JC@SOS.com

A Sermon preached by Reverend Patricia Rowe-Jones

Poland Community Church, UCC

January 14, 2001

Just the other day my son John purchased his very own cell phone. He has been cradling it in his hand ever since, you see he thinks that his new phone is ‘beautiful.’ The modern shape of it and the purple plastic covering combined with the excitement of having the current technology, a technology that most of his friends have as well, were evident from the gleam in his eye and the glow on his cheeks. And I have to admit, it does provide me some sense of security to know that I can get in touch with my boy anytime I need to and that he can call me for rides or if he feels in danger or threatened. And yet at the same time, I am like everyone else, wondering why modern technologies, especially in the area of communications, hasn’t been able to bring us closer together as we now have more access to one another than ever before. Did you know, for example, that most of us spend two years of our lives on the telephone, but now analysts are predicting that future generations will spend as much as five years of their lives “talking” with people around the globe. And Christians have jumped on the technological bandwagon as well, I have heard and seen of Christian web sites and I know that there is even a Satellite Company that deals strictly with Christian programming. Ah, the age of communication. We of all people can ask, “Why doesn’t God talk anymore?” OR would the more appropriate understanding of the situation be that God is indeed talking, but in the backdrop of all of our noisy and flashy technology, we simply don’t hear the voice of God anymore. But even Samuel was unusual for hearing the voice of the Lord for we are told that “the word of the Lord was rare in those days; visions were not widespread.” And we can certainly relate to this sentiment in our day, and yet there is something about Samuel’s experience that reminds us of Jesus. Jesus and Samuel were only twelve years old when they heard God’s call to them. Jesus was twelve when he dialogued with the priests in the temple of Jerusalem when he told Mary and Joseph indignantly that of course he was O.K. that he was in His Father’s House. Perhaps if Jesus had had a cell phone she would have called Jesus and been saved from worrying, but Jesus knew where he was and he understood why it was important that he be there. And then there is Samuel who hears God’s call to him in the middle of the night. And in this season of Ephipiphany it seems appropriate to view the call and response of Samuel and those of Jesus too. For both of these ‘boys’ were called by God as prophets who would speak of God’s wave of the future. Both Jesus and Samuel had messages to deliver that would not make people happy, at least not initially. They both had to communicate the fact that God would overthrow the old order of reality because of the greedy and disobedient nature of the religious establishment. Samuel and Jesus are linked by their appropriate response of total obedience to God’s voice. The ancient world may well have had its lackings of our modern accouterments, but one thing it lacked was the loud distraction of hi technology. I think that it was easier in some ways for our early brothers and sisters of the faith. It was in silence and solitude, for example, when God appeared to Moses through a burning bush. And when God placed a call to Abraham through three wandering strangers, he wasn’t experiencing the confusion of having just watched three theologically conflicting Christian messages on Satellite Television. When God whispered to Moses on Mt. Horeb, he could hear the whisper in the silence of the night and when Samuel was called by God late at night he was able to listen to Eli and, instead of going back to his room and surfing the web or watching tv, Samuel heard God again and again, 3X until he finally got it. You’d think that God’s voice would be heard now, with the telephone, the Internet, or satellite. You’d think so, and yet we make so much noise and fuss about God, arguing about who God is and what God wants; WE FORGET TO LISTEN. Prayer is not simply an exercise in asking for what we want; prayer is also about listening to God and what God wants for us. How often do we, like Samuel, say to God” Speak for your servant is listening” And for those of us who have learned how to discern the voice of God amidst the background of our noisy and hurried hi-tech world, then you know that God speaks, that God does talk. And God’s revelation in Jesus has the potential to increase our awareness of what exactly God is saying to us. The writer of Hebrews in 1: 1-2 makes a claim “When in former times God spoke to our forefathers, he spoke in fragmentary and varied fashion through the prophets, but in this, the final age, God has spoken to us in the Son.” And we just came through Christmas in which God chooses Mary, highly favored, to give the people the real thing. God decided at this point to make and personal visit; no more telephone calls, no more fragmentary and varied little conversations. The biblical record is a record of God trying to communicate through various instruments to the world, various instruments that never seemed to work too well. You can see that as many times as God tried to reveal himself there were those that hung up on him; sometimes people, sometimes an entire nation; indeed God’s very chosen refused to listen. But God kept right on loving the human race, for as we know, God revealed God’s self and the message of forgiveness was forged by his own blood on the cross.  God has spoken and God continues to speak through his Son who confronted the religious establishment, raised people from the dead, and loved people as none had before. God speaks to us through Bethlehem’s child, the hope of the world, who was cruelly crucified and then, just when it seemed the darkest and most cruel silence of God of all, he came back and started again. The message is that God is alive and well and that God loves each of us and that we can’t kill God (period). God lives despite our inability to hear him speaking to us. God speaks, despite our inability to hear. Now, if we could call God on our cell phones and if we could access God on the web, then don’t you think that Jesus would have come to earth as Bill Gates? The truth of the matter is that you can’t go to JC@SOS.COM and find Jesus; you might be helped for sure, but there is no substitute for knowing Jesus personally; and this requires time and attention to the development of your Christian Faith through the gospel provided to us, the church and our Christian tradition. It requires that we be participants, not spectators. Really, in the area of spiritually all the technology of our world is obsolete. I know that churches, including our own, our on line and have computers, but this does not make us better churches. Once Paul told the Pharisees that it is not what goes into a man that defiles him, but what comes out of him. Maybe today Paul would say to us that it is not how much technology one has access to that completes him, but how much faith one has. I don’t quite know how God works it, It is as mysterious to me as the intricacies of a circuit board, but I do know that every time I bow my head in prayer to the Lord that I am heard, instantly. My plea or petition to God doesn’t have to go through a Satellite connection. AND I also know that I need to let my children know that they can’t rely on their cell phones, no matter how pretty they may think they are, for their salvation. It is up to us to teach our children to hear the voice of God and to know that JC@SOS.com is not a web site in cyberspace, rather it is an open help line to all. For all of you high tech freaks out there, it might be interesting to study God’s revelation to us in the person of Jesus Christ, because truly, there is nothing on all the earth to compare to it. Once you begin to see the plan of God, even a tiny bit of it, you will know beyond a shadow of a doubt that God is a genius well beyond Bill Gates. So let us all spend more time away from our technology and the love of our technology, and more time with God, loving God, listening to God, the One who has the technology to really and truly help us. AMEN!