2018-03-13
Brooke Strong
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Scripture John 3:14-21
I wonder who in your life knows you. I mean really knows you. Who is it who knows that you loved a particular 90s boy band; or that you’re petrified of snakes; or that you intentionally avoid the cracks in the sidewalks? Who can you talk to about not just the events of the day but about the love of your life, or your fondest hopes and dreams, or your unwanted attraction to the co-worker who makes your heart beat just a little bit faster? Are you connected to people who let you be yourself, who put up with your eccentricities, who allow you to totally relax in their presence?
One of the things I hear most often in daily conversation is how busy people are. They run from one thing to the next, feel inadequate in almost every dimension of their lives, and never quite feel caught up. Gotta pick up my daughter in ten minutes; then make dinner; then pay the bills, then do my taxes; then I have a slew of work I need to get done by tomorrow. Maybe I go on Facebook or Instagram, or have a text exchange with my brother. Then I go to bed.
And the next day it’s more of the same. And I sometimes wonder if that incessant activity keeps us from each other. I wonder if there’s anyone with whom we share the grief of a parent’s death. I wonder if there’s any place this person’s hopes and dreams are aired out or if they’re just squelched. I wonder if there’s a place she can go to confess the terrible mistake she made at work or if it just slowly eats away at her. I wonder if he has a place to share the sense of shame he has at his financial failure or if gets buried instead in alcohol or Minecraft.
Many of us have friends or spouses with whom we can connect at the deepest levels. Others of us, though, go through life orbiting largely in our own private planetary paths. And I suspect there’s a painful cost to this sense of isolation, this disconnect from others.
Dana Trent, a college religion teacher, says “College students are obsessed with Friends. Not their real-life buddies, but the sitcom, whose 236 episodes dominated American TV from 1994 to 2004. . . . They are enthralled by it.
“Nearly 16 million people watch Friends reruns each week [most of them on Netflix or MTV, and most of them] adults under 35. . . . Why would media giants spend millions to acquire an outdated show? In his Vulture essay, ‘Is Friends Still the Most Popular Show on TV?’ Adam Sternbergh writes that young adults find Friends entertaining because of its now-impossible premise: six young Americans take time to talk to each other in person sans cell phones.”
Trent goes on to say that “the American Journal of Preventive Medicine reported that social media use among millennials corresponds to a higher rate of perceived social isolation or loneliness. According to a study, those who use social media 58 times per week (an average of eight times per day) were three times more likely to report feeling lonely [than] those who only went on social media nine times per week.
“Marta Kauffman, the cocreator of Friends, says the appeal of the show to a new generation has to do with wish fulfillment: ‘They’re on social media all the time, so I believe they crave human contact.’” They may be connected electronically to lots of people, but not “in the way that Chandler, Joey, Monica, Phoebe, Rachel, and Ross were.” In fact, “the singer-songwriter Lorde, whose album Melodrama examines this phenomenon among her peers, dubs her cohort ‘Generation L.O.V.E.L.E.S.S.’” (Christian Century, Feb. 28, 2018, pp. 12-13).
Several years ago, Mary and I attended a lecture by a computer scientist named Anne Foerst, who now teaches at St. Bonaventure University. She’s essentially a theologian in an Artificial Intelligence lab (what a fascinating vocation that must be!). And what I still so vividly remember her saying in that lecture is that it is not possible to feel compassion if you’re not in the same room with another person. Dr. Foerst is a woman who’s incredibly comfortable with the most up-to-date technology and all forms of social media. She’s no Luddite, no technological Neanderthal. And what she says is that encountering someone through a screen does not let us really feel what that other person is going through. It has something to do with the brain’s mirror neurons, something I don’t understand at all. But I get her fundamental point, that to really be with someone, it has to be in person, not electronic. We may think we share a person’s feelings through a screen, but it’s not until we actually share space with them that we can really identify with them, that we can really feel compassion.
This is not in any way to dis social media, or to say we should all ditch our phones and computers. Not at all. Social media of all sorts serve to connect people in a variety of ways. You can see baby pictures and learn about retail sales and find out about an upcoming concert. You can connect with old friends and plan class reunions and share interesting articles and pass on recipes for sushi or even kale (though why you’d want to I’ve never been quite sure!).
It is surprising, though, how often a vague sense of disgruntlement arises when a person starts reflecting on their own experience of social media. We may know, or have, children, for example, who have been bullied by classless classmates. Or, what may be less obviously traumatizing but nonetheless debilitating, a child who simply cannot put their phone down for fear they will miss something. The social pressures among young people are like a relentless, visceral tide. Among adults, you’ll hear the recurring lament that it takes an inordinate amount of time to keep up. And there’s a vague sense of dis-ease that most of what we see on social media is the pretty, gilded side of life. ‘Look how idyllic my vacation was, and how perfect my children are, and how special my honey is.’ We’re seldom shown the airport snafu that messed up the vacation, or the spat that sent both spouses to bed angry, or the anxiety-ridden child who can’t sleep at night and frets incessantly. Not only that but, as I heard a young woman say recently, after she had disconnected herself from social media, “I don’t like myself on Facebook.” She didn’t like her temper, I think, her snarkiness, her snappy retorts.
For some things, of course, electronic connection is just right. Most of us probably wouldn’t choose to return to a time without it. But as Judy Bagley-Bonner, my former colleague here on staff at Federated, used to say, “Email is for information, not communication.” In other words, it’s a wonderful tool for passing on news or setting up a meeting or arranging for when to pick someone up at the airport. But as soon as it gets into the territory of working out a tense stand-off at work, or trying to understand how a friendship turned frosty or discerning a necessary direction shift in a workplace, it fails miserably. Electronic communication has lured us into believing that nearly everything can be worked out and settled through the ether. And it can’t.
Once upon a time, the Creator God looked over the face of the entire creation and saw that it was good (Genesis 1:31). And at the same time, God could see that it was broken. There was betrayal and mean-spiritedness and injustice. And there was loneliness, deep loneliness.
And when God saw this whole swamp of neglect and selfishness and isolation, what did God do? God sent not an email nor a letter nor a declaration. No, what God sent was a human being. It was only in a human form that what was most needed could be conveyed. Only in a human being could the deepest wells of astonishing love be expressed. With all the failure and brokenness and loneliness that ooze through the world, “God so loved the world that God gave God’s only Child” (John 3:16). “This is how much God loved the world,” says The Message. And that love came not as a social media post or an email. It came as a flesh-and-blood person.
The good news we share here on Sunday mornings, and at every church gathering and meeting and service opportunity, is rooted in this greatest of all truths: that GOD—the One in whom we live and move and have our being—GAVE—not lent or sent or rented, but GAVE—God’s only CHILD—not a Facebook post or a proclamation or a terse message, but a CHILD. God gave God’s Child. And why? Because it’s in this human being that God’s undying affection for us and our world is most fully revealed. A Child given, and killed, and finally raised from the dead. It’s in that whole gift of the Christ Child that God’s love most gorgeously blooms.
It doesn’t stop with God’s love, either, of course. If love is the fabric of the entire universe, then our very call as human beings is to join that relentlessly transforming energy. It’s as though the whole divine being is a freeway of love, and we’re entering that freeway from an entrance ramp, and our whole work is to go along at the same energy and speed and frequency of the holy traffic we’re joining. Remember the old Aretha Franklin song? “We goin’ ridin’ on the freeway of love/ Wind’s against our backs/ We goin’ ridin’ on the freeway of love/ In my pink Cadillac.” Except that, on God’s freeway, it’s not so much romantic love that’s the subject—though there’s certainly nothing wrong with that!—it’s more the sort of love that gives itself away for the sake of others, and particularly others who may need our support and care.
At Federated’s last Church Council meeting, on Tuesday, Maren Koepf, our Moderator, asked us to reflect on the many and various ways we see love demonstrated. In what ways does love bubble up among us? The answers the Council offered were a simple and textured slice of everyday qualities and acts. As I reflected on ways love is shown, I recalled a piece of counsel I had read several months ago and shared here, that we will “tell better stories about those whose choices hurt us” (Osheta Moore, Christian Century, Nov. 8, 2017, p. 11; cf. my sermon of Nov. 12, 2017)—that we not assume the worst, in other words, about those with whom we disagree, or who bother us, but that we try to sense their own hurts and cares and deeply-felt interests. Others on the Council invited us to laugh more; to focus more on loving and less on worrying; to anticipate the needs of others; to be welcoming hosts of every guest who comes to this house of God. One person summed up this whole invitation to love by reminding us that it is, in a sense, the invitation, at each moment, to live into the care and character of Christ. That’s it—to be the embodied presence of Christ for each other.
The upshot is this: a Federated Church that is vital and alive sustains and supports one another so richly and so palpably that people around town who know Federated will say of us, “Behold how they love one another” (early church theologian, Tertullian; cf. John 13:34-35)—in their sharing, in their respect, in their joy, in their spirit.
A church steeped in that love, though, cares not just for its own members. It also reaches beyond itself and spreads that love far and wide. The other day in our staff meeting, my colleague Mark Simone related this story: “Asked by the BBC to identify the defining moment in his life, Desmond Tutu spoke of the day he and his mother were walking down the street. Tutu was nine years old. A tall white man dressed in a black suit came towards them. In the days of apartheid in South Africa, when a black person and a white person met while walking on a footpath, the black person was expected to step into the gutter to allow the white person to pass, and nod their head as a sign of respect. But this day, before a young Tutu and his mother could step off the sidewalk, the white man stepped off the sidewalk and, as they passed, he tipped his hat in a gesture of respect to her.
“The white man was Trevor Huddleston, an Anglican priest who was bitterly opposed to apartheid. It changed Tutu’s life. When his mother told him that Trevor Huddleston had stepped off the sidewalk because he was a ‘man of God,’ Tutu found his calling. ‘When she told me that he was an Anglican priest I decided there and then that I wanted to be an Anglican priest, too. And what is more, I wanted to be a man of God!’ said Tutu.
“Huddleston later became a mentor to Desmond Tutu and his commitment to the equality of all human beings due to their creation in God’s image was a key driver in Tutu’s opposition to apartheid.”
Said Mark Simone when he finished telling this story: “My prayer is that we can all strive to be ‘people of God’ who are willing to ‘step off the sidewalk’ and ‘tip our hat’ to our sisters and brothers.” Indeed, what a noble and grand calling! God has loved us. And we have the rare and precious privilege to love each other. May it always be so! Behold how they love one another!