Preached at St John’s, Devizes
Readings – Romans 7: 15–25a; Matthew 11: 16-19, 25-30
“I do not do what I want, but I do the very thing I hate.”
I wonder how familiar you are with quantum computing?
I ask, because the last interesting episode of my recent trip to North America happened on the bus out to Montreal airport to catch my flight to Heathrow. There was conversation between a man in his fifties from the United States, in town to attend an industry conference for people working in quantum computing, and a woman of about twenty who was studying computer science at one of the local universities, who was asking him all sorts of intelligent questions.
It’s much more difficult to make quantum computers to work in practice than the digital computers we’re familiar with, the man explained, but experimental prototypes work increasingly well, and it’s possible that we’re within a few years of them becoming practical. There are many wonderful things they might make much easier, like finding new vaccines. He said, however, that the first thing that will happen is that every encryption scheme in the world will become obsolete overnight. Encryption means the codes that are used to keep your debit card payments secure, your e-mails private, and the suchlike. Even the encryption used by the world’s militaries and secret services will become worthless, he explained, possibly not too far in the future. The first thing that quantum computers will do, apparently, is to force all of these vital pieces of code to be rewritten using quantum computers.
The young woman was wide-eyed – and so was I. He smiled and shrugged and said, “It’s just like when the Iron Age arrived. Up until then, anyone who had bronze weapons and armour ruled the roost. Then all of a sudden they were obsolete and people needed steel. It’s just what human beings do; we advance.”
Nowadays we’re no longer talking about swords, but things like cluster munitions. The war in Ukraine is a reminder of what how terrible long conventional wars between well-equipped large countries are. We’d almost forgotten.
Necessity, as the old saying goes, is the mother of invention, and countries fighting for their survival have needs that are acute. So war drives technological advancement. The last big international war finished with the invention of nuclear weapons. For the first time, human beings had the power to destroy ourselves entirely. In the 17 months since Russia invaded Ukraine, there has already been a revolution in some military technologies, such as the use of drones.
The wisdom of our culture and society is that more technology and more power will make the world a better place, making our lives demonstrably better. Quantum computing might require computer cyphers to be rewritten but, the conventional wisdom goes, this will be more than compensated for by things like new medicines and new energy-efficient building materials.
We can’t avoid the reality, however, that perhaps the biggest problem the human race has ever faced, climate change, is a result of our technological advancement. Ancient peoples didn’t have to worry about wrecking the planet’s capacity to sustain human life. And climate change was caused by very simple actions, burning coal and oil. Artificial intelligence or gene editing, both advancing rapidly, could present us with threats that emerge much more quickly than climate change and have consequences that are even more devastating. Our technological knowledge has increased but our nature as humans has not changed.
“I do not do what I want, but I do the very thing I hate.” St Paul, in this morning’s Epistle, neatly summarises one of the harshest realities of the human condition.
No matter how good our intentions are, we find ourselves sometimes acting in ways that are disgraceful. No matter how clever we are, we are capable of behaving in ways that are profoundly stupid and self-sabotaging. No matter how carefully thought our opinions are, aiming to be good and principled, from time-to-time we all act in ways that are completely contrary to them.
Yet we live in an era that worships intellect and which also obsesses about holding the correct opinions. The fact that we all often let ourselves down for no good reason, including the cleverest of us, goes little mentioned. Ironically St Paul, so often maligned as emotionally stunted, is more in touch with his genuine feelings and his true nature as a human being.
In a world that wants solutions to problems through the application of power and technique, part of the Church’s role must be to bear witness to the truth that human nature is somehow fallen; we are somehow condemned to be less than we think we should be. The Church’s role must include saying that while the Adam and Eve story isn’t history and the Genesis creation account isn’t science, these myths provide powerful explanations for why we human beings, as individuals and a species, seem doomed to fail to live as we think we should.
These are uncomfortable truths for the world to hear, and perhaps uncomfortable truths for the Church to proclaim, especially for us in the Church of England, so captivated by our intellectual and cultural pedigree, so determined never to be associated with the sort of Christians who talk too much about … … the end of the world. And mad things like that.
It’s easier for us to do things that get praised by the society around us. The wider world wants the Church to do things it finds useful, like feeding the hungry, or pricking people’s consciences about the miseries of the world. That’s all well and good, but what the world finds useful isn’t always the same thing as the Gospel, which is so paradoxical and strange that it challenges the conventional wisdom of any society.
The Church spends much effort chasing the world, trying to be useful, and trying to be on the right side of emerging social and cultural trends, yet never really pleasing anyone. When we chase the world, we forget that the world is a divided one, our own country also, and therefore trying too hard to please some people will inevitably alienate others.
That isn’t a new story. Look at our Gospel reading this morning. John the Baptist came proclaiming fasting and an austere life and they said he was a nutcase. Then Jesus came eating and drinking heartily and preaching that life was to be lived to the full, and they told him off for being too worldly and hanging out with the wrong sort of people. The lesson is simple. If people want to reject the teachings of Jesus Christ, they’ll always find reasons to do so. Indeed, the Church, being an institution made up by human beings with human failings, will inevitably provide them with good reasons for doing so.
What brings us here this morning, must be more than good works from the Church, or there would be plenty of alternative organisations for us to join. Something greater, and something that I think is much stranger, lies at the heart of the Christian message. It proclaims that no technology, no form of knowledge, no political structure, can save us from the consequences of our nature. That’s why Jesus Christ didn’t launch the political revolution His followers expected, but instead went to the Cross and died to destroy death and then rose to eternal life.
It’s a strange and paradoxical claim. But if we embrace it, if we trust that through faith in Jesus Christ we will be led to eternal life, to a state of being where the failings of human nature have somehow been done away with, then we have a different perspective on everything in this world. A different perspective on our personal problems, but also on the world’s great problems of war, environmental destruction, and runaway technology. If you are weary and heavy laden, and this is a time when most of us are, then come to Jesus Christ and embrace His promises, and He will indeed give you rest.
And now thanks be to God our Heavenly Father who has given us the victory through Our Lord Jesus Christ, in the power of the Holy Spirit. Amen.
Thanks to Pixabay for the public domain image sourced via Pexels.
There’s many a Baptist minister would be pleased to announce that alter call.