Over the past several years many of us have heard our Bishop, Scott Jones, repeat the phrase: If the 1950’s ever return the church will be ready to do ministry.  One day I was in a meeting where the Bishop was speaking and changed his normal statement to:  If 1957 ever returns.  Shortly after that, in yet another meeting, it said it again.  If 1957 ever returns the church will be ready to do ministry.  Being the curious type, I decide to Google 1957.  Do you have any idea what happened in 1957?

That was the year nine black students attempted to enroll in a previously all white school in Little Rock, Arkansas.  The building was surrounded by an angry mob until President Dwight D. Eisenhower deployed federal troops into the area.  Their job was to secure the building and protect the nine students.

While the civil rights movement was gaining momentum in this country, Europe was experiencing its own political upheaval.  On March 25^th of that year, the Treaty of Rome established the European Economic Community and the European Atomic Community.  The United Kingdom, however, had been conspicuously absent from the entire process.  One has to wonder if that was because Britain was preparing to test its first hydrogen bomb.  This was despite objections from the newly created International Atomic Energy Agency.

With the arms race moving full speed ahead, the world community was ready for some good news.  But it just wasn’t going to happen.  In June of 1957, the Soviet Union launched Sputnik 1 – the first artificial satellite to circle the earth. And everyone knew whichever country conquered space first would go on to control the world.

With so much chaos and uncertainty it was not surprising that some in the religious world declared that humankind’s sins had become so great – that the chasm between God and us had become so wide – there was no hope left.  The tribulation had obviously begun!

Now, no one in the Christian community denied that the world was becoming more complicated and, in many ways, an even more dangerous place to live.  What they could not agree on, however, was that God had given up on us – that we were doomed and all creation with us.  As a mater of fact, one of the leading religious voices of that time was a Swedish theologian by the name of Karl Barth. In the fall of 1957 he delivered a sermon to the inmates at Basel jail entitled “All”.  His one verse text was Romans 11:32:  For God has imprisoned all in disobedience so that he may be merciful to all.

As the comic strip character Pogo once said:  We have met the enemy and he is us. In other words, we are the sinful ones.  We are the ones who need God’s forgiveness