Sermon 78 - Quantum Community
Job 9:33
If only there were someone to mediate between us, someone to bring us together
Ephesians 4:16
From him the whole body, joined and held together by every supporting ligament, grows and builds itself up in love, as each part does its work.
1 John 4:18
There is no fear in love. But perfect love drives out fear, because fear has to do with punishment. The one who fears is not made perfect in love.
Usually my sermons are inspired by somebody else's boring sermon. Not today. Today it was actually the prayer time, before the service began, that occasioned thoughts.
First of all, someone thanks God that the church was doing a great job of outreach to the community. I was immediately reminded of the Pharisee and the tax collector in the temple. We all see the Pharisee as the bad guy in this parable. It's clear, from the way the parable ends that the Pharisee as the bad guy. But it wouldn't have been seen that way by the Jews, in the first century, who heard the parable. The Pharisees weren't the bad guys. The Pharisees were the religious elite. No, they might not have been actual priests, since you had to be a Levite, and even a subset within the family of Levi, in order to be a priest. They would be the teachers. They would be the *teachers* of teachers. Not exactly pastors, they would have been more like the faculty at theological colleges. They would have been Bishops. They would have been area ministers. They'd definitely be wardens, and deacons, and elders. Some of them would have been the equivalent of televangelists! They were the good guys.
And then there's the prayer that the Pharisee prayed. There actually isn't anything wrong with that prayer. The prayer thanks God that God has provided you with teaching, and support, and revelation, and the will to obey God. The prayer isn't really boasting about how good you are. It is thanking God for *making* you good. It is attributing to God any of your goodness. This is, in fact, a prescribed prayer. You can look it up in Psalms. It's right there. Chapter and verse.
So, there isn't anything wrong with thanking God for the fact that your church is doing outreach to the community in which your church is situated. It is good to thank God for his strength for giving you the opportunity to do outreach, and to fulfill the great commandment, and for giving your church the strength to follow through on it.
If, indeed, your church does, in fact, follow through on it.
And there's the rub. There's the problem. In the parable, was the Pharisee, in fact, so much better, so much holier, then the person he was comparing himself with? And, in prayer time today, was this church doing a particularly good job of outreach?
Now, I'm not really giving away any personally, or institutionally, identifying information by saying that, in the case of this church, I think not. An awful lot of churches in town say that they are doing outreach. And, a number of churches in town do make steps towards outreach. They give handouts to the poor. They help organizations that are helping the poor. They take up collections for organizations that are helping the poor. They even go into the streets, some of them, and actually talk to the poor, when they're handing out backpacks, or bags, or sandwiches. But do they actually follow through?
I am reminded of the old Jewish joke from the movie "Fiddler on the Roof": God bless and keep the homeless; far away from us!
I have, elsewhere, noted that doing security (which is my field) is like shoveling snow. You have to do the whole job, or, very often, it's worse than never even starting.
Do we do the whole job in regard to community outreach? Now, community outreach is a huge task. None of us, individually, can do that whole job. Having visited every Church in town, I can confidently state that the Christian population is only about four percent of the town. So for the four percent to reach out to the 96%, well, it's a huge task. So, no, nobody is expecting any one Christian, or even one church, to take on that whole task.
The thing is, there isn't much going on in regard to even part of the outreach task. As I say, I go around to a lot of the churches in town. On a fairly regular basis. And I'm not seeing much change in the populations of the churches. So if all of this outreach is going on, where are all the new congregants? If the outreach is, in fact, being effective, why aren't the churches growing?
Okay, I will agree that the philosophy of the church growth movement is not the only measure of success in spreading the kingdom of God. So, it isn't fair just to look at church membership numbers, and say that outreach is not going on. But I also see what is happening to individuals who are going into the churches in town. I see people coming to town, already part of the Christian church, and starting church shopping. And I also see them going from church to church, and being disappointed by the lack of outreach from the churches, when, after all, the individuals reached out first in coming to the churches. And, in all too many cases, I see the attempts to find a church falter, and then often die, since there is no return on the investment.
Yes, there are always people who come to our churches with an ulterior motive, and want something from us that we can't give or can't afford to give. But I'm seeing this failure to welcome newcomers in far too many cases. It's not just the leeches who are being turned away.
So, those were my initial thoughts, following that initial prayer to thank God for how good we are being at fulfilling the great commission. The thing is, prayer time went on. And, later in the prayer time, the prayers started to turn to the problems in the immediate vicinity of the church. And the problems are real. I know this. Probably better than the members of this particular church. After all, I am a volunteer with community policing. And, in community policing, we have recently been made aware of some concerns in the vicinity of this church. So, yes, the problems are real.
The thing is, the problems come from precisely the same demographic that, a few minutes earlier, the church had been congratulating itself on doing successful outreach to. And nobody seemed to notice that this was the case. Nobody seemed to be aware that, a few minutes earlier, they have been congratulating themselves, and thanking God for their success, in reaching out to this particular demographic. Supposedly they were making connections. Supposedly they were making changes in the lives of the individuals within this demographic. Supposedly they were improving the situation, and bringing the particular members of this outside community, into the church community. And then, a few minutes later, they were calling down God's protection on the church, to keep the members of the outside community away from the church, and the church community.
We are pleased with outreach *to* the community, just not keen on danger *from* the community.
And, seemingly, nobody saw any particular problem with this. Nobody saw any contradiction in these two prayers. Nobody seemed to be aware that they were congratulating themselves with reaching outsiders for Christ, and then asking Christ to keep the outsiders away from their Church.
Being a physicist my mind immediately went to quantum mechanics. In the normal world an object can't be in two states at once. In quantum physics a quantum entity can. Here we have a church which wants to be in community and doesn't want to be in community at the same time. In quantum physics this is known as superposition.
The thing is that superposition is an unstable state. There is something called the observer effect. As soon as anybody observes the superposition entity, the wave state collapses and the entity assumes one state or the other.
Which means that as soon as anybody takes a closer look at this prayer that wants to be reaching out to the community, but also wants to be protected *from* the community, these claims collapse.
You can't love your neighbour if you won't do anything for your neighbour. You can't say that you love God and that you have faith in God if you won't do what God requests in terms of loving your neighbour and actively assisting your neighbour when they need it.
In the same way that you can't love God and love and serve mammon or money at the same time, you can't ask God to help you reach out to the community if you refuse to, in fact, reach out to the community! You can't reach out to the community and ask God to protect you from that same community and make sure that they never interact with you!
I strongly suspect that, originally, the children of Israel were supposed to do what God had said that they were supposed to do. That is, they were supposed to be a blessing to the nations of the earth. Israel had God's law. I really suspect that, originally, they were supposed to follow God's law and then they were supposed to go to the other nations and show them, tell them, and demonstrate to them that following God's law meant you had a better life.
But they didn't do that. They didn't follow the law and they didn't bless the other nations. Even though they were not following the law, they hoarded the law all to themselves and did not reveal it to the other nations as I suspect they were supposed to do.
And so the law, the blessing, and the primacy in demonstrating the benefits of following God's law was taken away from them and given to the followers of the Way. That is, us.
And the thing is, do we have a responsibility that we are not following? Is there something that we are supposed to be doing? Is there a blessing that we are supposed to be passing on to others?
And if we don't, will the blessings, which in our case are possibly material blessings, be taken away from us? Have we been given material blessings in order that we may pass those blessings along to others, others in our community who are not as fortunate as we are, who have not been materially blessed? If we don't pass those material blessings, or even the blessings of our time, our attention, and our education, along to those in our community who do not have them, will those blessings be taken away from us and passed along to someone else who might, hopefully, be more responsible in their stewardship?
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