We are in the middle of a series on facebook. Facebook was created to help you connect and share with the people in your life. And we are noticing what this can teach us about our faith.
On facebook you have quote, unquote “friends.” These are the people you are connected to through facebook. You can set your facebook to be viewed by anyone on facebook, but I think most people set their page to be for “friends” only. I think that is wise with the amazingly harmful things some people can do through a computer.
If I want to become friends with someone I have to send a friend request. This is just a message that goes to the other person’s facebook page. Then they can decide to accept my friend request or not. As I said a few weeks ago, I do not friend request many church members because I do not want to put you on the spot to accept or reject my friendship. If you friend request me I will accept, but I will let you make the first move.
On facebook you do get to choose your friends. You can ignore someone who wants to be your friend that you do not want to be connected to your page. I have denied friend requests when I am not sure who the person is. But if I know who the person is I accept their friend request.
Through the friend requests you start to make friends on facebook and your friends are your network or community. Your facebook page gets linked to your friends. They can write on your wall, see your pictures, and connect to the things on your page. Also, there is a news feed page which shows you the latest activity of your friends on their facebook page. This news feed page tells you if a friend has added pictures or videos. It tells you who they have become friends with. It tells you if they have played a game on facebook. Sometimes it tells you too much information, but it is there so you can see what your friends are up to.
I browsed through the facebook pages of the members of this church that I am friends with looking for the person with the most friends. I may have missed some, but I found that we have four people with more than 700 friends on their facebook page. We even have one person with over 800. That is Brandon Davis, who just graduated from Williamsburg High School and he has 835 friends last I checked. Not quite twice what I have.
Through friend requests on facebook people get connected to one another. You could call it a network of connected friends. I thought about the image of a vine. A vine has the main stem or trunk which would be facebook and then each friend is an extension from the trunk.
This idea led me to the passage from the Gospel of John chapter 15. Here Jesus says, “I am the vine, you are the branches.” This gives us the image of Jesus as the stem or trunk of the vine and we branch off of him. As Christians, Jesus is that main connecting piece, which connects us to one another. Christ holds us in a network connected to one another. Communion reminds us of our connection to Christ.
And Jesus says the bond that holds us is love. Connecting in Christ’s love moves us from servants to friends. Jesus says here he calls us friend. If we have accepted his friend request then we are to show his love. And I say we accept his friend request because in verse 16 he says that we do not choose him, but he chose us. So in a sense he sent the request to be friends to us and we had to respond.
So if we accept the invitation to be friends with Jesus, what does that mean? Well, he says we are to love each other. I think we all would agree that this would mean we are to feed the hungry, give drink to the thirsty, help shelter the homeless and those kinds of things. If we love others we should be taking care of those who have needs. And we try to do that through the ministries of this church. But we also need to be mindful of how we can really care for friends when the need may not be as obvious.
So I was looking at the passage in John chapter 2 where Jesus performs his first miracle. Jesus here does something miraculous with the fruit of the vine when he turns water into wine. If you want to look at the passage it is John 2:1-11. Jesus is at a wedding celebration when his mother tells him they are out of wine. Jesus at first wonders why his mother is getting him involved, why she is making this request of him, but then he tells some servants to fill 6 jars with water. They fill the jars and then Jesus tells them to take some to the master of the banquet, so they do. Then the master of the banquet is impressed with the fine wine he has just tasted and calls for the bridegroom to praise him for saving some of the best wine.
It may be helpful to know that a wedding in this time was a week long event. There was the wedding ceremony and a large feast, but then the couple would be expected to entertain guests for a whole week. They wore their wedding clothes all week long as people from the whole community would come to celebrate their marriage. This meant the new couple needed to have plenty of food and drink for their guests. And also remember back then the people either drank water or wine. They did not have all of the beverage choices we have today. Because of bacteria and trying to keep things germ free, it was water or wine.
Now as you first look at this miracle it is just kind of a nice story. Jesus has the power to turn water into wine that is a nice power to have. But if you start to compare this miraculous power to Jesus’ other miracles, to me, at first it seems to miss the mark. Am I right? I mean compare this to giving sight to someone who has never seen before. What about someone being cured of leprosy? Jesus cast out evil spirits from people and he even raised people from the dead. Compared to those miracles, turning water into wine is again nice, but what real good did it do?
I think sometimes we do things like this as we try to love others. We question whether we really have anything to offer. We may look at what others can do or what others have to offer and we feel like we cannot compare. I can’t really change someone’s life because I do not have the financial resources that can really make a difference. Or I don’t really have any talent or gifts that God could use to make a difference, at least not a life changing difference. We get down on what we have and then hesitate to offer it because we are not sure it will really help.
Well, Jesus could have looked at this situation and said, the need is not big enough for me to do anything about it. And Jesus could have done nothing. Instead, he did something.
Now Jesus may not have given drink here to someone dying of thirst, but he offered a drink that was needed. You see if this wedding celebration had run out of wine this new couple would have had their celebration ruined. It was expected of them to provide for all of these guests. They would have dishonored their guests who had come, and they would have turned into a joke by the community. They would have broken the tradition of their community. For years to come they would be known for this mistake.
Jesus showed love to this couple by helping them keep their honor. Jesus protected their social need to be in a good relationship with their community.
If we love Christ and are connected to him we are called to love others. This means that out of love we will work to feed the hungry, give clothes to those who need them, but we can also show God’s love by connecting and caring for one another in community. All of us have the ability to meet the social needs of others by just having conversations.
It is an act of love to feed the hungry, but it is also an act of love to sit and talk with someone who has no one else to talk to. I remember in Nashville when we would go to the homeless shelter and serve food. I do not remember working in the kitchen much. This was either because I wanted to let the youth have the experience of that work or I was just trying to get out of working. One or the other. What I would usually do is walk around the lunch room talking with people and listening to their stories. I did not realize it at the time, but looking back I can see the importance of those conversations along with the food.
We have a wonderful opportunity to connect through conversations today and community with our potluck at 11:45am, so I hope you will be there. And I hope you will meet someone new and introduce yourself. You now have an excuse to talk with someone new because you can just say, let’s get our assignment from Pastor James out of the way.
As Jesus calls us friends, we are to connect with one another. Whether we connect by responding to friend requests on facebook or we connect with friends out here in the real world, we need to connect with one another and love one another. Those connections allow us to love each other in our times of need. Those connections will hold us through the storms of life.
A great example for us to build strong connections to friends is the redwood trees, which grow in California. Have any of you seen these in person? These trees are the tallest living things on Earth. Some of them are over 300 feet tall. That is a football field straight up about as high as a 30 story building. These trees can be around 18-20 feet in diameter on their trunk. They are just huge.
And to support a tree like that you would think the roots would need to be just as big if not bigger. To hold a tree 300 feet in the air you would think the roots would go down at least that far. However, the redwood’s roots only go down ten feet or so. Instead they spread out horizontally. They can spread out that way 100 to 200 feet.
Then what happens is that the next tree is not 100 feet away, so their roots begin to interlock with each other. One webpage for the redwoods describes the tree as holding hands underground. They grab on to each other for support, so when the strong winds and storms come they hold each other up. They need each other to survive.
We need each other to survive as well. Facebook might be a way that we would hold hands over the internet. But there are many other ways we can do that as well. The important thing is that we connect with each other in ways that give support. God requests that all of us connect to the vine. We connect to Christ and then are called to connect with one another. When we are connected we give strength to one another through the bond of Christ. He is the vine and we are the branches.
Let’s stand and hold hands as we close in prayer.
