Jesus, Mark Zuckerberg, and the True Social Network

Here is Steve's sermon for tomorrow. He's preaching through Romans. Below he plays with the idea of network of faith in Christ,  the true social network--a connection of persons and Persons, which bridges all the differences on earth.

Romans 3:21-31,  May 1, 2011

“One Faith” Second Sunday in Easter

Two weeks ago I went to the barber to get a haircut for Easter. As he draped the apron over me, my barber Larry said, “You know, I saw you and your family at Costco a while back. You were across the store, so I couldn’t say hello, but you were there.”

As his scissors started to click away, I said, “You know, you’re the second person to tell me he saw us there that day. Joanna was home for spring break and we all just stopped in to Costco after seeing a movie at Gateway.”
Then Larry quit clipping and thought for a moment. “You know,” he said, “I think I was the one who said that to you. We talked about this the last time you got your hair cut.

I contemplated that for a bit, then told him, “I think you’re right. And if you tell it to me again next time, I’ll probably think three different people saw us that day!”

Larry’s first mention of sighting the Bilynskyjs at Costco was so long before I forgot where I heard it. I imagined there were two different people involved. That’s what happens sometimes when people read the Old Testament and then the New Testament. That God whom Jewish people encountered at Mt. Sinai and in Israel seems like a completely different person from the God the apostles and others encountered in Jesus Christ.
There almost seem to be two different religions, two different faiths presented to us as we turn from Old to New Testament. God dealt with the Jews one way. Now He deals with Christians in a new and better way. But that impression is just as wrong as my barber shop confusion about Larry’s sightings of our family.

One of the main reasons we get the idea that God is different in the Old Testament is this business of the Law, that long complicated list of rules that God directed Moses to give to Israel. That God was a God of rule and regulation. Our God, we say, is a God of grace.

So in this little chunk of Romans, Paul takes law head on and says in verse 21, “But now apart from the law the righteousness of God has been made known, to which the Law and the prophets testify.” The only difference between Old and New Testament is now “the righteousness of God has been made known.” The Law told us about God’s righteousness, but now we can know it.
Children can feel a split personality in their parents. One moment Mom is all rules and law. Wash your hands after you use the bathroom. Eat your vegetables. Get home by 10 p.m. The next she is all grace and love and hugs and kisses like her children can do no wrong. But she’s the same mother. She just wants her kids to grow up as good people of character who love her like she loves them. She wants righteous children. So does God.

That’s why complete righteousness is the ultimate act of God’s work with human beings. He wants to give us what we do not have and cannot get on our own. Righteousness is what the law asked of the Jewish people, but their history in the Old Testament shows they could not produce it themselves. So in the end, God gave it to them, and to everyone.
Verse 22 says the righteousness of God is given through faith in Jesus Christ. Faith is the one way that God means human beings to receive righteousness. That’s why the end of verse 22 says, “There is no difference…” That’s all it says literally. Our TNIV translation adds the explanatory phrase “between Jew and Gentile.” But it’s more absolute than that. There is no difference between any human beings, however you select them, because, verse 23 tells us, “all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God.”

There is the great unifying factor of the human race. You can talk about brotherhood or love or common needs or economic community or Facebook, but what really ties us together across all boundaries of race and gender and nationality and language is this: we all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God. As Paul has said right along, we have all failed to live up to God’s glorious design for good and fruitful lives, whether we know that plan from the written law or from our own consciences. So there’s no difference.
What Paul adds to that thought in this passage is the great good news of verse 24, “and all are justified freely by his grace through the redemption that came by Jesus Christ.” That word “justified” needs to be explained. Even though English translators chose “justify,” it’s the same Greek root as that word from verse 22 translated “righteousness.” You could almost translate it, “and all are made righteous…”

The Gospel Paul teaches is that the righteousness of God, that glorious grand design for human life in His kingdom, which He first showed to the Jewish people in the law, is now being imparted to everyone, “by his grace through the redemption of Jesus Christ.”

I guess it’s dangerous to compare Jesus to Mark Zuckerberg, but Beth and I watched “The Social Network” a couple weeks ago about the creator and founder of Facebook. The story turns around the fact that two rich, athletic, connected students, twins Cameron and Tyler Winklevoss had an idea for an on-line student networking program at Harvard University. The Winklevoss twins enlisted Zuckerberg to write their program for them, but he took their idea and turned it into a social network not just for Harvard, but for any college that would adopt it and ultimately what we have today in Facebook, a network for the whole world.

Paul says that God took His own great idea, a glorious and righteous humanity living in His kingdom, which He first presented to Israel in the Law, and through Jesus Christ turned it into a program for everyone, for anyone.

God’s way of doing that is explained in verse 25, “God presented Christ as a sacrifice of atonement, through the shedding of his blood—to be received by faith.” Jesus died on the Cross and shed His blood so that anyone could receive Him by faith. That’s what we read in the Gospel this morning as we saw Jesus showing Himself first to the disciples and then to Thomas. It was so they could believe. It was so everyone and anyone could believe. “Because you have seen me, you have believed;” Jesus says, “blessed are those who have not seen and yet have believed.” And John tells that Jesus did many, many things he didn’t have room or time to write down, “But these are written that you may believe that Jesus is the Messiah, the Son of God, and that by believing you may have life in his name.”

By believing, by faith—that’s how we connect to God in Jesus Christ. Zuckerberg’s vision was actually a bit limited, a community anyone can join if you have a computer and a connection to the Internet. God’s vision was a community that includes anyone anywhere who puts faith in Jesus. That network of faith is the connection which really bridges all the differences on earth.

Verse 25 continues to say that God “did this to demonstrate his justice,” but once again it’s that same word. It’s God’s righteousness that He demonstrated in the atoning work of Jesus. In the broken body and shed blood of His own Son, God showed us what righteousness, what real living looks like. It’s a life, it’s a whole community of people giving themselves to each other in sacrificial love.

That sacrifice of Jesus on the Cross is why, Paul goes on to tell us, God could forbear and leave previous sins, the sins of Israel and the rest of the human race unpunished. It was the great vision that even those sins, committed beforehand, could be forgiven in Jesus and that ultimately God would be just, would be righteous, and would justify, would make righteous everyone who has faith in Jesus.

The plot of the Facebook movie is all about who had the idea first, about intellectual property, about pride of innovation. The Winklevoss twins and ultimately Zuckerberg’s partner sue him to save their own pride of creating a great idea. But for Paul, God’s glory in the gift of righteousness through faith in Jesus completely excludes pride and boasting. That’s verse 27. Shall Jews boast because of their possession of the law? No, that law required works they could never perform. Neither they nor anyone else could never live up to the glory of the righteousness of God by working at it.
No, instead, the real law in God’s program is the “‘law’ that requires faith.” There is one and only one way to connect to God and His righteousness. That is the one faith He asks and offers to anyone who will receive it, to believe in Jesus Christ and to receive righteousness as a free gift.

So the rest of the passage pushes home the point of one way, one faith. Verse 28 says that “a person is justified [made righteous] apart from observing the law.” And verse 29 applies that to a current dispute and division between Jewish Christians and Gentile Christians. God is not just the God of Jews. He’s the God of Gentiles too.

Verse 30 addresses that confusion, which is as old as a heretic named Marcion, which makes us think the Old Testament God is different from the God of Jesus and the New Testament, and says, “there is only one God, who will justify the circumcised by faith and the uncircumcised by faith.” There is no difference because there is only one way to God’s glorious righteousness. In all the Bible it’s only faith and that faith in finally and completely in Jesus Christ who shed His blood to remove our sins and give us His righteousness.

Let’s consider the implications of that one faith and that removal of difference between everyone who believes. When we log onto Facebook, we get to choose our friends. Our network isn’t really the world, it’s only the people whose “friend requests” we confirm. And if we decide we don’t like a friend we can remove them. As my friend Glenn mentioned to me Friday, “There was this one guy I just had to defriend. I couldn’t stand reading what he said any longer.”

But faith in Jesus Christ connects us and “friends” us to anyone who believes. That’s what Paul is trying to teach Jewish Christians about Gentiles. It’s what God wants to teach you and me about all the other sinners who share faith in Christ with us. We’re in it together, in the great and glorious kingdom of God’s righteousness demonstrated in the love and sacrifice of Jesus.

That means we’re in it with the annoying person across the sanctuary and with the especially annoying person who goes to that strange and different church down the street. We’re in it, as Jesus tried to tell us, with prostitutes and thieves and drug addicts and with the homeless and the illegal immigrants. One faith connects us all. There is no difference, because we are all sinners, but we are all made righteous by the blood of Jesus.

Talk about some of those categories I just listed and people will say, “But what about the law? You can’t throw out the law.” I think they may be talking about a different law than God’s, but it’s still law and Paul answers them in verse 31, “Do we, then, nullify the law by this faith? Not at all! Rather we uphold the law.”

The law of God was given to show us His righteousness and to bring people into His kingdom, His great connected community meant to embrace the entire world. In the blood of Jesus, God showed us how anyone can have that righteousness and enter that community through faith. Faith doesn’t cancel the law. It completes what the law, any law means to do, to bring people together into the true righteousness and true community which is the kingdom of God.

There is no difference. There is just one faith, for anyone. Come to the Table of the Body and Blood of Jesus this morning and receive the gift of His righteousness, through faith. And believing in Him, you will have life in His name.

Amen.

Valley Covenant Church
Eugene/Springfield, Oregon
Copyright © 2011 by Stephen S. Bilynskyj

Terrorists "R" Us?

Yesterday on "Fresh Air" Terry Gross interviewed Richard Clarke on the growing "Cyberwar" threat. Richard Clarke served as a counterterrorism adviser to Presidents Bill Clinton and George W. Bush. Clarke now heads a security consulting firm in Virginia and is a contributor to ABC News. He also teaches at Harvard's Kennedy School of Government.

At the conclusion of the program, Gross noted that her interview was occurring on the 15th anniversary of the Oklahoma City bombings; while in 1993, The Branch Davidian Compound near Waco, Texas, was destroyed in a fire after 51-day stand-off; and that in 1775 the American Revolution began in Lexington Common, with the shot "heard round the world."

"It is also the day that was chosen for a pro-gun, pro-second ammendment march in Washington, D.C., and another march in Virginia, and in the Virginia march, marchers have been encouraged to bring their guns." Gross continued. "Now ..as somebody who has worked a lot in counterterrorism, what do you think of a progun march being held on the anniversary of the Oklahoma City bombing?"

Clarke responded: "Throughout our history we have had right wing people who say they don’t like the U.S. government, they want to take down the U.S. government, they think violence against the U.S. Government is okay; and since the election of Barak Obama these people have grown in volume, and I think they have grown in number.

We have to remember when we worry about Al Quaeda and foreign threats that one of the biggest—certainly the second largest and second most destructive terrorist attack in our history-- inside our borders-- was was done by these people, American right wing people, extreme right wing people, anti-government, violent people. I think the United States today has a serious threat from those people, because legitimate public officials are egging them on, and legitimate public officials who are conservative, and who are Republican, aren’t criticizing them; or aren’t criticizing them enough. We need to de-legitimatize these people, or we will have another Oklahoma city."

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Listen to the entire interview here

On I-pods and Ray Bradbury

On Sept. 9, Apple is scheduled to host a media event in San Francisco, where the company is expected to unveil an updated line of iPod media players. Coincidentally, I have just finished teaching an online interdisciplinary studies class, wherein we read a selection from Ray Bradbury's Farenheit 451.

Two years before Steve Jobs was born, Ray Bradbury predicted the I-pod, only he called it Seashells, “radios in the ear that fill every minute with pop music and idle talk.” (Marvin Perry, Humanities in the Western Tradition: Readings in Literature and Thought, p. 290).

Montag's wife Mildred wears two of them, to keep a painful reality at bay:

The little mosquito-delicate dancing hum in the air, the electrical murmur of a hidden wasp snug in its special pink warm nest. The music was almost loud enough so he could follow the tune.

Without turning on the light he imagined how this room would look. His wife stretched on the bed, uncovered and cold, like a body displayed on the lid of the tomb, her eyes fixed in the ceiling by invisible threads of steel, immovable. And in her ears the little Seashells, the thimble radios tamped tight, and an electronic ocean of sound, of music and talk and music and talk coming in, coming in on the shore of her unsleeping mind. The room was indeed empty. Every night the waves came in and bore her off on their great tides of sound, floating her, wide-eyed, toward morning. There had been no night in the last two years that Mildred had not swum that sea, had not gladly gone down in it for the third time

At another point, Captain Beatty explains how Montag’s job works—why firemen burn books:

“You must understand that our civilization is so vast that we can’t have our minorities upset and stirred. Ask yourself, what do we want in this country, above all? People want to be happy, isn’t that right? Haven’t you heard it all your life? I want to be happy, people say. Well, aren’t they? Don’t we keep them moving, don’t we give them fun? That’s all we live for, isn’t it? For pleasure, for titillation? And you must admit our culture provides plenty of these.”

(From Fahrenheit 451, by Ray Bradbury. Published by Doubleday in 1953. )

Indeed, Captain Beatty, it does!

Cyberwar on Twitter

The following is fascinating on so many levels. Be sure to also read the discussion questions at the end of the page.

from Boing Boing

Cyberwar guide for Iran elections
Posted by Cory Doctorow, June 16, 2009 3:25 AM permalink

Yishay sez, "The road to hell is paved with the best intentions (including mine). Learn how to actually help the protesters and not the gov't in Iran."
The purpose of this guide is to help you participate constructively in the Iranian election protests through Twitter.

1. Do NOT publicise proxy IP's over twitter, and especially not using the #iranelection hashtag. Security forces are monitoring this hashtag, and the moment they identify a proxy IP they will block it in Iran. If you are creating new proxies for the Iranian bloggers, DM them to @stopAhmadi or @iran09 and they will distributed them discretely to bloggers in Iran.

2. Hashtags, the only two legitimate hashtags being used by bloggers in Iran are #iranelection and #gr88, other hashtag ideas run the risk of diluting the conversation.

3. Keep you bull$hit filter up! Security forces are now setting up twitter accounts to spread disinformation by posing as Iranian protesters. Please don't retweet impetuosly, try to confirm information with reliable sources before retweeting. The legitimate sources are not hard to find and follow.

4. Help cover the bloggers: change your twitter settings so that your location is TEHRAN and your time zone is GMT +3.30. Security forces are hunting for bloggers using location and timezone searches. If we all become 'Iranians' it becomes much harder to find them.

5. Don't blow their cover! If you discover a genuine source, please don't publicise their name or location on a website. These bloggers are in REAL danger. Spread the word discretely through your own networks but don't signpost them to the security forces. People are dying there, for real, please keep that in mind...

#iranelection cyberwar guide for beginners (Thanks, Yishay!) Previously:
Iran SMS networks "mysteriously" fail right before elections ...
Iran: Activists Launch Hack Attacks on Tehran Regime - Boing Boing
Iranian election uprising: Twitter tracks it real-time, Iranian ...

6. Denial of Service attacks. If you don't know what you are doing, stay out of this game. Only target those sites the legitimate Iranian bloggers are designating. Be aware that these attacks can have detrimental effects to the network the protesters are relying on. Keep monitoring their traffic to note when you should turn the taps on or off.

7. Do spread the (legitimate) word, it works! When the bloggers asked for twitter maintenance to be postponed using the #nomaintenance tag, it had the desired effect. As long as we spread good information, provide moral support to the protesters, and take our lead from the legitimate bloggers, we can make a constructive contribution.

Please remember that this is about the future of the Iranian people, while it might be exciting to get caught up in the flow of participating in a new meme, do not lose sight of what this is really about." continued...

Trouble with Twitter

Trouble with Twitter: (via Mike on Facebook)

Happy 1234567890 Day!

It was Time for Unix Nerds to Celebrate --

On February 13, 2009 at exactly 23:31:30 (UTC), Unix time was equal to '1234567890'. Parties and other celebrations were held around the world, among various technical subcultures, to celebrate 1234567890 day. (Wikipedia)

Thanks to Mike M for the heads up. Unfortunately I missed the magic moment, as I had to leave the computer screen to go pick up Joanna from school. Guess I'll just have to content myself with the memories of the changing millenium.

Cultural ADD

GKC wrote, "It is the paradox of history that each generation is converted by the saint who contradicts it most." If this is true, should we be on the lookout for an Asian Christian who is able to contemplate Christ for more than three minutes?

(If you find the article below, stimulating, see also Formation in an Electronic Age )


Digital Overload is Frying our Brains

(via Brad) Wired talks with Maggie Jackson

...In Distracted: The Erosion of Attention and the Coming Dark Age, Jackson explores the effects of "our high-speed, overloaded, split-focus and even cybercentric society" on attention. It's not a pretty picture: a never-ending stream of phone calls, e-mails, instant messages, text messages and tweets is part of an institutionalized culture of interruption, and makes it hard to concentrate and think creatively...

...Wired.com: Is there an actual scientific basis of attention?

Maggie Jackson: In the last 30 or 40 years, scientists have made inroads into understanding its underlying mechanisms and physiology. Attention is now considered an organ system. It has its own circuitry in the brain, and there are specialized networks carrying out its different forms. Each is very specific and can be traced through neuroimaging and even some genetic research.

While there is still debate among attention scientists, most now conclude that there are three types of attention. The first is orienting — the flashlight of your mind. In the case of visual attention, it involves parts of the brain including the parietal lobe, a brain area related to sensory processing. To orient to new stimuli, two parts of the parietal lobe work with brain sections related to frontal eye fields. This is what develops in an infants' brain, allowing them to focus on something new in their environment.

The second type of attention spans the spectrum of response states, from sleepiness to complete alertness. The third type is executive attention: planning, judgment, resolving conflicting information. The heart of this is the anterior cingulate — an ancient, tiny part of the brain that is now at the heart of our higher-order skills. It's executive attention that lets us move us beyond our impulsive selves, to plan for the future and understand abstraction.

We are programmed to be interrupted. We get an adrenalin jolt when orienting to new stimuli: Our body actually rewards us for paying attention to the new. So in this very fast-paced world, it's easy and tempting to always react to the new thing. But when we live in a reactive way, we minimize our capacity to pursue goals.

Wired.com: What does it mean to be distracted?

Jackson: Literally, it means to be pulled away to something secondary. There's also an a interesting, archaic definition that fell out of favor in the 18th century: being pulled to pieces, being scattered. I think that's a lovely term.

Our society right now is filled with lovely distractions — we have so much portable escapism and mediated fantasy — but that's just one issue. The other is interruption — multitasking, the fragmentation of thought and time. We're living in highly interrupted ways. Studies show that information workers now switch tasks an average of every three minutes throughout the day. Of course that's what we have to do to live in this complicated world.

Wired.com: How do these interruptions affect us?

Jackson: This degree of interruption is correlated with stress and frustration and lowered creativity. That makes sense. When you're scattered and diffuse, you're less creative. When your times of reflection are always punctured, it's hard to go deeply into problem-solving, into relating, into thinking.

These are the problems of attention in our new world. Gadgets and technologies give us extraordinary opportunities, the potential to connect and to learn. At the same time, we've created a culture, and are making choices, that undermine our powers of attention.

Wired.com: Has a direct link been measured between interruptions and neurophysiology?

Jackson: Interruptions are correlated with stress, and a cascade of stress hormones accompany that state of being. Stress, frustration and lowered creativity are pretty toxic. And there are studies showing how the environment shapes brain development in kids.

But I can't say if attention fragmentation really rewires our brains. When you sit at a desk for six hours multitasking like a maniac, are you actually rewiring parts of your attention networks? That's difficult to say right now.

Wired.com: Is establishing that link the next scientific step?

Jackson: It's one priority for future research. Right now, the field of attention science is especially concerned with attention development in children. The networks develop at different paces. Orienting is largely in place by kindergarten. The executive network is largely in place by age 8, but it develops until the mid-20s. Understanding the sweet spots for helping kids develop attention is where the science is at.

Wired.com: So adults are out of luck?

Jackson: We do know that people's attention networks can be trained, though we're not sure how long-lasting the gains are. There are exercises and computer games designed to strengthen attention, sometimes by boosting short-term memory.

The only sort training going on now in the office world is meditation-based, and that's being used more for stress rather than to boost attention, although it does do that. In terms of mainstream research, there's nothing I'm aware of that's being done to help the average adult, though there's tremendous interest in what's possible.

But there are ways to cut back on the multitasking and interruptions, shaping your own environment and work style so that you better use your attentional networks. If you have a difficult problem or a conundrum to solve, you need to think about where you work best. Right now, people hope they'll be able to think or create or problem-solve in the midst of a noisy, cluttered environment. Quiet is a starting point.

The other important thing is to discuss interruption as an environmental question and collective social issue. In our country, stillness and reflection are not especially valued in the workplace. The image of success is the frenetic multitasker who doesn't have time and is constantly interrupted. By striving towards this model of inattention, we're doing ourselves a tremendous injustice.

Wired.com: The subtitle of your book predicts a "coming dark age." Do you really believe this?

Jackson: Dark ages are times of forgetting, when the advancements of the past are underutilized. If we forget how to use our powers of deep focus, we'll depend more on black-and-white thinking, on surface ideas, on surface relationships. That breeds a tremendous potential for tyranny and misunderstanding. The possibility of an attention-deficient future society is very sobering.

The Pulse Smartpen

Nunc dimittis...
the Pulse Smartpen has arrived.

I had no idea such a thing even existed until this morning, when a student came up in class to ask if it was okay for him to record lectures. Sure, I said. It was then that he told me about his new pen. It has an infrared camera, a microphone, and a computer, all stuffed into a pen casing. You take notes as usual, but later, you can tap anywhere in the body of your notes and listen to the lecture at that very point. Pretty cool.

But then Joanna brought up an ethical problem. "What about the students who can't afford all these technological gizmos? There are kids who don't have laptops; there are kids who can't even afford the smartpens. What happens to them? Doesn't it give the rich kids an unfair advantage academically?"

That's a good question. What do you think?

Crossing the Technological Rubicon

Our daughter, Joanna, is a high school sophomore here in Eugene, OR. This year, after issuing textbooks, her teachers told her she didn't need to bring them back and forth to class. Almost all her assignments are online now, so she can just look online for what is due the next day. But she came home angry and troubled at this state of affairs.

Now you must understand that Joanna is my personal tech support, guiding me through every glitch and new update that descends from Redmond on High. She has a confidence with computers that is unusual for most young women, perhaps because she has grown up in a family where each person has his/her own PC and/or laptop.

But Joanna is also sensitive to the fact that the balance has swung against those who are not as privileged, kids who are her classmates. "It isn't fair," she fumed. "Some kids don't have computers, or they only have one in their household, and they have to share it with others in their family. You can't just come home and do your homework anymore. Those kids who don't have their own computers have to sign up for a slot, either at school or at the public library, and pray they can get it done during that time. That can mean you have to choose between participating in sports or other after school activities, or doing your homework. It isn't fair!"

Brad recently mentioned the One Laptop per Child program. What a wonderful idea! We'll need to get them for some of Joanna's friends as well as for kids in developing nations.