Many people have already applied themselves to the task of compiling an account of the events that have been fulfilled among us. 2 They used what the original eyewitnesses and servants of the word handed down to us. 3 Now, after having investigated everything carefully from the beginning, I have also decided to write a carefully ordered account for you, most honorable Theophilus. 4 I want you to have confidence in the soundness of the instruction you have received. (CEB)
“The Gospel Gone Viral: If the Bible had
been Written Online,” Week Four
The
CT scan confirmed what might have been the worst possible news for the mother
of a little two-year-old girl: this was not simply a stomachache, or a case of
the flu, but a neuroblastoma tumor in the abdomen, pushing down on the kidneys
and liver. It meant months of
chemotherapy and hospitalization for her little daughter, Hazel: months of
worry and joylessness with no end immediately in sight. Until they made a “send pizza” sign out of
masking tape for the window in Hazel’s room.
Here, I’ll let Hazel’s mother, Lauren, tell the rest of the story:
This sign was up for several days
without even a single phone call asking to send up a pizza (which we completely
expected!). Then, on Saturday, it all
changed. Aaron (her husband) had left the hospital, while my
father-in-law stayed with Hazel, to go home and spend some time with me and our
other children. I would return later
that night. While at home, we began
hearing news that several pizzas were being delivered to the hospital. After only a few short hours, we were told
that someone had taken a picture on the street of our sign, had posted it to
Reddit.com, and it had reached #1! Then,
someone ended up posting a link to our Blog, Facebook, and donation page, which
then all went bananas! Hazel woke up
from her nap to the smell of pizza and wa so excited to chow down! Several other children and nurses came into
the room, with music playing, and had themselves a wonderful pizza party. As of yesterday, there were more than 20
boxes delivered and more was coming! We
had such a great time! However, due to
the sheer number of pizzas and inquires from the media, the hospital has asked
that the pizza deliveries end and thank everyone for their support…
We’ve been absolutely humbled and
surprised by the outpouring of love and support from the online community and
can only hope and pray that this brings awareness to Neuroblastoma and the
childhood cancer community. Awareness
and funding is severely lacking, and to help get better treatments and outcomes
for our children, we need all the support we can get! I truly felt that God used this wonderful day
to help life, not only our families’, but everyone on the 4th floor’s
spirits. We all need a little hope up
here.
This
is a sermon series designed to take us through the month of August, and it is a
slightly different one from many of the sermon series we have had here in the
past, which often revolve around a theme, a chapter of Scripture, or a book by
a contemporary author. This sermon
series isn’t about a substance so much as it is about a style: the style of
communication that has taken the world by storm within the past 15-20 years via
the internet. And I adamantly believe
that online communication and social media represent a tremendous opportunity
for us to offer the Good News of Jesus Christ to a lot of people. Which is exactly the same way, I think, that
the writers of the New Testament viewed their Gospels and Epistles. With that supposition, we will be spending
these five Sundays tackling how we might write the message today, with our
modern-day tools, and we began with perhaps the most basic: email and text
messaging, before graduating last week to Twitter, and last week, we turned to
a platform that I know is familiar to many of you because I am friends with you
on it—Facebook—but now we arrive at another platform that you may perhaps
follow, but not indulge in participating in yourself: blogging.
Blogging
is itself an abbreviation—though not much of one, because it only drops two
letters—for writing on a “weblog,” or a “blog,” an online diary of sorts that
is typically public, but can on some platforms be made available to only a
select audience. Which really is all there is to it: a blog is a public, online
diary, except instead of the limitations of a traditional pen-and-paper diary,
your online diary can also include music, videos, links to other websites…the
sky really is the limit. And unlike
platforms like Twitter that include a strict word count on entries, entries to
your blog can be as long or as short as you like—which has meant that for many
people, blogs have become a terrific source of in-depth conversation on a
particular subject matter.
And
that is probably the biggest substantive difference between keeping a
traditional diary and keeping a blog: instead of being a recounting of the day’s
events, a blog will often recount events (both personal and public) with a tilt
towards a particular subject matter: there are blogs devoted to sports, cars,
politics, art, you name it. Just as the
sky is the limit for what you can put on your blog, so too is the sky the limit
for blogs that specialize in reflecting on a particular subject.
And
this seemingly infinite list of subjects most certainly includes Christianity
and other organized religions. There is
a proverbial boatload of Christian blogs out there online, waiting for you to
read them, and this is where Luke comes into play as a model for us to follow
today.
Unlike
Matthew, Mark, or John, Luke begins his Gospel with a formal preface to the
Gospel’s original recipient: an otherwise unknown man named Theophilus, whose
name literally means “lover of God.”
Luke, then, is not trying to write to a hostile audience, but to someone
who already knows God and loves God, but perhaps does not yet know the truth
about Jesus Christ.
Or,
rather, perhaps Theophilus knows about Jesus, but only in incomplete and
inadequate ways. The first words of Luke’s
Gospel are an acknowledgement that many others have undertaken to create this
narrative of the events of Jesus’ ministry, yet Luke sees the need to create
his own record, a record that, as he puts it, has been “investigated carefully
from the beginning.” Luke follows this Biblical
seal of quality assurance by saying that he wants Theophilus to know the real
truth about everything that has just happened in Israel in the years and
decades prior.
Which,
let’s be honest: speaking as a preacher, this really isn’t that innovative of
Luke to do. He is pulling the oldest
trick in the book for fleshing out a sermon: outline the ways in which those
who came before you got it wrong, and then proclaim how you have gotten right. That’s Preaching 101. It’s also a not particularly humble way of
proclaiming the Gospel, but it is still an easy trap to fall into, because we
want to be right. If we felt we were
wrong, we would get different opinions and different beliefs. Luke is no different from us in that regard.
But
speaking as a historian, which Luke in so many words claims to be—by noting
that he is not himself an eyewitness, but a documenter of the accounts of
eyewitnesses—what Luke says is absolutely clutch. Luke is saying that he wants nothing but the
truth for Theophilus…well, that implies that there are some less-than-accurate
accounts of what really happened floating around.
And
in this singular way, the internet—and the world of social media, and of
blogging—is not unique in the slightest.
Wack-a-doodle theories and delusions will exist regardless of the era.
Put
a different way: if Luke is the orderly, reputable scholar or journalist
attempting to get his findings peer-reviewed and published in a journal of
repute, then who he is warning us against is the crackpot End Times fanatic who
listens to too much late-night televangelism while writing on his blog that we
have to return to only coining money, lest the Antichrist use ATM cards to
brand us with the Mark of the Beast after the government unleashes the Four
Horsemen that they have been secretly hiding in Area 51 along with evidence of extraterrestrial
life.
And
plenty of theories abounded about Jesus after He ascended—the Romans, of
course, had geo-political motive to discredit Jesus entirely, but even within
the nascent Christian movement, there were different theories: that Jesus was
never actually dead because one cannot kill a God, or that the Resurrection had
been staged to cover up a tomb robbery, and so on. Luke is aware that such theories exist, and
is saying, in so many words, “Please. I
did the work. Trust it.”
That
is the test that we need to apply to our own writing, whether it is in a traditional
pen-and-paper diary, whether it is in a letter to the editor, whether it is in
an online blog, or whether it is not writing at all: but simply speaking the
Gospel to one another. Because as the
story of Hazel and her impromptu pizza extravaganza demonstrates, word moves
faster than ever these days. The words
we say, the words we share, on behalf of the divine Word, these are words that
must be offered with care, just like Luke, because after all, what right do we
have to tell others to trust us, when we ourselves and our words are not yet
trustworthy? How can we claim to offer hope
to people who are worried that Christians are out to deceive or manipulate them
instead?
Speaking
of Hazel, there is an epilogue to the story of the joy in her internet-inspired
pizza party in the midst of a childhood cancer ward…the joy continues. About ten days ago, her mother posted on
their blog that Hazel’s latest blood cultures came back negative, and so she
was able to go home. This is not the end
for Hazel’s healing: she will be undergoing another surgery this Wednesday, the
21st, because the tumor, though shrunken dramatically, is still
present and they need to remove the rest.
And so the “orderly account,” as it were, of Hazel’s odyssey continues,
at least for the moment unabated. You
can follow her at ourlittlehazelnut.blogspot.com.
And
so I, my dear fellow Theophiluses—fellow lovers of God—have sought to share
with you my own account of one girl’s life and struggle as a microcosm of
something far bigger than ourselves: that in pain, there can still exist
relief; that in illness, there can still exist joy; that in weakness, there can
still exist strength; and that in trials, there can still exist salvation.
These
are all truths that are easy—sometimes too easy—to lose sight of. We get distracted just as easily by our own
hurts as we do by a harmful interpretation of Scripture because both prey on
the same thing: our own short-sightedness.
In exhorting Theophilus, the lover of God, Luke so too also exhorts us
all as lovers of God to look beyond our own narrowness for the Christ who
taught us and healed us and died for us.
And we receive with each passing moment newer and more exciting ways to
fulfill that charge. The world may be
growing smaller, but the ways of hearing God’s message are getting only bigger. Thanks be to God. Amen.
Rev.
Eric Atcheson
Longview,
Washington
August
18, 2013
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