Lost Connections

The scriptures referred to are John 15:1-8 and 1 John 4:7-21.

If Jesus had been born today, I believe today's gospel would be about cellphones. Let me explain.

In the community of the chronically ill, to whose ranks Covid-19 is adding people daily, you will eventually hear of the “spoon theory.” It's not really a theory but a makeshift explanation of our problems with energy. Apparently a chronically ill woman met a friend for lunch at a nice restaurant and the friend complained that they rarely did that anymore. The other woman, casting about for an explanation, gathered all the spoons from the table and said that her energy each day was like so many spoons, which she had to give up or spend on any activity she wished to do. Taking a shower might cost her a spoon or two, getting dressed another, going shopping might cost a great many. She had to be frugal and budget the spoons given her every day and that meant choosing not to do some things in order to have enough spoons or energy to do other things.

That was a good improvisation but, to my mind, it needs to be improved upon. I have no idea how many spoons or how much energy I have at the beginning of the day. I might wake to find I have a normal amount of energy, or little or none. And that can change at any time. I can start out feeling normal and suddenly feel my energy draining rapidly by mid-morning, or mid-afternoon or at night. I might not get any energy back the rest of the day. Or I might just as suddenly find my energy restored after 40 minutes or as much as 3 hours later. What's really frustrating is at the end of a bad day suddenly feeling my energy return—at bedtime! So you have to add to the spoon analogy some kind of waiter who randomly takes your spoons or alternately gives you more, perhaps as some kind of prank.

I was discussing this online with others in the ME/CFS community when someone gave us a much better analogy. We are like faulty cellphones. You know how you plug your phone in at bedtime so it will charge overnight? We have all had the experience of picking it up in the morning only to find that it wasn't fully charged or that it didn't charge at all. Or you do have a full charge in the morning but when you check it just an hour or two later you are mysteriously down to 15%! And the longer you have your phone, the longer it seems to take to charge it and the shorter the time it holds the charge. At some point it may not charge at all. So you have to get a new battery, or, if you have an iPhone, a whole new phone! Unfortunately you can't do that with a body that just won't charge or hold a charge.

If you are lucky you will find that the problem is in the charger cord. You check to see if it is firmly connected to your phone AND to the plug AND to the outlet. Or you change the cord out for a new one and all is well. But you may have discovered that those cheap cords you can pick up in the drug store or the convenience store have a very limited lifespan. Or the part that plugs into your phone gets bent easily and suddenly it won't stay in. And so in just a few months you have to get another cord.

In the first century, of course, they did not have electronics, so Jesus used the grapevine as his metaphor. But the point is the same: you need a good connection.

Many if not most of the problems we Christians have are due to not being properly connected to Jesus. And I think, as Jesus used the grapevine as his metaphor, we, who may not know much about viticulture, can get some insights from thinking about it in terms of the devices we use every single day.

If you think about it, we need 3 different kinds of connection: one to get power, one to connect to the internet and one to get the right content. So let's look at each.

Sometimes the problem is that we just aren't connected to the power source. You can probably see where I'm going with this. The analogy is obvious and so is the solution. If we don't feel any connection to God, we need to check if we are communicating with him in prayer and by reading his Word. Are we worshiping and sharing the body and blood of Christ with the body of Christ, his church? And are we doing these things regularly?

Sometimes the problem is not that our device isn't physically connected and charged, it's that it can't connect to the internet. You don't have enough bars or you don't have the password or the router is down. And if your device is a tablet or a Kindle, it is almost useless. Now you may have some downloaded content you can use offline, like a book. But you can't get Wikipedia or the news or the weather.

If you aren't connected to God, what you need to know about him and from him is cut off or limited. Some people walk around with content about God and Jesus and spiritual matters they got when they were in Sunday school. And then there's the question of what was transmitted to them. One of my Sunday School teachers probably attended Sunday School himself in the early 1900s. If he didn't keep up with the latest in Biblical scholarship and theological reflection, what he passed on was probably influenced by what he was taught a half century before he taught me.

In the same way people who aren't actively connected to God today haven't gotten any updates on their childhood conceptions of him. They have no real time connection to the person they are supposedly following. That's like your GPS being out and so you find an old Rand McNally road map in the glove box to guide you but it's copyrighted 1978! Some of those streets have been altered or renamed or cut off by a highway built in the intervening 40-odd years. On the other hand, Jesus, we might say, is the Waze, the truth and the life!

Seriously, though, there are a lot of outdated ideas about God out there. It's like when you boot up your computer in the morning and go to a familiar website. You might notice that it's not actually interactive at first. The stories are a day or more old. What you're really looking at is a screenshot of the last time you visited the site. You need to refresh it. And we need to refresh our ideas about God occasionally.

Some people are stuck with ideas of God that date back to Late Bronze or Early Iron Age theocratic Israel. So they are obsessed with things like ritual and purity and certain kinds of people being acceptable and others being excluded. They also believe a lot of interpretations of passages in the Bible that have been overturned by recent scholarship. But chiefly they lack the most fundamental understanding of the nature of God, found in our passage from 1 John: “God is love.” And they might actually disagree with 1 John that “There is no fear in love, but perfect love casts out fear...” How are we going to keep people moral if we don't teach them to fear God and hell?

They obviously haven't upgraded to Covenant 2.0, which would give them a clearer picture of God, focused through the lens of Jesus' teachings and his life, death and resurrection. And that leads us to a problem we see even when we are connected to the internet: the quality of the content. The internet gives us access to virtually all the knowledge of the world, yet some people gravitate to and get mired in the disinformation that is also out there. They are presented with angry and distorted takes on people and sinister motives that are supposedly behind certain groups and movements.

And the same thing happens with the Bible. People bring their own prejudices, fears and desires to the Bible and it often acts as a Rorschach test for them. Angry people see only an angry God. Fearful people see only a God to fear. Overly scrupulous people see a nitpicking God. People obsessed with purity see a God primarily interested in that. The Westboro Baptist Church elevated a person's reaction to homosexuality to the most important issue in Christianity. I often wondered how they dealt with things like the commands to love others including those we perceive as enemies. Then I heard an interview with a member who was expelled for basically asking about such things. The answer she gave is that they don't deal with it. They ignore such things or explain them away. A lot of people don't go to the Bible to hear God's position on things; they go to hear their positions coming out of God's mouth, even if they have to do a lot of editing to make that happen.

Like I said, the lens through which we view scripture must be Jesus. As John chapter 3 so famously says, “For God so loved the world that he gave his one and only Son that whoever trusts in him should not perish but have eternal life. For God did not send his Son into the world to condemn the world but that the world should be saved through him.” (John 3:16-17) Everything Jesus does is done out of divine love and to rescue, not condemn, the world. How do people miss that? It's held up at every single football game!

God is love; Jesus is the God who is love incarnate. If we want spiritual power, if we want to learn more about who God really is, if we want to do what he wants, not what we want him to want, we must be connected to Jesus. We need to connect to him through prayer, through his Word, through the sacraments he gave us, and through worship with others who are connected to him. We need to refresh our link to him and update our understanding. God's people aren't a bunch of nomadic tribes fighting to conquer a land anymore. We don't live under a mere human who rules as king by divine right. There is not one designated temple where we must go and make sacrifices. We don't belong to a race that must be kept pure from contact with other races.

“...the Father has sent his Son as the Savior of the world,” 1 John tells us. The focus of the Bible does at first narrow from all the people in the world to Abraham, and then to his grandson Jacob and his twelves sons, and then of the twelve to the tribe that comes from Judah and then to the descendants of David and finally to Jesus. But with Jesus the focus shirts to his twelve disciples and then to all the Jews, and to the Samaritans and to the Gentiles and then to every tribe and nation and tongue in the whole world. Because real love enlarges us and the circle of those we love. God loves everyone and wants everyone to know it. And we are to be the connection to and channel of that love.

“If you abide in me and my words abide in you, ask for whatever you wish, and it will be done for you.” That is a huge promise. But it doesn't mean that God is like Aladdin's genie. If we are connected to the God who is love and his words of love dwell in us, we will only ask for what will help us spread his love and connect more people to Jesus. And of course he will give us whatever we need to accomplish that.

And I hope that if you sense that you have lost your connection to Jesus, you react as you would if you find your phone is almost out of power or if you realize you have lost your internet connection or that you lost the link to the article you were reading online, and you immediately seek to restore the connection. The good news is you don't have to rely on some wires or an electric company or an internet provider. You can be in touch with God in a second, any time at all, wherever you are, whatever the rest of the world is doing or not doing. And with him you never have to worry about using up your data. We're on an unlimited grace plan.