Susan and I have a new member of our household. Frankie is a kitten; he's nine or ten weeks old, and he is very inquisitive and very affectionate. We had never had a kitten that young (when we got our previous cat Boots she was 6 months old), so we were concerned about whether he knew about the litter box protocol. Thankfully, he does (although I haven't had the conversation with him about the word "protocol"). So far, no "accidents".
In a strange way, the litter box protocol is like the parable Jesus tells about the net thrown into the sea to catch fish. When you clean the litter box, you scoop up a bunch of litter, and the holes in the scoop let the litter run through, and the solid waste stays in the scoop (that includes the liquid waste, which clumps together with the litter). But since the cat has been a good cat and covered over the waste, you have to scoop the litter not knowing what is in it. The holes in the scoop let it sort itself out.
In this parable, Jesus says the Kingdom of Heaven is like a net catching fish of every kind. You gather the whole catch together until the net is full, and then pull it ashore and sort it out. The point seems to be that the sorting out happens later, not as part of the catching process. And Jesus says that the end of the age is where the sorting happens for the Kingdom of Heaven--the angels (God's messengers) do the sorting.
Obviously, this says to us as the church a couple of things. Our task is to do the catching, and we are to catch whatever we catch. This implies that we engage with everyone and don't start out by discriminating--the outreach we do is for anyone who might be "caught". It is not up to us to determine who ought to hear the message of Jesus, or who is more likely to respond to it. We may indeed have a better idea how to talk to the people we know, but that doesn't absolve us of talking with people we don't know. In the metaphor this parable offers, our job is to fish.
The other thing is that not only are we not to predetermine who hears the message, we also have no role whatsoever in determining who is "good" or "bad"--or "evil" or "righteous"--to use the words Jesus uses in the parable. God's messengers sort that out, at the end of the age. We are to love neighbor and love enemy equally. We are to reach out, albeit, as Jesus tells his disciples earlier, in Matthew 10:16, "See, I am sending you out like sheep into the midst of wolves; so be wise as serpents and innocent as doves". We have a sense of who might not necessarily be so good or who might engage in evil things, but we don't get to NOT reach out in concern and care.
And again, it would seem that the Kingdom of Heaven/Kingdom of God which we live in and live out here on Earth includes everyone. Not only do we not get to decide who's in--since it seems everyone is in, since all the fish are in the net--God's messengers, the angels, don't even figure it out until the end. The Kingdom is lived now, not then. We are to live in it now, with everyone.
GOSPEL Matthew 13:47-50
47‘ Again, the kingdom of heaven is like a net that was thrown into the sea and caught fish of every kind; 48 when it was full, they drew it ashore, sat down, and put the good into baskets but threw out the bad. 49 So it will be at the end of the age. The angels will come out and separate the evil from the righteous 50 and throw them into the furnace of fire, where there will be weeping and gnashing of teeth.