Revelation 21:1-6
Psalm 148
Acts 11:1-18
During my years in the corporate world, at the intersection of technology and design, I worked with Fortune 500 companies, start-ups, governmental and non-governmental organizations. I had to sign a non-disclosure agreement when I was consulting with Hasbro, for they were developing toys for Star Wars films that had not yet been released,. I went out to lunch at “interesting†places with United Auto Workers members in Detroit, not the sort of places I would regularly eat lunch. I walked the streets of San Francisco. But most of my clients were right there in the Big Apple, and among them was the New York Police Department’s CompStat Unit.
Comp and Stat are the giveaways. This is the department’s big data team, before we were using the term big data. Today you can find CompStat online at the NYPD’s website. You will see, at least as of Wednesday, that crime is down again this year in almost every category, with the exception of sex crimes, and that category is always challenging because of variables and delays in reporting.
You wouldn’t know it by listening to the 24-hour news cycle, which feeds on hysteria, nor by listening to politicians, for fear has reliably been the best tool for manipulating and deceiving voters, but the simple truth is that like illegal immigration, crime has been going down for years. It has been going down for so long and there is so much data, that there is now a serious scientific debate about the factors that led to the decline.
Malcolm Gladwell, a Canadian journalist on the staff of “The New Yorker†and author of five books including “The Tipping Point,†argues that “broken window policing†explains the drop in New York City crime and those other cities that adopted this approach, developed in the 1980’s by George Kelling, who died this week, and a colleague. This is a law enforcement emphasis on minor crimes with zero tolerance, including the notorious “stop and frisk†practice that targets young black men for unwarranted harassment, contributing to mass incarceration and the new Jim Crow.
Steven Levitt, a prize-winning University of Chicago economist and author of “Freakonomics,†argues that a massive increase in the size of the police force as well as Roe v. Wade are the reasons crime rates dropped, both in New York and nation-wide. The connection between a Supreme Court decision on women’s reproductive freedom and crime may surprise you, but Levitt argues that fewer unwanted children means fewer adult criminals.
Then there is Steven Pinker, Harvard professor of psychology, and like the other two, author of multiple bestsellers. Though Pinker takes a generally optimistic approach to humankind, especially in his 2011 work “The Better Angels of Our Nature,†when it comes to crime, he may well be closer to the numbers and to the science than the other two, for Pinker notes the exact correlation between declining levels of crime and declining levels of lead particulate in the air during childhood, the result of the move to unleaded gas. This really should not surprise us, as we know the brain is particularly vulnerable to lead poisoning, but we had no clue that the damage done by our tailpipes was so pervasive. Yet, if you place a graph of lead levels in the air against a graph of crime, offset by the years it takes for a child to become an adult, you see that there is an almost exact match.
In truth, it might not be any one thing, but some combination of things, even if I am inclined to Pinker’s argument over those of Gladwell and Levitt since not all departments adopted the NYPD’s tactics, and abortion rates vary widely. Still, the drop in crime is consistent and nationwide.
Something like crime rates can’t really be tested in isolation, can’t really be tested through experimentation and blind samples. And crime statistics themselves can be unreliable since crimes can be classified in ways meant to give the illusion of increasing or decreasing criminality depending on the agenda of department leaders and politicians. A policy like broken-windows policing may well have an effect, but at what cost? This is a question we should especially ask this week, as officer Daniel Pantaleo faces charges from the Civilian Complaint Review Board, an independent NYPD watchdog, for his 2014 chokehold murder of Eric Garner, who police had stopped because they thought he was selling “loosies,†or untaxed cigarettes, certainly not a capital offense. This was a textbook example of the “broken windows†approach.
Whatever the cause or causes, there was a cascading effect, a tipping point when criminality in the United States began to decline, and it had nothing to do with deporting illegal immigrants.
Small things add up, and we don’t always know exactly what made the difference. “Broken windows†policing and the massive militarization of law enforcement were intended to bring down crime, yet women’s reproductive freedom and regulations to address air pollution may have made the difference, or at least contributed.
Cascading effects can work the other way too. Maybe even more than good decisions, bad decisions are not additive but are instead multiplicative. The “tipping point†can tip in either direction.
There were almost as many religions, cults, and sects two thousands years ago as there are today. Syncretism was the norm in the Roman empire, where you might participate in worship of the emperor, an Egyptian sun-god, and a local Hellenic cult without feeling that you had betrayed or let down any of them. Only the Jews and those Gentiles attracted to Jewish worship, known as theophobes, God-fearers, or theosebeis, God-reverers, refused this polytheism. Jews and Christians were actually called atheists for their refusal to accept other gods, though Jews accused Christians of being polytheists for believing Jesus was God.
Judaism was never the singular and united religion so commonly portrayed in religious texts and teachings. Not all Northern Kingdom Jews assimilated into the new syncretic Judaism of the South after Israel fell, and after the period of Exile, distinct communities remained in places like Babylon and later Alexandria. There were multiple competing movements within Judea after the Hasmonean rebellion in the Second Century BCE, including the Pharisees with theological innovations like belief in life after death.
It was a religiously fertile period in a religiously fertile region. We know that there was a significant movement around John the Baptizer, not only from ancient sources, but also because the gospels put so much effort in positioning the Jesus movement over and against the movement around John. There were Sicarii, calling for what was essentially a race war. At Qumran, there was a group called Essenes, also looking forward to battle. They are the source of the Dead Sea Scrolls, providing us remarkable insight into this form of Judaism that insisted on purity, a sort of ancient Jewish Shaker in their emphasis on abstinence.
Today, out of all of the diverse movements in First Century Judaism, only two remain, those descended from the Pharisees, who form what we now know as Rabbinic Judaism in its various forms, and those descended from the followers of Jesus, who form what we now know as Christianity in its various forms, both groups that chose to adapt to changing circumstances. With the exception of a few hundred Samaritan Jews living on Mt. Gerizim, every other sect and movement disappeared. In fact, even that portion of the Jesus community that was distinctly and observantly Jewish eventually disappeared. Today’s text brings us to what may well be one “tipping point†that allowed the Way of Jesus to survive and thrive, until it would become the dominant religion worldwide.
While we can fairly debate the nature of the Christianity that survived after Paul and certainly after Constantine, Peter had this vision, the Holy Spirit was at work, and the Council of Jerusalem would create a path for Gentiles to follow Jesus, allowing the religion to spread across the Roman Empire, something that likely would not have happened had followers been required to be circumcised and to follow the 600+ strict laws of the Mosaic code.
There were those who rejected the council’s decision, groups that would be called “Judaizers,†the Ebionites and the Nazarenes, labeled heretical. The resistance to Gentile converts was so great, the effort to open the Way of Jesus to anyone who believed was so fraught, that when it was all over with, nothing that resembled a Jewish Christianity was left. Those Jewish Christians had adapted internally to make room for the good news of Jesus, but could not adapt enough to open the doors to Gentiles.
Paul, an observant Jew, advocates for creating a Christianity that does make room for Gentiles. It takes Peter, the first leader of the church after Jesus, with the support of James, the brother of jesus and leader of the church in Jerusalem, to make it a reality.
Our text wrestles with who should receive communion. You might not have noticed this since we have emptied the Lord’s Supper rite of any but the most superficial resemblance to a meal, but when it talks about Peter eating with the Centurion Cornelius and his household, identified in the previous chapter, it is the table fellowship that is at stake, for there was no separation between Jesus’ rite of remembrance and sitting down to break bread. Cornelius and crew are baptized in the Spirit, but uncircumcised, and there is no chance that the meal would meet the strict dietary requirements of Jewish Law. Peter eating with these Gentiles in table fellowship, in communion, would render him unclean to other Jews.
Paul would do more to make Christianity than any other follower in those first centuries, but this one small action of welcome and adaptation by one person, Peter at table with Cornelius, might have been that one thing.
I don’t care whether you believe this twice told tale of Peter’s vision was an intervention by the Holy Spirit or a fabrication to justify a decision. Peter doesn’t sit down at that meal, there likely is no Christianity, no Handel’s Messiah, no Sistine Chapel, no U2 singing “Gloria.†It all ends, withers and dies. We go down the rabbit hole of counterfactual history, of what-ifs.
To me, the good news is that while we can’t pinpoint one single decision that made crime rates fall, some combination of decisions that were mostly good decisions had the result that crimes rates fell and continue to fall despite the terror of mass casualty shootings and domestic terrorism.
We can’t pinpoint one single decision about baptism or circumcision or kosher food, can’t fully credit Paul or Peter, despite this dramatic story, but some combination of decisions brought the Way of Jesus to a tipping point, some combination of adaptations, and we get Dietrich Bonhoeffer and William Barber and this church.
Which maybe also means that you don’t need to find the single and perfect solution for the problems in your life, for the problems in our community, for the problems in this church. Maybe we just make a bunch of small good decisions, a bunch of small adaptations, and we get cascade, and tipping point, and one day we know what John of Patmos meant in today’s other reading, for we can feel a sense of newness, a New Jerusalem, all things new.
Small decision like name-tags and leaving pews at the back open for our guests, but hey, let’s not get crazy. We can leave those conversations for another day.
Small decisions. Not waiting until the single perfect consensus solution that is guaranteed to succeed. Just a better decision today or maybe Tuesday morning than you might have made yesterday, just one small decision where we listen to the Spirit and make room at the table.
Of course there are terrible things happening out there. There are good things happening too, like those declining crime numbers, like people coming together, like the voices who remind us that we can make America kind again.
Who knows when the tipping point will come. But it will come, for the Kingdom of God is at hand, a beautiful city centered on a God of Love and Creativity, if only we believe.
Amen.