Getting centred in a twittering world

From Wellington Cathedral of St Paul

Getting centred in a twittering world 1 August 2010

• Psalm 107:1-9,43
• Hosea 11:1-11
• Colossians 3:1-11
• Luke 12:13-21

Rev. Dr. Raymond Pelly Priest Associate http://wellingtoncathedral.org.nz/index.php/Sermons

Right now we’re in the midst of the latest IT craze: getting our hands on an IPhone or maybe it’s an IPad. It’s the latest ‘must have’ thing. From a very contemporary angle this poses the question: what lies at the centre of our lives? What makes us tick? Do we have a centre? Or are we in fact driven every which way by every next text-message that comes our way?

Each of the three readings in its different way challenges us to come clean about what is at the centre of our lives. What goes on in our heart of hearts? By what criteria do we make key decisions in our lives?

I.

Hosea was a man with the wounding and alienating experience of being married to an unfaithful wife. Actually, she was a whore. From this experience he imagines what it must be like for God to be yoked (or covenanted) to faithless Israel. He compares Israel to a child, loved & called by name; a toddler whose hands he held as he learned to walk. The ‘walking’ in question is the journey from slavery in Egypt to freedom in the Promised Land. This was the honeymoon period; but then it turned sour. Israel turns out to be unfaithful like an unfaithful wife. A whore, in fact.

But how does God react to that? Once again, Hosea draws on his own experience. ‘How can I give you up? How can I hand you over? My heart recoils within me; my compassion grows warm and tender.’ Israel, for her part, utterly fails to respond. ‘They shall return to the land of Egypt’. Israel, in other words, incredibly, is bent on returning to slavery. Hell-bent? ‘My people are … turning away from me’. They prefer their own little ‘schemes’ to the love & calling of God. And this basically means conformity to the pagan society around them. The result? Everything goes wrong. ‘The sword rages in their cities’, says Hosea. Violence reigns. The covenant with its ethics has been forgotten. If we can commit adultery, why not kill?

II.

Colossians says something similar, but in another way. Now the centre is the living Christ, whose ‘mind’, or way of life, the new converts are invited to share. It’s like Paul in Philippians 2 who says, ‘Let the same mind be in you that was in Christ Jesus’ – the emphasis here being on the cross. Or, we might recall his letter to the Galatians. ‘It is no longer I who live, but Christ who lives in me’. In Colossians the experience of being renewed or re-created is compared to taking off old, soiled, worn-out clothes and exchanging them for a smart new outfit. ‘You have stripped off the old self with its practices and have clothed yourself with a new self’.

Once again, as with Hosea, acceptance or rejection of God has far-reaching effects. Acceptance brings with it a wonderful freedom of encounter. ‘There is no longer Greek and Jew, circumcised and uncircumcised, barbarian, Scythian, slave and free; but Christ is all and in all’. All the old barriers are down. But rejection of this new centering in Christ and the freedom that flows from it, brings with it all kinds of destructive behaviour both of self and of community. Paul highlights greed because this is the classic case of putting something other than God at the centre of your life: the craving for things; or the mindless amassing of more and more information.

When the well-known comedian Tony Hancock committed suicide in a Melbourne hotel some years ago, they found that his electric razor was full of beard. It hadn’t been cleaned out for several months. More and more and more and then bust.

III.

Spring on to the Gospel. This too is about greed, but in a still more radical way. It starts with a young man trying to co-opt Jesus into sorting out a dispute he has with his brother over the family inheritance. Jesus’ response is to say, ‘I’m not a lawyer (a Rabbi in that sense), but a person who can see with piercing insight what is going on in your heart. You are consumed by greed. Take care, life does not consist in the abundance of possessions’.

Jesus then follows up with a hard-hitting parable. It goes like this. ‘There was once a rich absentee landlord. His wealth was based on getting his hands on land forfeited by peasants who had fallen into debt. He lived in one of the local towns; and now he’s looking at retirement. He’s amassed heaps of stuff, but it's all for himself. Not like Joseph in Egypt who collected grain to feed the starving. His idea of retirement is to ‘relax, eat, drink and be merry’. But there’s a problem. Just at the moment he retires, he has a heart attack or a stroke. It all turns to custard’. Is this a familiar story? ‘Then’, asks Jesus, ‘the things you have amassed, whose shall they be?’ – the implication being that all those people who had been deprived of their land and forced to work as day labourers for low wages will come and take back for themselves what had unjustly been taken from them.

Once again, the same pattern: something less than God has come to dominate the life of an individual. Not only does this turn out to be self-destructive, it also creates a social situation that is inherently unstable and potentially violent. We have been warned.

IV.

In his poem, The Four Quartets, the poet T.S.Eliot wrote of ‘a twittering world’ where people are ‘distracted from distraction by distraction’. This was surely prophetic. It provokes a question. Are we a generation that talks freedom, but which, in the mass popular culture we inhabit, are continuously brainwashed into conformity? Last week I read an article about the effect on us of always being at the beck and call of our mobile phone, Blackberry, IPhone or whatever it is. In studies that have been made of this, some interesting things emerge.

For instance, if you are engaged in some task requiring real concentration, and you interrupt to take a call on your mobile, it takes on average between 10 and 20 minutes to re-focus, to get back on task. Are we talking about a huge waste of time? Or, if you are always on the ‘qui vive?’ trying frantically to keep up with the jumping scene, you probably think – if you reflect at all – that you are at the forefront of modern liberated life.

But the question is, Do you ever stop to think in depth for yourself? Isn’t all this frenetic communicating not an unprecedented freedom, but rather the symptom of a new slavery, an ever-growing conformity? And do we know how to switch these blessed things off and get a good night’s sleep!

So we arrive at a paradox. The speeding up of life turns out to be a huge waste of quality time. Or, perhaps we suffer from the delusion that if we amass enough information, we shall become omniscient (or all-knowing) like God. Whereas the message of today’s readings is simple. When the living God becomes the centre, real life starts to flow; and this as enlivening of us as people as it spills over into relationships that are faithful, healthy and good. Pray, and life will break out all around you!

Dr. Raymond Pelly, Priest Associate raymond.pelly@clear.net.nz