SPIRITUAL TEXT-MESSAGING
Rev. Dr. Kathy Fuson Hurt
FBC, September 20, 2009
Readings: Mark 9:30-37
Hafiz, “Stop Being So Religious”
I shudder to confess this, realizing that I will lose the respect of many of you by doing so, but it seems an important step to take in the interest of transparency and full disclosure, so: I am one of those who does not use text-messaging as a form of communication. Yes, I hear your gasps all the way up here in the pulpit.
And I know that avoiding the use of text-messaging immediately marks me as some sort of weird, anachronistic technophobe, someone who is refusing to move on into the present by self-righteously, pig-headedly abstaining from one of the most common forms of communication. But it is a fact: I do not, nor am I likely anytime soon, resort to text-messaging in order to get in touch with someone. I write e-mails, I make phone calls, I have even more recently tested the waters of Facebook—but I do not text-message. The problem is not so much that I feel incompetent at it (though there is that, since I do not know many of the shorthand communication symbols used in text-messaging, and my large fingers are clumsy on the small cell-phone keys used for text-messaging); rather, the problem is that I cannot see the point of text-messaging. It seems tedious and labor-intensive. Why go to the trouble of typing out, on a small keyboard and a small screen, a couple of sentences that could more easily be delivered in a phone call? And if I am in a setting that prohibits voice calls, such as a worship service maybe I should be paying attention to something else (like the sermon) rather than sending text-messages.
Those are my obvious objections to text-messaging, nothing you have not heard before from others who, like me, proclaim themselves to be non-text-messagers. But I want to take my text-messaging concerns further this morning, into the spiritual arena, for I believe text-messaging may well be both the latest evidence of a longstanding spiritual problem—and the latest evidence of a kind of new spiritual insight.
One of the more spirited debates that continues in church management circles involves the relative importance of how children are regarded in a congregation. One side of the debate insists that the key to church vitality lies in appealing to adults: make sure church experience is filling the needs of adults, and those same adults will come along with children in tow, thus leading to a growing, vibrant church community. The other side of the debate decries the tendency of so many churches to become “adultocentric,” to be overly concerned with the experience of adult members so that children are stuck with the leftovers, and instead argues that the measure of a church community can be seen in how it attends to the needs of the lowest and least, the most vulnerable—beginning with the children in the congregation, who will always, in any church, be at the bottom of any hierarchy, official or informal.
In terms of this church, I see us usually landing on the side of the debate that recommends focus on adult needs. Take a look at our personnel budget over the last, say, ten years, and you will see that we have consistently decreased the hours spent on a staff member for the Sunday School. The smallest group in our church currently is made up of those persons under the age of 21. The area of congregational life which consistently attracts the fewest number of volunteers is the programming for children and youth: those volunteers which do lead such programs are often the same persons, year after year. We sequester our children and youth in a separate building, which could be a good thing, giving them their own space; but in doing so, putting them over there, we make it easy to forget about them. And while adults make plenty of noise during the worship service, wander in and out, forget to turn off cell phones, and engage in side conversations, the complaints that tend to be made about noise in the worship services invariably focus not on noisy adults, but on noisy children. Similarly, while I do hear unhappiness sometimes about how children behave “disrespectfully” in this sanctuary when the service is ended, running up and down aisles, for instance, or climbing around the pulpit, I have yet to hear any complaint about the disrespectful adults who slop coffee and leave discarded bulletins scattered around the space.
All of which supports my conclusion that we are a church more attuned to the needs of our adult members than our youthful members—and all of which leads me to wonder what to make of the scripture reading this morning about humility, service to the least and most vulnerable, and Jesus’ apparently clear regard for the presence and perspective of children. I also find our culture thrown into a questionable light when measured by this scripture: while it is true that ours is a culture overly focused on youth, to the neglect of the equally vulnerable aged, the focus is not really about valuing youth or respecting the unique needs and gifts of the young, but more about perverting the young into precocious, sexualized objects, youth whose primary purpose is to make us, the adults, look good (because we are, after all, the ones who produced these wonderful children and taught them everything they know and sacrificed so much for them, so they become a testimony to our own values).
The occasion for Jesus drawing upon the presence of a child to offer a teaching came about in response to his own disciples arguing, not for the first time nor for the last time, about their own standing, about “who was the greatest.” Like any one of us, the disciples saw the measure of a person’s worth in terms of how much power he exercised, who she could boss around, the extent of his influence over others, what other powerful people she knew, all the cool places he had traveled, the books she had read, the politicians he had supported, the ideas she could articulate and the convincing arguments he could make. In other words, the same measures we use now were the measures the disciples were drawing upon then to determine status, power, influence, success.
Though no one wanted to be the one to tell Jesus what the argument had been about, perhaps because the disciples already sensed that Jesus would take a dim view of their concerns, he seemed to figure out the focus of the argument anyway, and used the presence of a child to present his teaching about his primary value of service and concern for the least powerful within a community. And how effective do you suppose Jesus’ teaching was in setting the disciples straight? Do you suppose this was the last time they would argue over issues of status and power, that Jesus had finally convinced them to sign on to his preference for service over status and humility over power? Or do you think the silence of the disciples was only momentary, the sort of indulgent silence we give to someone who is trying to teach us a lesson we have no interest in learning so we let the person speak his/her piece and then return to business as usual? If this history of the Christian tradition is any proof, while there have always been some in any generation, in any congregation, who did take to heart Jesus’ call to servant leadership and humility and concern for the most vulnerable, the “little ones” in the community, those have been in the minority. In every age, in every church, bitter and destructive conflicts have been waged to determine who would be in charge, what authority someone would wield, who was most important, and why. Most of those conflicts did not result in the triumph of those who sought to follow the way Jesus laid out; opting for humility and concern for children and vulnerable persons is in fact usually a perfect recipe for ending up the loser in a conflict.
As the phenomenon of text-messaging emerged, it seemed that those who first embraced it enthusiastically were young people. Like youth of any time and all times, they saw it as a means of communication that mystified the adults and afforded ways of interacting that adults could not disrupt or control. And text-messaging quickly developed its own particular language, with abbreviations and symbols that made it possible to deliver a lot of information in a minimum of words—again, a style of communication that many adults (such as myself) are not fond of, loving as we do the sounds of our own voices and preferring to use many words, as many words as possible, as many words with multiple syllables as possible, using words not so much to convey information as to impress another with our brilliance, our wisdom, our intellectual powers, our authority. Text-messaging does not lend itself at all to this sort of cleverness and influence over others—which, I confess, is one of the real reasons I refuse to employ it. How can I possibly show you my stellar communication gifts and my astounding brainpower in a handful of words and cute symbols on a tiny screen? I need lots of words and a big space to accomplish that. Small wonder, then, that text-messaging is far more popular among youth than adults: if you are in a position that holds little or no power, then tiny messages will serve you well—as our young people have discovered, even as those persons not in power in other oppressive cultures have discovered. The powerless can make fine use of text-messaging; the powerful find it silly, too cute to be taken seriously.
Author Phyllis Tickle, in a book entitled The Great Emergence, surveys the tremendous shifts occurring through the Christian tradition and Christian churches in recent years, and concludes that Christianity is having a huge “rummage sale,” in which quantities of stuff—not literal stuff, but ways of functioning, priorities, values, teachings, interpretations—are being discarded in order to clear space for something new. Just exactly what that something new will be has yet to be determined, but Tickle offers some provocative suggestions, pointing to what churches and Christian practice might look like within, say, five to ten years. One characteristic that Tickle says is on the way out and to be discarded in the rummage sale is church functioning based on traditional authority, whether that authority comes from a hierarchy, from scripture, or from polity/church organization and governance. In its place, Tickle imagines, will be a church that does not look to scripture or a denominational official or even (and this is important for us to recognize) democratic process to set its priorities and direction. No more pronouncements, no more dogma, no more votes with winners and losers, no more looking to a Bible or a church constitution to chart a course.
All of which sounds like a recipe for chaos to me, and Tickle warns that many of us will find this new form of church chaotic. She describes how it will work in terms of a conversation: the lines of “authority” will be conversational, the process by which movement and change happens will be conversational, the primary quality of church experience will be conversational. The time of pronouncements is gone; the time of conversation is coming fast. And one interesting feature of a conversational kind of church experience is that it is much more difficult to determine who has the power, who is in charge. Everybody gets to speak in a conversation—in fact, we need one another much more when a conversation is happening. For without one another, there can be no conversation. So a conversational church is a church where authority is widely dispersed, where no one person or group calls the shots, and where the back-and-forth movement that characterizes a conversation has replaced any sort of forward, linear progression towards a particular destination. And a conversational church such as this begins to look a lot like the sort of community that Jesus may have been envisioning, where each of us is concerned about the other party in the conversation, where no one is first or last because the conversation is ongoing, where relationship is what matters most—not buildings, not programs, not sermons, not budgets, but relationships. Further, in this coming conversational church, I expect we will see some very different understandings not only of how church should be, but how God might be.
I remember once seeing a comedy sketch where God was characterized as an entity of many words with a repetitive, pompous style of communication. Confirmation of this image of God was found in some less inspiring portions of the Bible that suffered from a poor translation. This version of God, a God who propounds at length from on high to God’s subjects down below, is radically transformed in a conversational, networked and dispersed vision into a God similar to that described by the poet Hafiz as a “God who knows only four words.” And Hafiz notes that such a God is particularly known by children:
Every
Child
Has known God,
Not the God of names,
Not the God of don’ts,
Not the God who ever does
Anything weird,
But the God who only knows four words
And keeps repeating them, saying:
“Come dance with Me.”
Come
Dance.
