Yesterday's Sermon: Visions and Revisions

Yesterday, I wrote this blog post about the sermon I planned to deliver.  I planned to briefly talk about Thomas and his doubt and then shift to Jesus breathing on the disciples.  Then I planned to shift to modern takes on parables--the community (Kingdom) of God is like a virus.

I did worry about how the idea would come across to parishioners, but I was prepared to run with it.  But when we got to church, I got the idea for a different end to the sermon.  I ended up talking about not 1 metaphor for the community of God, but 2.

I learned that the choir would be singing "The Old Rugged Cross" after my sermon, and I was thinking about ruggedness.  And then, it came to me:  the community of God is like the Internet.  I thought about the article in The Washington Post that I had read about how the original folks who created the Internet had planned for it to work precisely the way that it does.  One part of it can go down, but the other parts will fill in the gaps. 

The Internet is designed to work if there should be a limited nuclear war--not Armageddon, like The Day After or those other 80's films, but something that takes out part of the network, but not the whole thing.  Information packets get delivered by way of the nodes that make the most sense.  It's a very durable system--much like the Kingdom/community of God.

I was much more pleased with this ending.  I hope that in the coming weeks, when people hear news of the virus or when people hear about all the ways we're living online now, I hope that they'll think of the Kingdom/community of God and make interesting new connections. 

I hope that we'll be enriched in this way.

For those of you wishing you could hear the sermon--or watch the whole service, you can still see it here on Facebook.  If you only want to hear the sermon, at minute 15ish, I come up to read the gospel, and the sermon is after that.