Spooky Action at a Distance--January 25, 2021

Spooky Action at at Distance--January 25, 2021

"I am saying this so that no one may deceive you with plausible arguments. For though I am absent in body, yet I am with you in spirit, and I rejoice to see your morale and the firmness of your faith in Christ." [Colossians 2:4-5]

We are all learning these days that it is hard--but possible--to be connected to one another even when we aren't in the same room.  It's kind of humbling, and also kind of encouraging, to read a passage like this from Colossians and to recall that it's always been this way for the community of Jesus.

That's really the challenge we are reading about here--it's hard for Paul that he can't be physically with them at the time that he's writing, and he knows it would be easy to misinterpret the lack of face-to-face connection as a lack of caring on his part.  Silences are notoriously difficult to interpret, and Paul's absence would make it easy for folks in Colossae to say, "See? We must not be important to Paul because he hasn't come to spend time with us."

And while it's true, as Zadie Smith writes, that "Time is how you spend your love," in Paul's case, as we've noted earlier, he can't help being apart from all of his friends in congregations across the empire.  This one really isn't his fault--he's in prison, or something like a house-arrest, as he writes, and is headed sooner or later to a trial that will end with his execution.  He can't be with the Colossians in person, but not because he doesn't care about them--it's because he has already given so much of himself for the work of the gospel that he's gotten himself thrown in jail again.

And yet--and this is the thing we are dared to take on faith in the community of Jesus--even when we can't be in the same room together, we are bound together in a community and a communion that are real, even if not in our usual sense of physical closeness or shared space.  Paul insists that even when he can't be with the Colossians in their weekly gatherings, where they would share a meal together and hear the stories of Jesus and encourage each other for how to face another day in a brutal empire as the face of God's countercultural reign, he is still connected to them.  He is connected at the soul level, so to speak, even if he can't pass the basket of bread or the dish of mashed potatoes to the next person at the table.

We've been living with this reality for most of the past year, haven't we?  This is one of those times where we may be in a better position right now to understand what Paul and his readers were going through than we have ever been in our lifetimes before.  We are learning, living through the days of social-distancing, suspended in-person gatherings, and meetings-by-screen, that it is hard to be physically separated from our community... and yet that it is possible to find ways to connect with each other.  No, it's not the same.  No, it's not easier.  No, we don't want the "virtual" way of doing things to be the new normal... but the fact that we keep trying and making the effort to stay connected in the face of how hard and weird it is is evidence that we are still connected even when it's not in the same room.  And that connection is real, even if it doesn't look like everyone piling into the same space.

It's hard to wrap our minds around the idea that we can still be bound to each other, "in spirit," as Paul says it here, when our bodies and faces are in different places.  It's okay to admit that--hey, even Einstein had a hard time with the idea.  Seriously!  See, there's this notion in quantum physics that they now call "particle entanglement" that basically says there are ways to connect two tiny subatomic particles so that doing something to one will affect the other, even if they physically separated from one another--even across vast distances in the universe.  Quantum entanglement says that things in the universe can be connected even when the usual rules of space and time dictate that they shouldn't be able to relate to one another.  Well, as this idea was just emerging in Einstein's time, he couldn't understand how something like this could be true--his famously skeptical phrasing dismissed this whole business as "spooky action at a distance."  It was his way of saying, "I can't understand how it could be true that things could be connected even when they are so far removed from one another."  And yet, quantum physics says, "Like it or not, understand it or not, that's how it works."

I rather like that idea as a way of thinking about our life in Christ right now.  There's a lot that just feels like "spooky action at a distance"--the difficulty of trying to keep one another connected, of reminding one another that we are all held in God's grip, of assuring one another that this difficult time of distance will not last forever, and of encouraging each other with the hope of a renewed future.  That's all hard, and sometimes the physical separation just gets to us.  I know it, too.  I feel it, like you do, I'm sure.  But if particle physicists can tell us that things in this universe can be "entangled" with each other even across vast distances in space, then I wonder if we, too, can say the same of our life in Christ.  We who are held in the grip of Christ's scarred hands are entangled with each other, so that even when we are not in the same place, we are still held together.  The connection is real, even if we cannot explain how it works.  The love that binds us together is genuine, even when it has to bridge all the other ways we are divided from one another.

Today, maybe it is enough to trust that we are bound up, as Dr. King so powerfully put it, "in an inescapable network of mutuality, tied in a single garment of destiny."  What affects you also affects me, and my choices pull on you as well.  We don't have to understand how it works that we are entangled with one another, but it is worth being honest that we are.  

We are blessedly, wondrously, and mysteriously stuck with each other--that is how Christ holds us.

Lord Jesus, hold us even when we cannot see or quite feel the connectedness between us, and give us the faith to believe the promise that we are bound up together in your love.