Islands of Tomorrow 7/1/45
Scripture: Luke 24: 13-34
Modern popular literature furnished us an interesting example of collaboration in the writing of several books. Charles Nordhoff and James Hall were not content to settle down at old familiar pursuits following the last World War. So they went to the south Seas in the Pacific. Each married a Tahitian wife and settler there permanently.
The two men began to write in collaboration. Drafting the main plan of a book together each chose the chapters he would write and went home. When the first draft was done, they exchanged manuscripts, criticized and corrected and rewrote. Finally the book would appear. The writing was so well correlated that only an expert could hope to tell which chapters had been written by Nordhoff and which by Hall, even though each had done his own work in his own home.
Together they wrote “Fairy Islands of the South Seas.” Then came that interesting trilogy, “Mutiny on the Bounty,” “Men against the Sea,” and “Pitcairn Island.” You may have seen some of these stories in motion pictures.
Recently a Saturday Evening Post article calls attention to the descendants of some of the Bounty’s mutineers encountered by members of our armed forces today in South Pacific islands.
Not long ago, abandoning the role of collaborator, James Hall wrote a book all his own entitled “Lost Island.” Dr. Horace G. Smith, President of Garrett Biblical Institute, calls attention to the book in a sermon of his which I read recently, much of which I want to pass on to you this morning.
According to Hall’s story, one of the quick decisions of our military leaders after the Pearl Harbor attack involved certain islands to the south across the Pacific ocean. A southerly air route might be needed to keep supplies and personnel going through as far as Australia, while the enemy pushed farther and farther south. The American authorities quickly set about securing the necessary island bases on which planes could land, and from which they could take off.
One of the islands needed was a lovely coral island on which lived a hundred or more Melanesians and four people of the Caucasian race. Of the four Caucasians, one was an old sea captain who had married into the Melanesian group and was regarded by them as a sort of elder statesman. One was a Roman Catholic priest who had endeared himself to the people, under whose leadership they had built a beautiful chapel and made a lovely garden. The other two were a father and daughter - Jewish refugees who had come there to a veritable sanctuary after terrible experiences abroad.
These four, and the hundred or so Melanesians, lived on their lovely island in what would seem as one looks back to it to be very nearly idyllic contentment. But their island was needed as an air base during this titanic war. And no other island in that area would do. Proper arrangements were made with the owner of the island, and then these people were told, kindly but firmly, that they would be moved to another island.
They were moved, together with moveable possessions from this island which had been their home for generations. Then the engineers quickly set to work. Native houses were swept away and trees uprooted. Ground was leveled and surfaced for landing strips. Only the church was dismantled with care, but it too disappeared. These innocent people had lost their island home forever.
When we read such an account, we are filled with sympathy for the simple people who, through no fault of their own, have lost their home. And a deep regret rises in us that the demands of war must be so harsh. Of course they fared much better than millions of others who have lost their homes without any other place to go; who have lost all that life holds dear and even life itself. Even this tempering realization does not satisfactorily justify the case however. It remains one of those cruel necessities which war demands.
The story of this Lost Island illustrates, however, the way life works among all people. We are always losing “islands” that have seemed so fair, and we are destined to lose others. It is part of our Christian philosophy of life to learn how to accept these losses and look to the Island of Tomorrow.
As adults look back to childhood, that seems like a “lovely island.” We remember with a certain longing what seem now to have been carefree days. (Of course they weren’t carefree; they were filled with the cares of childhood instead of the cares of maturity - with lost jackknives and rainy picnic days instead of lost jobs or uninsured illnesses!) The taste of apples from the tree, the lure of the swimming hole, the adventures of camping, the fresh awakening from a night of sound sleep, and “house” made of a few sticks in one’s favorite “climbing tree” - all seems like a lovely island, now lost to the adult. Memories float back filled with romance and adventure. We look at them a bit enviously as though every day had been bright and fair.
Time passed and the island of early childhood was lost. Parents, teachers and friends of the whole adult world moved us who are now grown to another island. They were very nice about it, and often kindly - but firm. We had to go to school. We had to learn and do, regularly, certain jobs about the house and yard. The “tomorrow” of our prekindergarten talk had now arrived!
Something like it happened in college, before the time of “accelerated” programs and war’s stern demands. Four years of study, play, and fellowship with students and faculty! It was a lovely island; and many a man and many a woman looks back on those four years as the happiest so far.
But that island is also taken away after a while. The faculty was careful about letting us in, more careful about letting us stay. Bye and bye they told us to get out into some islands of the future in a nice ceremony called “commencement.”
We are always “losing islands” and being moved on. Time marches on and relentlessly carries us with it. We play one part, and find that the very playing has groomed us for a new part. We can be gloomy about the island we have lost, or eager about the one we are approaching.
Many remember the world as it was before 1914. It is hard to realize now how secure one could feel in this country up to that time. There was a geographical isolation that seemed to protect those living here. An ocean on two sides, and peoples with whom we could be on friendly terms to the north and south of us. No one worried then about global warfare. Never again will this nation, or any other nation, live on such a lovely isolated island. It is lost forever. The islands of tomorrow are more thickly populated and we have no choice except to learn to live with them!
Our living is filled with other illustrations. There was a time when one workman, one craftsman, completed most of the work in making a given object. A man might make a wagon with his own two hands and the materials and tools at hand. Another might complete every detail of a set of harness for a team of carriage horses. One family might produce a suit of clothes, completing the whole process from raising and shearing sheep, through spinning, weaving, dyeing, cutting and fitting. A laborer could look at his handicraft and say, if he thought of it, “I have made this with my own hands. By my own labor, I am the boss of my own life. Let others do the same if they want to get along. As for my neighbor, we can trade or not, as we desire.”
Much of that is gone now. And it is all changed. Mass production has speeded it up. Not one man, but thousands of men and women make one truck or touring car. People all the way from Australia to England may be engaged in the processes that produce one wool dress or suit. Mass production and the conveyor belt has brought better products and more of them. The individual craftsman is largely pushed aside. And if he will survive, he takes his place on an assembly line or at a desk, playing only one part in creation - perhaps feeling that his part is no more than that of stage hand in the drama of production. Vast numbers of workers can not know each other in a single factory. Much less can they know their employer personally, nor he all of them.
An island that may seem to have been lovely is lost. Another island is ahead. And there is nothing to do except learn to live on the new island.
Individuals, groups, nations in a whole world lose islands and move to new ones. Inventions, laboratory discoveries, new methods and processes keep us ever like the man of old who “went out not knowing whither he was going.”
Not every one will accept necessity and keep going toward the islands of tomorrow. I suspect that no small number of persons are poised for the day they can start back to the old island. They are waiting for the hour when they can start. The old job, the old pastimes, the same family circle around the table, the same free shooting in business. Some of the things that have been lost temporarily ought to be recovered. But in a sense of which we should be very keenly aware, there is no going back. Even if he wants it back, a man may find great changes in what he thinks of as his old job. The old pastimes will involve new people and different play. Those who gather around the family table will never be “just the same” as they were last year, or two or three years ago. The years of study, work, war and time have made all different and we must find our joy in the new maturity that time has brought.
Twenty five years ago, the nostalgic and determined cry, “Back to normalcy” proved to be only the voice of a siren leading our country fast toward depression, unemployment and more war.
The islands of the past are lost forever. No amount of determination can replace the same trees, the same cabins, the same people at the same age and with the same tastes as in the days gone by.
They only realistic and faithful way of living is to face forward to the islands of tomorrow that lie ahead. Most of the good, we can cherish and carry with us in our hearts anyway.
The history of our own nation is so. Millions of our ancestors and some of our contemporaries have come from an old world and found a richer, fuller life in what so many have called a Promised Land. Pioneers moving westward left much behind that was precious, but on the whole found something better farther on.
The intellectual leader who speaks of “America Unlimited;” the research engineer who declares that we are even now on the edge of a new continent; those dreamers who talk of a life “fuller, richer, finer for all” - these are the voices to encourage us and lead us to faith in the future.
And so as we lose our beloved islands of the present and past, we will not be defeated or frustrated, but will press forward to the other islands which lie before us in the future.
Two stories from the Bible illustrate, better than our modern incidents, the way to face life when we have lost an island as individual persons or as a group. That is why these ancient stories have lived through the centuries - they have life itself.
The first is that of the children of Israel who had grown and lived in slavery in Egypt for generations. After harrowing experiences, they have left Egypt behind and are on their way to a Promised Land. They way is long; food is scarce, poor, and rationed daily. They begin to whine. Some of them propose that they go back to Egypt where at least they had leeks and onions and a job making “bricks without straw.” It was slavery under lash, but at least most of them had stayed alive. But the voice of the Eternal said that the way was forward through the pillar of fire by night and of cloud by day, even though it might take months and years.
The other story is near the end of one of the New Testament Gospels. Two disciples, broken hearted over the hopes they had lost when they seemed to lose their master, were on their way to Emmaus. They were wishing that they could go back to that comradeship in which they had dreamed of a new world - as they saw it - wherein a little bit of territory for a free Israel might be set apart from the Roman yoke. Return to their lost island seemed hopeless, yet they longed for it.
If they had had their way, they probably would have gone back - and perished with the other zealots whom Rome put to death as rebels. And the world would have missed all of the history of “redemption and release” which has been proclaimed through the church since then.
Jesus knew a better way. He tried to prepare the disciples by telling them that it was expedient that he should leave them. Ahead lay a more wonderful island toward which God was leading them.
And Jesus Christ is still trying to tell us the same thing.
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Delivered in Wisconsin Rapids, July 1, 1945