The following is the text I prepared for my sermon Sunday, October 21, 2012, at Plainfield UMC. This sermon focused on the second part of our mission statement: “Equipping people for a growing relationship with Jesus Christ to serve all.” The thesis is that we can be extremely well equipped, but if we’re not standing for Jesus and resisting the “ways of the world,” i.e. “sin,” then we’re not building strong “faith muscles.” A “growing relationship” with Jesus / faith in Jesus grows and strengthens from “resistance training.”

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“Resistance is futile?” Can anyone identify how this catch phrase was popularized in culture?

Wikipedia: “The Borg are a collection of species that have turned into cybernetic organisms functioning as drones of the collective or the hive. A pseudo-race, dwelling in the Star Trek universe, the Borg take other species by force into the collective and connect them to ‘the hive mind’; the act is called assimilation. The Borg’s ultimate goal is ‘achieving perfection’. The origin of the Borg is never made clear, though they are portrayed as having existed for hundreds or thousands of years. In the movie Star Trek: First Contact, the Borg Queen merely states that the Borg were once much like humanity, ‘flawed and weak’, but gradually developed into a partially synthetic species in an ongoing attempt to evolve and perfect themselves.”

Borg Queen: “Assimilation turns us all into friends. In fact, it brings us so close together we can hear each other’s thoughts.” Doesn’t that creep you out? Yet, we likely find the idea of “being friends” or at least “getting along” with everyone an appealing ideal. Remember Rodney King’s public appeal in the midst of the Los Angeles riots of 1992? “Can we all get along?” The Borg, however, want much more than just “getting along” with each other, and certainly much more than mere coexistence, they want “assimilation,” which has as its ultimate goal, “achieving perfection.” [Read more…]