Philemon, I thank my God every time I mention you in my prayers 5 because I’ve heard of your love and faithfulness, which you have both for the Lord Jesus and for all God’s people. 6 I pray that your partnership in the faith might become effective by an understanding of all that is good among us in Christ. 7 I have great joy and encouragement because of your love, since the hearts of God’s people are refreshed by your actions, my brother. 8 Therefore, though I have enough confidence in Christ to command you to do the right thing, 9 I would rather appeal to you through love. (CEB)
“The Gospel Gone Viral: If the Bible Had
Been Written Online,” Week Two
As
a 23-year-old unpaid intern in the chaplain department of California Pacific
Medical Center, I split most of my time between two wards: the inpatient
psychiatric ward, and the dialysis and kidney disease ward (with the occasional
field trip up to the transplant floors).
My stories from the psych ward are for another sermon entirely, but here’s
the thing about a dialysis ward:
It
is not like any other hospital room. You’re
in a chair in a giant room, and everyone else is sitting in a chair just like
yours around in a circle. There is no
privacy, no curtains, no walls, no doors.
You’re in the open, in the round, and prone. You’re at the mercy of a machine to do things
your body used to be able to do for itself.
Your movements are tethered to the necessity of always being near a
treatment center. And it is little
wonder, then, that a transplant is often the preferred course to a lifetime of
dialysis.
But
transplants come with their own array of challenges—namely, finding a perfect
match donor (and even then, nothing is guaranteed). But after three years of living with kidney
disease, a man’s illness was becoming worse and worse, and he knew it: he
needed a new kidney. As for what
happened next…well, I’ll let the folks at Twitter tell this particular tale:
Not knowing what else to do, he turned
to Twitter and wrote: “(Expletive), I need a kidney.”
Within a few days, 19 people offered to
find out if they might be a match. One
of the people who replied was an acquaintance…who hadn’t seen (this man) in
years. After seeing the tweet, e
researched the procedure, talked to people who had been through it before, and
then decided to get tasted to see if he would be a match.
When the match came back positive, he
decided to donate his kidney. After the
procedure, he sent a get-well-soon message back to (his acquaintance)—on Twitter.
This
is a new 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 is not 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 last week with perhaps the most basic: email and
text messaging. This week, we graduate
to the more advanced class of learning about this newfangled thing that people
call Twitter, where people tweet at each other, but that has nothing to do with
birds…or with that Angry Birds game you hear that all of those same young whippersnappers
are playing nowadays! (Seriously,
whatever happened to Yahtzee?)
Last
week, I talked about how this letter of Paul to Philemon was the closest thing
we have in Scripture to an email—to a piece of personal and informal
correspondence from Paul. And in
comparison to most of the rest of his letters, which were written and designed
for public consumption, in the manner that open letters or letters to the
editor are today, the letter to Philemon definitely reads as something more
intimate.
Verses
4-8 are no exception, because after the greeting that makes up verses 1-3, Paul
launches into a very heartfelt, very encouraging tribute to Philemon’s own
character and work as a Christian. Okay,
so maybe Paul is buttering Philemon up for the major, major request that is to
follow—and that we will get to next week in this series. But considering how much of a crank Paul
comes across as in other letters—my personal favorite being his exclamation in
Galatians that he wished those who opposed his view on circumcision would
castrate themselves—I’m inclined to believe that there is a groundswell of
genuine, acute affection for Philemon.
And
I say this in part because of a Greek word that appears in verse 6 in this
passage—a Greek word that many of you have probably heard of: koinonia. Koinonia is one of those New Testament words
for which there is no good English translation, and that is partly due to the
shortcomings of the English language itself: it tends not to be able to
differentiate between the different forms of love very easily—it just calls
every kind of love “love.”
Biblical
Greek, by contrast, has a plethora of terms for the different sorts of love:
there’s “philo,” the sort of camaraderie and brotherly love that the city of
Philadelphia gets its name from. There’s
“eros,” or erotic love. There’s “caritas,”
or selfless love or compassion, from which we get our English word “charity.” And then there’s “agape,” or an overwhelming
sense of communal love. It’s the big
love, it’s the God-level love, the love that is meant to awe us.
And
the human expression of agape is koinonia—a communion and a fellowship in
something far bigger than ourselves. We
mere mortals may not be fully capable of agape, but we are capable of
participating in koinonia, which is what Paul is saying about Philemon in verse
6: “partnership in the faith” is one way we translate “koinonia,” but to be
honest, I don’t entirely care for that translation, because I think we—perhaps unconsciously—tend
to think of a partnership as a two-person endeavor: two people or entities
partner together, kind of in the way that we might say that two spouses are one
another’s partners. But koinonia is
meant to have a potentially infinite number of partners and potential partners. What Paul is saying here is that Philemon’s
work as a Christian has a lot more partners than might first meet the modern eye.
So,
what on earth does this have to do with Twitter and tweeting and people
tweeting like birds?
Twitter, more than perhaps any other form of 21st century social media, has made people accessible to one another. For all the worry—some of it justified—that social media has turned us into a cave-like people content to interact purely through 1’s and 0’s rather than with ink and paper and face-to-face contact, Twitter has allowed interaction with people you would have otherwise never known existed, or people you would otherwise have never had a chance at getting the ear of. If you have an internet connection and an ability to put your thoughts down in 140 characters or less (often very difficult, I’ll grant you), it can be a tremendous tool for good.
Here’s
how it works: You create an account, just like with email or Facebook. You can then choose accounts of other people
or organizations to follow…and the possibilities are almost limitless. You can follow your friends and family (just
like on Facebook), but you can also follow your favorite celebrities, athletes,
news organizations, sports teams, humanitarian organizations, political
leaders, you name it. You can even
follow this church or me on Twitter! (I’m shameless, I know. First step in solving a problem is admitting
that you have one.)
The
aggregate effect of all of this, though, has been a completely brand new way to
deliver news: you can create a list of news organizations, and they will post
links to their stories on Twitter as they get filed, which has made Twitter one
of the quickest ways to receive the news today.
When the Tsaranev brothers were terrorizing Boston earlier this year,
the news that one had been killed and the other apprehended was broken on
Twitter. When the 9.0 earthquake—and subsequent
tsunami—struck Japan in the spring of 2011, Japanese government officials
utilized Twitter to notify each other where rescue attempts needed to be made. And, on a far more micro level, one someone
breaks the news that they need a kidney donor, well…nearly 20 people almost
immediately and selflessly step forward.
If
that isn’t a sort of koinonia, of a communion that comes with belonging to a
fellowship far bigger than ourselves, then I’m honestly not sure what is.
And
so imagine if Paul had access to Twitter today: or if Philemon, in all his work
as a Christian leader, did as well—what their partnership or fellowship in the
Gospel might look like now. After all,
the letter to Philemon is Paul’s shortest letter by a considerable amount—to the
extent that you can boil one of them down to a Tweet, this is it: “Hi,
Philemon. Love your work. Sending Onesimus back to you. He’s your brother, not
your slave. Lovies, Paul.” It’s
practically a telegram (you remember those, right?). It’s just online instead of wired.
Think
about how new ways of communicating can increase the koinonia of the
church. We are the heirs to the work of
Philemon, and our tradition has had a great history of taking advantage at
every turn of new tools to preach the Gospel.
A big reason why Martin Luther’s Reformation took off like it did was
because the printing press had just been invented. A big reason why the 1950s was a heyday for
preachers was because television had just become widely accessible.
And
so who are we, as heirs to the koinonia, to the wide partnership practiced by
Paul and by Philemon, to dismiss out of hand new ways to spread the Good News? Who are we to say we can only do one thing or
offer the message of Jesus Christ in only one way? Who are we to try to try and narrow our
communication of a limitless, boundless, fenceless God?
It
is easy to say that God does not fit into a box. And it is easy to say because it is
true. But it is harder to say that our
communication of that God does not also fit into a box. And it is harder to say because we refuse to
allow it to be true. But it was true for
Paul, and for Philemon. It was true for
the Apostles, and ultimately, for Jesus Christ itself. Let it be true for us again. Amen.
Rev.
Eric Atcheson
Longview,
Washington
August
4, 2013
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