“HDTV In-Forming”
Scripture Reading: Romans 12:2
Sermon Transcript for January 21, 2007
By Pastor Nancy Blevins
HDTV—no, that’s not something that you are going to have an opportunity to be sold this morning. This is a first in a series. Last week I tried to introduce a series called “HDTV” and I talked with Bob about it and we decided to use that for the whole series. HDTV—How to Design the View. I spoke of it last week how sometimes there is this huge “thing” in our living rooms. Sometimes it might be just a small thing—a TV. But we arrange our places and we angle our seats sometimes in our rooms towards that item. So “How to Design the View” is about our world view. And we will be talking the next few weeks, Bob and I, about utilizing some spiritual processes that are classic, just a few of them that have proven themselves in the Christian tradition. Today I’ll be speaking about Scripture in-forming us. Next week, Bob will be talking about in-coding and prayer; the week after that we will address the mission and service. And then the weekend of the 10th and 11th once more I’ll speak to you about solitude and meditation. And then we’ll talk about increasing the signal; and that will be our concluding part of the series about service and commission.
But today I would like for you to read with me the Scripture that will be displayed up on the screen. It’s from Romans, Chapter 12, Verse 2. Let us read together: “Do not be conformed to this world, but be transformed by the renewing of your mind so that you may discern what is the will of God—what is the good and acceptable and perfect will of God.” Amen.
The snow this morning reminded me of a few weeks ago. Just a few weeks ago Colorado during the holidays was home for many people—Denver Airport—they spent a lot of time there. And then a friend of mine from Texas told me this week that it too had been paralyzed by winter storms. And I confess that just last night I wanted to make sure that we were covered—not with snow but that someone was going to be here to take care of removing it. We were a little maybe behind the times for this service. It came a little faster, a little more than what was anticipated. I don’t know but perhaps you heard about another thing that was not anticipated. Sometimes it’s snow, but there was a breakdown across the ocean. Transatlantic communication got disrupted. There are cables on the ocean floor. And there was an earthquake and the plates on the ocean floor shifted enough to damage those. And our brothers and sisters of humanity over there in Asia and the eastern part of the world—they couldn’t communicate. Their Internet was down big time. Well as long as our satellites are functioning up there—it’s a miracle isn’t it? We don’t even appreciate them until perhaps maybe a summer night or the TV signal gets crossed and those images get distorted.
But we have a multitude of ways of being informed and of getting information these days. Someone said that we could never get so much information and be so informed and really not have anything good to hear. A favorite commercial of mine involves a driver. I don’t know what the commercial advertises. But there is this gentleman driving down being very content, sort of cocky, satisfied with himself you get the indication. And he’s got a GPS system in his car. It’s not just one of those that you punch that get the screens that tell you where you are going; it’s one that has a voice to it. So there he is driving along and then the voice says, “Turn left”. And so he does; right into a store front. And the voice continues. The voice then says, “…in 50 yards”. Informed—but just a tad too late.
Mapquest—how many have ever used that program? Now I’ve tried to find a few people with that program, at least their address. I can even have a business card with an address on it and put it in and it says, “No, it doesn’t exist.” I don’t care that you know it exists and I know it exists, that program will not give you a printout unless it knows that street exists and that number exists. You may have even been there before. Oh, to be less informed sometimes of what the world knows or doesn’t know.
I want you to try to go somewhere with me this morning. We won’t even have to leave the building. But it will be a strain for some of us, a little harder. I want you to think back to yesterday, literally, 24-hours ago. It’s Saturday morning around 10:00 a.m. Think of the last 24-hours that brought you to this point today sitting here. And I want you to take a guess. In fact, I want you to take your bulletin and realize that there is a blank space there on the back this morning. And there are pens and crayons if you need those in the back. This morning, I want you to participate with me in an exercise. Not making airplanes out of your bulletins! But I want you to take inventory yourself and think, “Wow, from 10:00 a.m. yesterday morning until 10:00 a.m. this morning, how much time did I give to entertainment or new media?” Now so that you don’t have to spend the rest of the sermon calculating, I’ll allow you to use 30-minute increments. I’m going to mention some categories and just jot down, it’s not for me, it will prove valuable I think for you, perhaps some insight. I want you to jot down the time in those half-hour increments as I read the categories such as TV and movies. How much time watching or listening? What about video games? Music and radio? Or screen time with your computer on the Internet? And then there is that old-fashioned media, newspapers and magazines, books. Although you might want a separate category for books. Now total that up. For myself, I did this last night, I wonder if you fall asleep in a movie if it counts? But it’s quite easy to come up with four or five or six in just watching a prime-time movie, isn’t it? So I won’t embarrass anyone this morning, including myself, we’ll use a broad category. How many of you got more than two hours down? Okay. That will tell us a little bit about ourselves, doesn’t it?
That is a media consumption rate that you just computed. And I suggest to you that that might be shaping your view and my view of life. In the past 24-hours, we who raised our hands, gave our tithe—time, two of twenty-some, to outside forces of information. And they shaped our perception of life. Even last night on the weather channel that blue thing coming this way; or maybe you got the pink. But it shaped my perception of what might happen this morning snow-wise, weather-wise. Tomorrow if you go and you turn on the radio on your commute to work, assuming you have more of one than I do, you will hear radio or TV personality tell you that traffic is bottlenecked on 465. That shapes your view whether you travel 465 or not. It’s all clogged up. You may not have thought of it that way. You go out in the morning you pick up your newspaper, you come in you check your e-mail, you turn on the TV, you get into the car. Maybe you plug your tape or your CD in. Put those little earphones on as you drive. Your view is being shaped; it’s being formed by what you see, what you hear, what you experience and information.
Sometimes our experience informs us. In the tradition of United Methodism we have Scripture, tradition, reason and experience that we use in our interpretation of the Scriptures. And our decision making and our discernment utilize those primary means. But I am telling you from personal experience, sometimes you need a new word. I got a new word this week; it was “humility”. Have you ever had humility as your word of the week? Well, I was taking that $50 rebate check, John, that we got off one of our printers to Staples to get another printer which was going to be just like it so that the person who is working in the treasurer’s office and myself would have a printer apiece. And I wouldn’t have to run out to Sandy or yell from my office, “Can I print something?” And I wouldn’t get brochure paper. So there I was; me—the one who has ten years of experience working in systems, have been down on my knees not just in prayer but plugging things together for many years underneath desks. And I plugged it in and it didn’t work. I took it out of the box, ripped off stuff, threw it up there, plugged my computer into that cable, stuck it into the unit, turned it on and it glowed. This little green light said it was ready to go. Well, fine. I sent a print job to it, then another print job to it. I sent another print job. And it said, “No way Hose?”. Actually it said, “Your document has failed to print.” That was information I did not need. I could see that. So there’s where the humility came in. There is something called a Printed Setup Guide. I didn’t need that. I had experience. I had reason. I even had a tradition. The geeks don’t read. But the Lord gave me a word—Scripture—“be humble”. So I opened that up and I found out that it wanted me to do something that all of my experience, all of my reason, all of my tradition told me wasn’t the right thing to do. You do not take things that are plugged in and push them together with another cable. And it said you don’t do it in this sequence. You hand have to turn it on when the two machines are not connected to each other; and then you plug it in it will work. And it did!
Sometimes you need a new word. And I guess for all of us the question is, “Are we humbled enough to admit it”? There is a new process; there is a new program; there is a new media—but the message doesn’t change. The method may change but the message doesn’t change. Paul in that letter urges us to be transformed. It’s not a minor transformation that he is talking about. It’s a big one; it involves thirty pounds. I understand that’s about what our brain would weight if we set it out on a scale. I always wondered where that extra thirty pounds came from. You can be transformed by the renewing of your mind Use your brain. Use your mind.
My grandmother was 16 years old when a photograph was taken of her. I guess in that time it was pretty common that you had a 16-year old photograph of the ladies, the debutant. She was probably the only one in our family who made that. But she is standing there with a rose and it is an oval photograph. It is one of those that have been clouded by time. At least I hope it is my grandmother. I could have someone else hanging in my dining room. But I’ve understood now that there is a process that can make that cloud go away that can make grandma’s image sharper, that will take the dullness away. I have an image of my grandmother not like that woman that’s standing there, that young child. That photograph itself is over 100 years old. I have an image of grandmother with a magnifying glass in her hand and a Bible to her side leaning over in the window. She was truly blind in one eye and couldn’t see out of the other because of cataracts. So the image that I have of grandmother is bending over a Bible about three inches away reading that Bible while I cleaned her house. I dusted her house. She couldn’t see the dust; I don’t know why I dusted her house, bless her heart. But one of the things I dusted was the Bible, big Bible that thick—family Bible. She never used it except when someone got married or died or gave birth. She wrote in the middle of that big family Bible those events and dated them in calligraphy.
I got to thinking about the Bible dusting it off. And I thought, you know; right there—not that specific Bible, but the way that she devoted herself to the word of God, that blew the dust off of her life. That can blow the dust off our life. The Word of God can blow the dust off our life. It can clear the clouds away. And yet so often we only turn to it in times of despair, in times of darkness, in times when we’ve tried everything else. And yet it can sharpen our perception so much of ourselves and our world, our view of the world, of God in the world.
The story was told of a woman who lived in Wales and electricity was coming. And she was a young woman and she had many children. And so she wanted that for her cottage. And so she scraped together enough money and she moved things around and made way for that power of electricity to be in her cottage. Well, they came out; they installed the equipment—the meters, the line. And the electrical company started monitoring. After a few months they were quite confused; they thought maybe it wasn’t working right, the equipment. Not because there was too much electricity being used, but because there was hardly any being used according to the meter. And that was something they had to check out in person. So he went to the woman’s house. And the repair man checked the meter; it was working fine--all the equipment, the line, the connections. And so he went up to the front door and he knocked on the door and he said, “Ma’am, you have electricity coming into your house and I just wonder if maybe you don’t know how to plug things in or to turn things on so that you can utilize it.” And she said, “Oh, I know how to use it. Every night I turn it on to help re-light my lamps and then I turn it back off.”
We sometimes use our Bible that way, don’t we? Here is this powerful source of availability, of wisdom, of God. And we’re like the woman; we only plug it in to help us see. We only plug it in to that power, in to those words; we only concentrate on those words when we think we have a need to shed some light. Only when we are in the dark. God’s power flows from a light that is informed by God’s Word. In our Bible Study I told our participants that they might want to wait a little bit before they get a new Bible. The way you can get a new Bible is to switch with your neighbor. Really, you’ll see things underlined, you’ll see things highlighted that you never saw before.
The writer of Hebrews reminds us that the word of God is living and active. It is alive. It is not dead. It’s living. And you expect something living to be active, not passive. And then the writer of Hebrews goes on to say in Chapter 4, Verse 12, “It’s sharper than a two-edged sword.” Living, not bios like biology, but active. Active, powerful, energy, sharp! That word sharp actually means to cut like with a surgeon’s scalpel. It says that it can separate the marrow from the bone, the joint. Get to the heart. The word of God can get to the heart of the matter. It cuts away the nonsense. It gets to the real thing. And yet it can do it in nuances. It is able to cut down to the issues that really concern us with a laser like precision. It’s piercing. I understand that’s the only time that the Greek word is found, “piercing”, in the whole New Testament is right there in Hebrews, that one verse, Chapter 12. Piercing—what does it mean? Well, the whole connotation of it is that you get run through, to be run through. That would change your view. Not just the surface scratched, not just a scrape. But is quite another thing for an instrument to go completely through, to be altered by it. And then James says that the word of God is like a mirror; it’s totally objective. If it’s a true mirror, not one like in a funny house or that wavers, but if it is a true mirror, it will give you maybe not what you want to see but it will tell you what really is; the whole picture. And then it says that the word of God is dividing to part and separate souls and spirit. What does that mean? Who knows? I don’t! Souls and spirit—I heard this morning on NPR that some guy things the spirit is the product of the mind. To me it means that God is able to see through us, to see who we really are and as we really are. Judging—that verse says that the word of God is able to judge, it’s able to get past our justifications and our rationalizations, to remove our filters, unravel things for us.
And I guess the question is as you look at that time that you spent just in the past 24-hours, and what if it represented not hours, maybe you had a number two, what if it represented your commitment to the next 24-hours. Two minutes—give two more minutes to the word of God. Two minutes to be inwardly formed around that word that you might find. Now I urge you not to do the point and shoot method or the drop and dip method. Deliberately seek the word. Go to it to seek our peace or joy, to look at what the word “walk” means and how many times and where it is and read those Scriptures. Be brave enough to ask God to work with you in designing the view of your life. Not just to give you more information, but start a transformation, a change of your perspective to give you an increased sense of who you are in your place in the world, in your place in God’s time now at this moment that you live to give you a meaningful, more meaningful life. That comes from the living word of love which God sent through Jesus Christ, who was, who is, and who is to come. Amen.
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