Tweet or Re-Tweet?

Numbers 13:1-14:1

Matthew 9:1-8

I love this time of year.  I love the weather, the football games, the kids getting ready for Homecoming and all the traditions surrounding that.  I love the upsurge in energy. It’s harvest time.  It’s just a natural time of preparation.

What is God preparing his church for?  What is God calling His church to do?  Will we do as we have always done or will we add to the song of God’s chorus our own voice? There is nothing wrong with the song as it is. But God makes all things new.  No one says get rid of the song but rather how will we lend our voices to the beauty of what God is already doing? The flowers of the field and the birds of the air have their part, what will our part be?

The title of today’s message is “Tweet or Retweet” and as many of you know this is a reference to on-line social media, more specifically, Twitter. More of you are probably familiar with Facebook. But for those of you who are less familiar I will give an interpretation of both. 

Imagine Face book to be a big reunion of family and friends from all over.  You get together and open your photo albums and you share stories about your life.  The people at this reunion may comment on your photos or give an indication (a thumbs up) today that they like what you have or they may choose to say nothing at all.

A gathering of family and friends.
Photo by Holly Pohl posted on Facebook

Twitter, on the other hand is a bunch of people standing on a street corner shouting short phrases (140 characters max. including spaces and punctuation) to the world hoping someone will listen.  You can choose to listen to others and others can choose to listen to you. 

A “tweet” is something you write that goes out there, and those that follow you will have that added to the list of tweets of other people they follow.  People often follow hundreds of other people so it is safe to say that just because someone is following you, is no guarantee that they will read what you wrote.  It is likely that your tweet is buried in a pile of hundreds of other tweets. 

There are times though when I am reading through some of the tweets of the people that I follow that one will strike me as meaningful or funny and I will retweet it.  That means that tweet I liked is then passed on to all the people I follow. 

So you can either Tweet, write something original.  Or you can retweet, pass on something that someone else wrote.  Both are valid.  Both have a use. One without the other would be less than ideal.

It’s just like life in the church.  There are good and profitable thing that we do that have been handed down to us and we continue to do them.  Likewise there are new ideas, new directions, a new movement of the Spirit and we do those things as well.

The thing that gets difficult is what to do when someone is asking you to tweet and you think the best thing to do is to Retweet or vice versa.  What do you do when someone wants to diverge from the tried and true and go off into the unknown? What if you want to go where you know there will be blessings and some want to stay where they are?

Tweet or re-tweet?

There is value in both.  You have imagination, inspiration and intellect. And so do your brothers and sisters.  We each have and understanding of God’s revelation.  The Holy Spirit lives in each one of us who believe.  And each one of us has the capacity to listen for the voice God and be directed in the way we should go. At the same time we all have, to a greater or lesser extent have been taught many things about our faith.   We learn from each other through experience, and reason, and tradition.  God works through all those things to reveal who God is.  All those things are seen through the lens of the Holy Scriptures. 

In the Old Testament lesson we read about the spies.  Those that went on ahead to see what was in the land that was promised to them. 

Some saw danger. Some saw opportunity.  We have scripture. We have a record of what happened so we can say from this vantage point that the ones that saw danger were mistaken.  But that doesn’t mean that there is never danger.  That doesn’t mean that there is never risk.  There are plenty of circumstances in life where the warnings of danger were ignored and bad things happen.  The report of the spies was that the inhabitants of the land were strong.  Taking this land meant risking their lives.  I understand the apprehension.

We are being asked to risk something.

We are being asked, as a congregation to risk looking in the mirror and seeing ourselves just as we are and to ask the question.  “Could we be better?”

Could we be better at making disciples for Jesus Christ?  Could we be better at knowing Christ? Could we be better at making Christ known?  Can we risk hearing an honest answer to those questions?

We fear the unknown.  My kids are getting ready to go to Homecoming next week.  They have way less pressure than I had when I was in high school.  Back then no one went alone.  If you didn’t have a date you didn’t go. So that meant you had actually ask someone to go with you.  That meant you actually had to talk to someone. That meant that if you didn’t want to risk public rejection you had to use the phone, which was hooked to the wall where the whole family could hear you.  That call was so hard to make.  I was so stressed out about the possibility of hearing “no.”  We don’t like the unknown. We don’t like rejection.  And that is part of we are risking in this upcoming consultation.  We don’t know what they are going to say, and that is difficult.  They might say something negative about something we love. We don’t want that kind of rejection.  But you know I did go to home coming dances.  I won’t say I went with the fist girl I asked every time, but I went.  I enjoyed he punch and the treats my date may or may not have enjoyed the dancing, I never did. But I had the experience.  The fear of rejection and the unknown is dispelled the moment we decide to act. 

In the Gospel lesson the legal experts were getting upset with Jesus because he said the paralyzed man’s sins were forgiven.  Only God can forgive sins.  Who does this guy think he is? Hmm.

Okay, Jesus says if you don’t believe my words perhaps believe the action. He told the paralyzed man to take his cot and go home. And the man did just that.  With Jesus it wasn’t just talk there was always action.

Remember Jesus story of the Good Samaritan.  “What must I do?” love God

Who is my neighbor?

Go and do likewise.

Just asking someone on a date to a homecoming dance is nothing unless you go and participate in the dance.  And so I danced.  I am not a very expressive person, I am a bit of an introvert. Dancing is very uncomfortable for me but I went and I danced and I’m glad I did.  

The Hebrews walking in the desert were given the Promised Land.  They just had to go in and possess it.  If they just stayed on the border looking, if they never advanced they would never receive what was promised to them. 

We are called to press on. We are called to bring light into the darkness.  We are called to be the body of Christ on earth.  If we only stand our ground then there will be people who are missing out on the good news about Jesus Christ. We have to advance.  If we are not advancing we are retreating.

So, do we advance or retreat?  Do we dance or do we just eat the treats? Do we tweet or do retweet?