Jesus built bridges between the divergent unities of his day. The church must do the same.

On September 13, 1987, two unemployed young men trying to make a living entered a partly demolished radiation clinic in Goianaia, Brazil, an 18-hour bus ride from Rio. They discovered and then dismantled a cancer therapy machine, the parts of which they peddled to various junk dealers. One junk dealer in particular purchased for 25 reals a stainless steel cylinder, about the size of a gallon paint can. Inside the cylinder was a cake of crumbly powder that emitted a mysterious blue light.

The dealer took the seemingly magical material home and distributed it to his family and friends. His 6-year-old niece rubbed the glowing dust on her body. One can just imagine her doing the bossa nova while she glowed in the sultry darkness of the tropic night. The dust, of course, was cesium-137, a highly radioactive substance. The lovely light was the result of the decay of the cesium atoms. Another product of the decay was a flux of invisible particles with the power to damage living cells.

You know, of course, the rest of the story. The girl is dead. Others died or became grievously sick. More than two hundred people were contaminated.

A beautiful, incandescent dust, taken from an instrument of healing, had become an instrument of death. The junk dealer's niece was not the only child who rubbed the cesium on her body like carnival glitter, and the mental picture of those incandescent children dancing in the darkness haunts the imagination.

It's an image that won't go away because the story is a moral fable of the church's ministry in our pluralistic world a world where healing instruments can become death machines in split seconds, a world where the best and the worst are a hair's breadth distance apart, a world where the poorest and the richest, the favelas and the copacabanas, are as close as the blink of an eye.(1)

What is the world coming to? What in the world is going on?

-A world where one government (Philippines) placed the following advertisement in Fortune magazine: "To attract companies like yours ... we have felled mountains, razed jungles, filled swamps, moved rivers, relocated towns . . . all to make it easier for you and your business to do business here."

-A world where worldwide forests and wildlife are being exterminated to make room for businesses, as well as for 1.3 billion cattle, 1.8 billion sheep and goats, 0.9 billion pigs and 17.2 billion chickens (whose numbers have doubled in the last decade).(2)

-A world where every hour, three species go extinct a world where the number of species lost each year is 27,000.(3)

-A world where (1992) 2 billion people live in countries with an average annual per capita income of $400, 2.6 billion reached $1,600 and only 830 million have an average of $22,000.(4)

-A world where 40 percent of the world's population lives in poverty and suffers from malnutrition, while people in my country spend 15 billion dollars per year on losing weight, and an extra 22 billion on beauty aids.(5)

-A world where, in 1992, Michael Jordan earned $20 million to promote Nike shoes that's more money in endorsements than the entire annual payroll of all the Indonesian factories that make the shoes.(6)

-A world where druggists beat out ministers by 10 percentage points (66 percent to 56 percent) as the most trusted professionals in the United States.(7)

-A world where 16 percent of the earth's population will never have heard the gospel by the year 2000.

-A world where 88 percent of a cross sampling of people from Australia, Germany, India, Japan and the United States recognized the McDonald's arch.

-A world where 88 percent of the same cross sampling recognized Shell Oil's seashell logo.

-A world where the percentage of the same cross sampling that could identify the cross as symbolic of Christianity was 54 percent.(8)

-A world where one in every 200 Christians worldwide can expect to be martyred in his or her lifetime.(9)

"What is this world coming to?" is a question on everyone's lips. It is a question unworthy of the church.

"What is this world coming to?" is the world's question. The church's question is "What is coming to this world?"

Will God's chosen instrument, the church, bring Christ to this coming world?

Let me be clear about something: I don't like this world we are in. I wish I didn't live in this kind of a world. I think this postmodern post-Enlightenment, post-Christendom, "posties" world is the pits. There's a big difference between what is going on out there and what should be going on out there. There's a big difference between what people are interested in and what they should be interested in.

Will the church direct the minds and hearts of the people of this new world to the truth?

It isn't fair that just when I came along, the Enlightenment bridge, the bridge that successfully carried all our baggage and cargo for 500 years, started to crumble and collapse. It isn't fair that my seminary educated me for an Ozzie-and-Harriet world that expired in the '50s. It isn't fair that my preacher mother could trust the Enlightenment bridge to carry her ministry across into the future, but I can't.

I think it's awful that that word "Christian" is now so greasy from everyone fingering it that it has become slippery and slimy until one hesitates to pick it up.

Get over it, Sweet. Get a mission. Get a language that they will pick up. If "Christian" is too yucky to pick up, call people to be disciples of Jesus. Now there's a novel idea, and one that may be a lot clearer anyway, especially to a culture wearing the T-shirt "Jesus: Save me from some of your followers."

F. Scott Fitzgerald once said that the test of a first-class mind is the ability to hold two opposing ideas in the head at the same time and still be able to function. Or to paraphrase James M. Cain's classic noir thriller, "The Postmodernist Always Rings Twice." Postmodern pluralism has created a world of double takes, a world that faces in at least two directions at the same time. The patron saint for the postmodern era might as well be Leonardo da Vinci, who sketched with his right hand while he wrote with his left simultaneously.

Poet W.N. Herbert has a poem that serves as an aphorism of the postmodern world: "And not Or."(10) Historian Hillel Schwartz, in his study of centuries' endings, invents the word "janiformity" to express the nature of this world of doubles, the pervasive experiencing of life as both/and, not-only-but- also: From refried beans to twice- baked potatoes to white chocolate mousse frozen yogurt; from instant copiers to genetic clones to double- speak ("Less Is More") ... from book titles like Ordinary Miracles and Open Secrets to movies like True Lies and intellectual constructs like Michel Foucault's concept of "calm violence."

Global outreaches like Habitat for Humanity and Hospice have understood our text this morning better than the church: Ministry in a postmodern, pluralistic world must bring together the opposites; it must embrace and bridge a world that is homeless and well-housed, a world that is both dying and healthy, a world that is both fiction and fact, a world that is obese and anorexic at the same time.

If our church keeps looking for the middle, keeps cutting to the middle, keeps hugging the middle of the road, we will be hit by both sets of oncoming traffic. Straight-down-the-middle strategies don't work in a serpentine world. Postmodern ministry gives up trying to mend the "broken middle" and instead builds bridges between the fissile tensions and intentions of postmodern culture.(11)

Here are some wedge issues that warn us of the dangers of fixing on a single frame of reference for ministry in a pluralistic world:

The postmodern world is becoming more local, and the world is becoming more global. The world is now multi-tribal and uni-global. Build a bridge and get over it, church.

Postmodern people are getting more back-to-nature, more "unplugged," more "natural" and at the same time more high-tech and computerized. Build a bridge and get over it, church.

In our rhetoric and our project proposals, we have become a world of moralizers and sermonizers about terminal moral decay. In the reality of everyday life, we are living in one of the great immoral periods of history and seem to be getting more immoral, more sleazy, with every passing day. Build a bridge and get over it, church.

The nurturing of creative individuals and supergeniuses has become one of the most important tasks of a postmodern society. Yet at the same time, the most powerful force for change is teamwork.
Build a bridge and get over it, church.

The postmodern world is getting both more decentralized and more centralized. The world is both coming together and spinning apart. Build a bridge and get over it, church.

Fewer and fewer people are interested in religious things at the same time more and more people are interested in spiritual things. Build a bridge and get over it, church.

For the first time in history, the world is divided between a "Zone of Peace," which comprises 15 percent of the globe's population but the vast majority of the world's economic wealth and military power, and a "Zone of Turmoil and Development," in which war and strife are the norms of everyday life (12).

Build a bridge and get over it, church.

A journalist was assigned the Lebanon beat. Walking through the bombed-out streets of Beirut one day, he heard some beautiful music coming from a doorway. He wandered over to where the music was being played and there saw a lad playing a flute. The music was beautiful, but the flute was the weirdest looking instrument he had ever seen. He got as close as he could properly get when the lad stopped playing, smiled and handed him the instrument. It was not until he picked up the flute did the journalist understand. For what this young Lebanese boy had done was to find in some field a discarded rifle, re-bore holes in the barrel of that rifle and transform a gun into a flute.

When the world builds bridges that bring the ends together, it makes weapons. When the church builds bridges that bring the ends together, it makes music. Which will it be? What will the future hold? Instruments of destruction or instruments of healing? Bows or Harps? Guns or Flutes?

These are the best of times for ministry. These are the worst of times for ministry.

Build a bridge and get over it, church. Through Jesus the Christ, we can live the two together. The church of Jesus Christ can do this. The body of Christ is called to do this.

Break the walls down.
Build the body up.
Bring the people together.
Bridge the gaps across.

Build a bridge and get over it, church.