Synchronicity
By Charles Rush
November 7, 1999
Ephesians 4: 4-13, 16
most of you know, I am in a group that meets four times a year,
to discuss various implications of the relationship between theology
and physics. My paper for the year is supposed to explore the question
of whether or not there is life after death and how you would talk
about that given our present understanding of the universe. If you get
any great ideas in the next few months, let me know.
Thinking about physics... gives me a headache. Some fundamental
concepts from Quantum mechanics are counter-intuitive and they have
some profound implications. One of them, for example, is Bell's
theorem. Bell studied sub-atomic particles that were in a pair. One
of the things he discovered is that paired particles remain in
relationship, despite a separation over space and time. If you took
one subatomic particle from a pair, kept it here on earth and you took
the other of the pair and moved it over to the other side of the moon,
if you spin this one clockwise, the other one would begin spinning
counter-clockwise. It is a profound insight on a couple of
levels. First, in conjunction with other insights from Physics that I
won't confuse you with this morning, it suggests that fundamental
reality in our world is better understood in terms of relationship,
rather than discrete units that are fitted together. At some
fundamental level, matter cannot be completely broken down into
individual units. In fact, the way to comprehend the world is to see
it through a relational matrix.
Secondly, it strongly suggests that causal relationships are far
more interdependent and interrelated, that the radius of their
influence is far wider than we are normally given to contemplating.
This is where I start to get a headache. I was sitting at one of these
seminars in the fall, in the midst of a discussion on this point. It
was early evening and the stars were out. I tried for a moment to
imagine the interrelated character of the entire universe, the
interrelationship of all things on our earth. It was like fitting 100
gigabytes of data onto a 5-kilobyte hard drive. My mind just crashed.
And yet, there is a complexity to our relationships, indeed there
is a mystery to them. Shift gears for a moment. How about those times
in our life when things happen that give us just what we need at the
time we need it? Fredrick Beuchner says that one time he remembers
"sitting parked by the roadside, terribly depressed and afraid about
his daughter's illness and what was going on in his family, when out of
nowhere a car came along down the highway with a license plate that
bore on it the one word out of all the words in the dictionary that he
most needed to see exactly then. The word was TRUST. This is what he
says, "What do you call a moment like that? Something to laugh off as
the kind of joke life plays on us every once in a while? The Word of
God? Beuchner says, "I am willing to believe that it is something of
both, but for me it was an epiphany. The owner of the car turned out
to be, as I'd suspected, a trust officer in a bank, and not long ago,
having read an account I wrote of the incident somewhere, he found out
where I lived and one afternoon brought me the license plate itself,
which sits propped up on a bookshelf in my house to this day. It is
rusty around the edges and a little battered, and it is also as holy a
relic as I have ever seen" (Listening to Your Life, p. 326).
This is a theme that gets picked up in the Bible and developed in a
variety of different ways. In the story of the Exodus, Moses comes to
Pharaoh and asks Pharaoh to let God's people go. Eventually, Pharaoh
does and the people leave. But there is not a lot of forward planning
here. The idea of freedom was compelling enough but actually planning
the escape, they didn't really get that far. They are depending on God
to work this out. They are only out of Egypt a couple of days and the
people start to grumble. There is nothing to eat out here in the
desert. Water is very hard to find. What did God bring us out of
Egypt just to let us starve to death here in the desert? And then the
real kicker... They say to Moses, tell God that we want to go back to
the slavery of Egypt. At least back there, we had predictable meals
and we knew what to expect. And they actually start to organize
themselves to go back. Sounds like a bad scene out of your family
vacation doesn't it? Some people just seem to come alive when they get
a chance to grouse about something.
But there is something profoundly terrifying about the unknown,
about real freedom. There is something really scary about having to
trust in God and trust in yourself because you do not have everything
planned out, with ample resources for every situation that could come
your way. There is something really worrisome about having to rely on
your own spiritual creativity and ingenuity.
In the story of the Exodus, we are told that God provided Manna for
the people of God, something edible that has been variously identified
that they discovered that appeared each day briefly and could be
harvested in sufficient amounts that they were sustained. It wasn't
enough to keep the people from grumbling in the future, but they did
not starve, and truth be told, their needs were met.
The very first time Jesus sent his disciples out on a missionary
journey, he sent them out two at a time. This is what the gospel of
Mark says "He instructed them that they should take nothing for their
journey, except a mere staff- no bread, no bag, no money in their
belts. There were to wear sandals but, he added, -Do not take a spare
tunic'"(Mk. 6:8-9). Why did Jesus send them out bereft of any
resources save themselves and the Spirit of God? My presumption is
that he did it so that they wouldn't get confused into thinking that
the marvelous things that happened to them on that adventure were the
result of their resources or the result of their careful planning. I
think he wanted them to experience the way that things sort of
miraculously fall together when you are open to the Spirit of God,
guided by that Spirit, and committed in spite of your anxieties and
fears.
St. Paul says the church is like that. I think the Church is
something like that. It is a place where we come to get into our
Spiritual groove, where we come for committed relationships in the
Spirit of God, and things happen here, we change lives and we ourselves
change, in ways that we could not have predicted.
We have a meeting tonight for our Confirmation Class, eighth
grader's, all. Our church pairs each of our Confirm ands up with an
Adult mentor. What a great idea for both the kids and the adults.
Sometimes nothing really comes of the relationship and sometimes it
does. Either way, we are just planting a seed and you will not likely
see it come to blossom. Often times, we have our greatest impact on
people over the little things that impress them and have a deep
impression. It is unlikely that they will ever call you up and tell
you and that really doesn't matter, although it is wonderful when it
does.
This summer, we sent a bunch of Adults and a bunch of teenagers
down to Nicaragua, on a little mission trip. It is hard to say what
impact that has on people. I know one thing, more than one of our
teenagers that have made that trip, have written College applications
about it, saying it was one of the most important things they had done
in their life. Who knows what that will mean for them when they are
Adults? Who knows what may come of some of those relationships that
they form in Nicaragua?
We have just started a sister relationship with Temple Sinai that
is all of 9 months old. We have shared worship together, shared food
together. This year, we are going to study together in January and do
some outreach work projects together. Who knows what will come of the
relationships that we make with our Jewish neighbors and how they will
change us?
And some of these relationships actually get to us as well. One of
my favorite personal Christ Church stories is Allie Pruner. When I met
her five years ago, she was an agnostic, born on the Upper West Side of
Manhattan to Jewish parents that were committed atheists, educated to a
burnished secularity at Brown University. Her only mistake was to fall
in love with a Protestant and get married. When their kids were of an
age and they had moved to the burbs from Manhattan, her husband Dave
decided that he wanted to take his kids to church, so he did. She
would occasionally come, not hostile to spirituality, but with no
familiarity for the church whatsoever. She got to know the Minister.
He didn't bite. She got to know some of the people in the church.
They liked to cut up and fool around. They were working, at least, on
developing some integrity.
So she starts coming quite a bit, gets on some committee. Then we
asked people if they would like to help us sketch some banners for
Advent, those huge banners that we hang around Christmas. She turned
in a beautiful sketch of an Angel and another that had some wonderful
symbolism that tied Christmas together with Easter in a subtle way. I
remember thinking that ain't too shabby for an Atheist Jewish kid from
the Upper West Side.
Eventually, she got involved in the leadership of the church. And
I'll never forget, a couple years later, when she showed up on the
Executive Council and was in to it. It was so sad when she and Dave
moved to Houston, Texas for a job transfer. Kate reminded me that I
emailed a bunch of people to prayer for my nephew Henry. Allie called
me back to say she had activated the prayer chain in her church.
Recently, she was back in New York and ran into someone from town who
was asking her about Texas and did she miss Summit, etc... She said,
get this, she didn't miss Summit at all but she did miss Christ Church
because church in Texas isn't nearly as cool. I'm not sure what stuns
me more; that we had that kind of impact on her or that she still goes
to church, even in Texas? But she is a changed person in ways that are
as important as they are hard to articulate.
Relationships change lives way beyond us. I was listening to a
group from the Philippines talk about community development in the
rural Philippines. It was a very creative approach that incorporated
environmental conservation with self-development and economic
independence for rural peasants. I was asking an elderly gentleman
with the group some questions afterwards and I happened to mention that
I was the pastor at Christ Church in Summit, New Jersey. He said to
me, "Yes, I know you, your church supported our work for years." We
started supporting that project in the 60's. It has grown and
multiplied. It is now something of a model for other missions. Our
relationships here connect around the globe and spread out in ways that
we can't imagine.
I was at a Conference at Princeton last year and met a student at
the seminary that was from Ban galore, India. For many years, our
church supported a Christian hospital in Ban galore, India so the name
stuck with me. I asked him what his parents did for a living. His
father was the head Administrator at the hospital there. I got to
thinking how our mission support provided his father with a vocation in
India through which he could raise his children to become Christians so
that one of his children could come back to the U.S. and be educated
as a Minister. It was the oddest thing but the both of us felt somehow
related even though we had never met before that hour and the reason is
that we were related and the Spirit radiated through so many different
people that the way we got to each other was as circuitous as a Web but
we were all in it. St. Paul says the Spirit binds us together.
It seems to me that this is what we are primarily about. We need
you to pledge yourself concretely to this group of people at this
juncture in your life. When you do that positive relationships start
to develop and in your own small way, you facilitate a whole web of
things that open up, some of them you see, some of them you will never
be in direct touch with. We know all too well the very powerful forces
in the media, in the market that are shaping our collective destiny in
profound ways. I hope that you pledge yourself to the uncanny Spirit
of God and the radical freedom of the Kingdom of God. Open a new
door. Make a difference to someone. Amen
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