Facing into the future – cyberspace, God, and all that!
Some believe that the current turmoil we are living through is a temporary aberration after which things will all eventually settle down and return to normal again. There was so much wrong with the old normal that I for one do not want to go back to. I believe we are in a major change transition, fueled by a threshold shift that will bring changes we can’t yet delineate.
The staff team with David Brookhart spent two days this week being trained in REALM - the new data management software we have chosen to go live with next year. This is a wonderful cloud-based system that will really take our organizational capacities to the next level. By bringing all our desperate data information systems and reports together in one place, we will be able to more effectively serve and communicate with our membership. I can boldly announce that St Martin’s is venturing further into the future that is increasingly focused in cyberspace.
In a recent conversation at Christchurch Greenwich, CT, the journalist and author
Tom Friedman noted that we now live at least 51% of our lives in cyberspace. It’s where we go to buy a house, buy a book, order groceries, do our banking, look for a date, a partner or spouse, and soon – we will manage our parish life here. We may increasingly live in cyberspace, but does God?
In answer to the question is God in cyberspace, Friedman quoted one of his spiritual advisors, his rabbi no less – who teaches that we have both a Biblical and a post-Biblical understanding of God. I find this distinction to be incredibly helpful!
Cyberspace is an amoral if not immoral space full of some very pernicious and completely unregulated projections of humanity’s dark side. Friedman notes it’s a space where we are all connected but no one is in charge. It’s lawless and unregulated – no rules, no laws, no protections afforded by agreed enforcement or policing mechanisms. Cyberspace represents a new world where we’ve never been before and where the Biblical God of justice and judgment seems absent. It’s a world where one person could kill all of us and where all of us- if we put our minds to it - can become God-like in our capacity to address and fix all the problems currently facing us.
The Biblical view of God is of the Almighty who smites evil and rewards good. God is God because of the way
God behaves. On the face of things, cyberspace is a place devoid of such divine regulation. The post-Biblical view God is manifested through the way
we behave. This means it’s up to us to bring God into the moral emptiness of cyberspace by the way
we behave there; through the values systems and enforcement expectations
we build and hold one another accountable to.
Being Christian (or Jewish, Muslim, Hindu, Buddhist, or Sikh for that matter) compels us to view the world through a particular lens – the lens of compassion, personal responsibility, and mutual accountability. Here the focus is on the quality of the choices we make, on the compassion of the attitudes we hold, on the integrity of the actions we take, and by the courage of the convictions we live by. Cyberspace poses a Biblical challenge and also a post-Biblical opportunity. The seeming absence of a God identified by Biblical behavior compels us to make God present through the integrity and conviction of the lives we build and share there, together.
Don’t forget, a principal expression of being Christian is to be in Church on Sunday.
This coming Sunday is
Ingathering
when if you have not done so already please return your 2020 estimate of giving (pledge) card during the service.
See you there!
Mark+
