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Psalm 1
Mark 9: 30-37
A Sermon by the Reverend Odette Lockwood-Stewart
Epworth United Methodist Church, Berkeley

This morning’s Gospel reading describes two ... powerful, and... uneasy ... silences.  The first... silence... happens when Jesus tells his disciples what to expect.  They have followed him as the Messiah ... the one anointed by God to lead and liberate the people ... and now they hear him say ... “the Son of Man will be betrayed into human hands... and they will kill him ... and three days after being killed he will rise again.”  Imagine that silence ... each of the disciples looking at their own sandals, hoping against hope that someone else would speak up ... but no one did. According to Mark’s Gospel, “they did not understand what he was saying, and they were afraid to ask him.”

The next... silence is after they arrive in Capernaum.  Jesus heard the sounds of arguing along the way there. When they entered a house, Jesus asked the disciples what they were arguing about. The Gospel says, “but they were silent, for on the way they had argued with one another who was the greatest.”  Talk about an awkward silence.  How do you tell Jesus that what you had been arguing about on the journey to his passion who was the greatest among you?

Silences ... prompted by a lack of understanding ... or deepened by fear, or exposing false or foolish behavior ... silences are windows for the soul ... allowing us to see and be seen in essential ways.

The disciples were silent when they were confused, when their expectations of Jesus were turned upside down, when the smallness of personal competition in community was exposed..

We talk a lot about community at Epworth.  We try to be real with each other ... but it’s hard.  It’s even hard to be real about things when we feel good .... let alone about the things that drive us to uneasy silence.  We, too, fail to understand and are afraid to ask about suffering or mystery. We, too, argue along the way about who is right, who decides, who’s the greatest in so many ways.

Jesus placed all this confusion, conflict, and competition ... into a Gospel context.  He took a little child (the most vulnerable and least powerful being among them) and put the child in the center of the room. Embracing that child, Jesus said, “Whoever embraces one of these children as I do embraces me, and far more than me, God – who sent me.”

Earlier in worship we watched a brief video about Facebook... and Twitter... and iphones... and text messaging... and the ways in which technology can draw us into a virtual addiction to connection...without the solitude or silence or space for reflection.

Communication technology is changing the shape of communities of faith even as it transforms the culture as a whole.  Blogging ... Twitter ... Facebook.  The possibility now exists to share the most intimate ... or mundane moments of our lives instantaneously with scores ... or hundreds of those we have technologically designated as “friends.”

For those of you unfamiliar with Facebook, a basic feature is the status update ... you are invited to write on your own Facebook homepage or “wall” a response to the perpetual question, “What’s on your mind?”  

In John Wesley’s day, people in weekly face to face class meetings asked each other, “how is it with your soul?”  And only those gathered in the room could hear.

Now, “What’s on your mind” goes out as often as you want to write something  .... to everyone designated in your “friends” network by typing a few words and posting them.

Facebook is also fun.  It is a way to publicize feelings, calls to action, or a television show you just watched.  Mission Intern Lindsey Kerr told me that it helps her stay connected to a whole community in the Philippines. Movements and ministries are sharing and being shaped by Facebook.  But, as with every means of communication, it is also possible to hide in the transparency of details, to answer quickly the question “what’s on you mind?” while avoiding the deeper question, “how is it with your soul?”

I recognize that there is irony to my humble beginnings of a conversation about community and communications. I’m doing well if I update my Facebook status once a month.  And while I regularly get messages that someone is now following me on Twitter, I have not gone anywhere, nor do I know how to go anywhere, for them to follow!  Questions of who owns our images, who has access to information, and how much is too much information are just some of the things to reflect upon together.

One blogger has named the Facebook experience “ambient intimacy.”  She says, “Ambient intimacy is about being able to keep in touch with people with a level of regularity and intimacy that you wouldn’t usually have access to, because time and space make it impossible.  Not only does this ... allow us to hear confessions and make our own, it also helps us become a community of caring and support.” (Christian Century)

This immense yearning for connection moves me.  Facebook reportedly receives around 1.9 billion visits each month ... and the number of people using Facebook today is over 150 million.  Over half of these people use Facebook everyday.

Using this, or any other medium, we choose what we disclose, how we respond.  We choose whether to show our “friends” our “true” faces in all their complexity or to promote false faces to a broader audience.  

Writing in Christian Century Magazine, Lenora Rand wrote, “Something about that simple question ... ‘What’s on your mind?’ ... invites reflection and response.  For some it calls forth truth at a profound level. I have read admissions of envy and rage, of inadequacy and fear, of disappointment with self and frustration with life.  Sometimes the admissions are sent to you stripped down and raw; one Facebook friend recently admitted that she ‘woke up kind of heartbroken.’  But quite often the admissions are mixed in and softened with humor; another friend wrote, ‘Wrestling the demons of too much to do and too little time.  The demons fight dirty.’  With whatever tone they are served up, the truths about our lives that we often mask with polite smiles and the superficial ‘I’m fine, how are you?’ are leaking out in this online world.”

However we keep in touch, texting, online, on the phone, at coffee hour ... or other face-to face settings, Jesus places our conversations in context.  Jesus places that little child at the center, embraces the child, and asks “what’s on our mind” when we are face to face with the most vulnerable, the least powerful ... in the world ... on our streets ... in this room.

We are invited to discover, and to share, who we are in community in many ways. We are invited to see the face of God, and to add the most vulnerable as friends right on our home page.

Thanks be to God.