There S an App for That

THERE’S AN APP FOR THAT Sermon by Paul R. Powell St. Charles Avenue Baptist Church, New Orleans Easter Sunday, March 31, 2013

It will likely come as no surprise to you that I have fallen seriously behind the times with phone technology. And it’s more than a little frustrating that there are now smart phones capable of doing quite a few things I have no need of. A few weeks ago as I was listening to a PBS program of some sort, there was quite the discussion going on about a new app for your smart phone that would allow you to photograph your poop and have it analyzed remotely. TMI indeed, but there’s an app for that and I won’t go into any of the jokes that were being made about that particular app.

Most of you are familiar, I’m sure, with what has been called the serenity prayer: “Lord, grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, the courage to change the things I can, and the wisdom to know the difference.” That’s a tall order, even for God. Perhaps another prayer hits closer home: “Lord, give me patience, and if your answer is no, I’m going to need bail money with that.”

For most of my active career, I was a librarian with some sort of church job in addition, usually music. Once when asked to describe my vocation, I said it involved information and inspiration, which pretty much sums up what I have devoted my life to. We have been thrown face down in the muck of the information age, and those of us who are old enough to have lived at least some of our years before computers and even television, are often dumbfounded not only with new technological apps, but even more so with the rapidity by which each newfangled gadget is replaced with something faster and more powerful.

Sometimes, it seems as if all this technology and the ease with which we obtain information about almost everything is in direct opposition to faith or religion. And it seems to me that there is too much emphasis on the

1 obtaining of information and too little emphasis on the attaining of knowledge and wisdom. We have confused information with knowledge, and therein lies the challenge and the beauty of the life, death and resurrection of Jesus. Gordon Cosby, co-founder of Church of the Savior in Washington, DC, died recently. But in one of his sermons, he said the following about the mystery of the cross and the resurrection: A personal God, in a very personal act of love, bore my sin--bears my sin. The tangled self-will of us all is only finally retrieved and transformed when we see that God died for us. In the seeing, our heart is broken and our self-will is transformed and the old rebellions against God are fundamentally dropped. How we fight this! How this cuts across the grain of our self-will. The cross is an embarrassment to us--that God in Jesus should do on our behalf what we cannot do for ourselves. Isn’t it strange how little we understand the cross after all these years. Is it because we can't afford to? If we let ourselves see, we would be irrevocably bound in obedience to this Savior for time and eternity. I have always believed that Christian faith is a journey with a beginning and an end. We as Baptists have believed and practiced for our entire history that salvation comes as a gift of God through faith in Jesus Christ and that only youth or adults mature enough to accept Jesus as Savior can be saved. And we have avoided infant baptism in favor of adult baptism as initiation into the Christian faith. Other traditions who baptize infants believe that this too is an initiation followed by the raising of the children in the faith until they are old enough to accept Christ on their own. Michael Gerson, the columnist, points out that the fastest-growing religious affiliation today is the lack of religious affiliation, the “none of the above” group that constitutes nearly twenty percent of the population. However, it is also true that we Americans still claim to be religious and regard prayer as very important, and those percentages have remained remarkably stable for the last twenty years. But what has changed is that fewer and fewer of us remain attached to religious institutions, that is, to the church, particularly in mainline protestant circles. Gerson goes on to

2 point out that the recent growth in the “none of the above” group has come among those who are not married which indicates a group of people distrustful of societal institutions, and not just marriage but charity work, volunteer organizations or whatever other groups and activities which help to create the very thing they most want which is community. Have we as the church encouraged such falling away because we have demanded loyalty to a particular theological viewpoint or church government to the exclusion of the very Savior who died on the cross that we might be brought into community with God and with one another? Could it be that in attempting to raise up an informed congregation of believers that we have sold out to denominational gurus and canned literature? There’s an app for that, you know. And that app is to study the Bible for what it says, not what we would like for it to say, and to undertake that study in community with others who are seeking out the information that can best inform their faith. And often that basic information can be turned into real knowledge when we battle it out with others who just don’t happen to think the same way we do. Information alone is never enough. If we read and study the Old Testament as if Jesus had already come, we are likely to read into those Scriptures far more than is there. True knowledge comes when information changes us, when it motivates us to not be content with merely giving our assent or allegiance to Christianity, but rather moves us toward the great “cloud of unknowing” where the true believer soon comes face to face with immortality, where nothing is known except that we are not our own creators, and that only a superior being could have created us. If the “fear of God” is the beginning of wisdom, then that awe-struck moment is the beginning of something truly wonderful. Only when we come to realize the validity of Jesus’ words, “I am the Way, the Truth, and the Life” can we truly know that God is and that God loves us, and that is true wisdom. The two great doctrines of the Christian faith so far as I’m concerned are the incarnation and the resurrection. Only the God who incarnates himself as the human Jesus to teach us how to live and die could also teach us how

3 to live again and forever in the heavenly dimension which we call eternal life. God has come to us and lived among us that we might live the abundant life. And there’s an app for that, too, and that app is salvation through Jesus Christ. On this great getting’ up Easter morning let us praise God, let us rejoice in God’s presence, let us live life with God’s Spirit at our side, let us love one another as God has loved us, and let every day be Easter. Thanks be to God!