of societal and cultural change. It must stand, with Christ, for issues of social justice, world peace, the equality of every person, the inclusion of diverse ways of believing, living, thinking and being. The Church can engage community in conversation, clinging to the hope that was in Christ Jesus (and other religious, social, political, economic, civil rights and legal figures). 2016 can be watershed year, where the Church makes a grand resurgence. Or we can shrug our collective shoulders and watch our worst fears be realized.

Here's to an important, meaningful 2016!