01/29/2008
Facebook.com
by The Reverend Joanna M. Adams
“Facebook.com”
Text: Psalm 139
The Reverend Joanna M. Adams
Morningside Presbyterian Church
Atlanta, GA
January 27, 2008
You searched out my path and my lying down, and are acquainted with all my ways.
Psalm 139:3
Most likely, I have told you before about the young man who, in the days before
e-mail and instant messaging, went off to college. For weeks, his parents did not
hear a word from him. They were frantic. At last a telegram arrived. It said, “Start
worrying. Details to follow.”
I recently read a sentence in an article in the New York Times that made me start
worrying. Robert Wuthnow, a respected sociologist of Religion had written,
“Unless religious leaders take young adults more seriously, the future of
American religion is in doubt.” (1) That alarmed me. I set out to discover some of
the details, and I did. For example, research by the Barna Group, which is a sort
of Gallup poll of Christian trends, reveals that 40% of Americans between the
ages of 16-29 do not identify themselves with the Christian faith. Moreover, “87%
find the Christian faith to be ‘judgmental,’ 85%, ‘hypocritical’, 78% ‘old-fashioned,’
and 70% ‘insensitive to the needs of others.’” (2) I also discovered that the
average age of an American Lutheran is 53, and of an American Methodist 57.
(3) I would imagine that we Presbyterians are right along in there somewhere,
wouldn’t you?
It is not unusual, of course, “for young people to drift away from their religious
moorings when they leave home” and go to college or begin their vocational
lives. (4) It’s not unusual for young adults to stay away from organized religion
until they marry or have children, but with later marriages, more career options
for women, and people putting off having children until they are well into their
30’s, the stay is longer. The longer the time away, the less likely the return will
be. The average intervening period has stretched out now to 15 years. And yet,
what a shame! So many important decisions are made in young adulthood.
Professor Christian Smith, who directs the Center for the Study of Religion at the
University of Notre Dame writes, “These are the most crucial years in a person’s
life for the formation of personal identity, behavioral patterns, and social
relationships.”
It is obvious that mainline Protestant churches, including this particular mainline
Protestant church, needs to wake up and smell the coffee, as Ann Landers used
to say. We need to remember that today’s young adults are not necessarily
looking for the same things that middle-aged and older adults are. Young adults
are interested in experiential, participatory, and communal kinds of religious
experiences. Those are the characteristics identified by Leonard Sweet, a
professor of Evangelism at Drew University.(6)
For evidence of Dr. Sweet’s points, one need look no further than Facebook.com.
Aren’t you proud of me knowing that there is such a thing! Eighty-five percent of
all college and university students have Facebook.com. Sixty percent of them log
on everyday. Users, on average, spend 19 minutes a day, doing it. I am thinking I
should get a face lift before I get Facebook, but I am very interested in the
phenomenon.
Facebook.com was started only in 2004 by two former Harvard students who
wanted to help the people in the college and university community connect with
one another. When some of us went off to college, as freshmen, we were given a
Facebook. You could sit on your bed in your dorm room and go A-B-C and try to
learn the faces of your classmates – that’s where the name comes from. The
point of Facebook.com is to answer the basic human need to know and to be
known. (7) It is used by 60 million people around the world. If you’ve never seen
anybody’s Facebook site, you ought to. I have logged on to a few, and have
found out all sorts of interesting things. People put photographs on their
websites. They have photos of themselves, their dogs, their goldfish. People log
on, make comments, leave messages, you reply, and on it goes.
I once thought this whole phenomenon of internet communication reflected a
growing societal disconnect and sense of isolation, but now I have the sense that
the spectacular success of these new methods of communication reflects this
deep, human longing to connect to hear and to be heard, to know and to be
known.
Naturally, there is a dark side. People hack their way into information they have
no right to know about you. The innocent are preyed on, the gullible taken
advantage of, and there is more out there in cyberspace about you and me than
we wish there were. I got a chill in my blood last Sunday when I was reading the
paper and the headline said, “They’ve Got Your Salary Number.” It seems as if
there is a company based in Atlanta that collects salary numbers and job titles.
Right now they have 46 million Americans in the database, and they share that
information with Lord knows who.
Friday, when I was writing this sermon, I took a break and logged on to
Amazon.com; I wanted to buy Jim Wallis’ new book, The Great Awakening. As
soon as I clicked on the screen, there was a message for me. “Hello Joanna
Adams. Here is a list of other books we think you’d like.” They know my reading
habits. Soon, I guess, they’ll know my eating habits. To borrow from the 139th
Psalm, clearly, “Amazon.com has searched me and known me.” (8)
Another Sunday, we will explore more deeply how the church must change, lest it
lose an entire generation. This morning, I want to think with you about the original
Facebook.com, which predates the current version by several thousand years.
The 139th Psalm is the Bible’s original Facebook. One of the most treasured of all
the Psalms, it speaks of the innate human longing to know and be known by
God, what Martin Buber called the I-Thou relationship.
No matter whether one is 19 years old or 49 or 99, all of us have within our
hearts a longing for God. We cannot truly know ourselves or other people without
the knowledge of God. John Calvin, the intellectual and theological giant of our
mainline Protestant tradition, had it right. Without the knowledge of self, there is
no knowledge of God. And without the knowledge of God, there is no knowledge
of self, or of anyone else. (9) The Psalmist marvels that God knows everyone
and everything in the universe, including him. “You search out my path and my
lying down; you are acquainted with all my ways. If I take the wings of the
morning and settle in the farthest limits of the sea, even there your hand shall
lead me. Your right hand shall hold me fast. Such knowledge is too wonderful for
me; it is so high I cannot attain it.”
I like the language Eugene Petersen uses in translating one of the verses of the
139th Psalm: “Investigate my life, O God. Find out everything about me. Crossexamine
and test me. Get a clear picture of what I am about.” (10)
I wonder if you would ever make a request like that of God. “Investigate my
whole life, please, almighty God. I want you to know everything about me.” I will
admit I might have to clear my own throat a few times before I prayed a prayer
like that, and yet, this is the core of the matter. Whom else can we trust to know
us fully and to care for us unconditionally?
It does no good to present a false face to God. God can see through to the very
heart of who we are. I believe that beneath and beyond our longings for one
another in a romantic sense and a sexual sense, in the sense of friendship and
community, beneath and beyond all of that – is our need to be close to our
Creator. What did Augustine say, “Our hearts are restless until they rest in Thee.”
God our Creator, who knitted us together in our mothers’ wombs in the first place
and who has promised to guide us everyday in the way everlasting, knows the
whole story already.
The Psalmist, not with resentment, but with gratitude and a sense of marvel,
says, “Lord, you know what I am going to say before I even know what I am
going to say. You know how many breaths I am going to take before I even
breathe a breath or live my life.”
When you first think about these things, they sound a little scary. I mean, really,
can’t we have a few boundaries here? But then we remember that God is after
us, God wants to know and does know all about us, not because God is trying to
“get” us, but because God wants to help us, to give us divine grace, wants to
keep us from falling off this or that or the other deep end. If I go out to the farthest
limits of my anxiety, and I have no idea of how I am going to get through the next
week or month, it’s really good to know that way out there on the edge, God is
going to hold me fast. If I walk through such a time of depression that the
darkness has covered me up, I can hang on for dear life to the assurance that
the darkness itself is as light to the Lord
All of us will have darkness, sooner or later, before we’re done. Most of us will
have the feeling, sooner or later, that God is far away, that God has stopped
caring, that we have been abandoned in some way. But think of how it is on a
dreary, cloudy day, that you cannot see the sun at all, but do you doubt that
behind the clouds the sun is there, shining? (11) The Psalmist says, “Even if I
make my bed in hell, God will be there too.”
If I were to ask you what the number one problem facing young people today is, I
wonder what would you say. I would say it’s the same problem I faced when I
was a young adult. I would say it’s the same problem my grandparents probably
faced. It is a simple but universal problem. That is the question of whether or not
I matter. The psychologists use the term “self-esteem”. I think beneath the selfesteem
question is the existential question of whether or not it makes any
difference that I am in the world or not. Do I matter? Do I have any worth?
I sometimes watch a rough television show on HBO called “The Wire”. Set in
Baltimore, it’s about a lot of things- drug trafficking, police corruption, and so on.
But mainly it is about kids and young adults who have concluded that they do not
matter to anybody. As a consequence, they are willing to do just about anything
to themselves and to others.
How many people there are in this world, how many young people, how many
young adults, who have never had anyone tell them, “YOU are wonderfully and
fearfully made. There is no one on earth even remotely like you. You have a
particular purpose that no one else who has ever lived will be able to fulfill except
YOU.”
Our Maker will go to any length for us, including dying on the cross to defeat our
darkness, including following us wherever we end up, and bringing us home.
What was it Robert Frost wrote in The Death of the Hired Man, “Home is the
place where, if you have to go there, they have to take you in.” That’s the way
God is with us. Our home is with God, and God will not let us get away.
I think of the older poem written by Francis Thompson:
I fled Him, down the nights and down the days.
I fled Him, down the arches of the years.
I fled Him, down the labyrinthine ways of my own mind; and in the midst of tears
I hid from Him, and under running laughter
Up vistaed hopes I sped. . .
And yet those strong feet followed,
Followed after.
The church in the 21st century must be the place where people of all ages, but
especially young people, hear the great news that there is a love that will not let
them go. That we matter to God, not just a little bit, but a whole lot. God will go
with us all the way. The Church needs to be the place where we get the message
that God is not wanting to destroy us or exercise wrath against us. God
celebrates the wonder and uniqueness of who we are. The message needs to be
loud and clear, that nothing, not even the worst that life can do, can break the
bonds we have with God and God has with us.
Creature-Creator, I-Thou. “In life, and in death, we belong to God.” (12) It is a
done deal. We belong to God forever.
There is one thing in this world we must never forget. Not our password. Not our
social security number. Those mean nothing compared to this: The one thing we
must never forget is that we owe our lives to the One who knows us better than
we know ourselves. We owe our lives to the One who has dropped the mantle of
dignity upon our shoulders, and who has promised to go with us all the way.
I close with these words from a Prayer of Thomas Merton, the great Trappist
monk:
Dear God, I have no idea where I am going.
I do not see the road ahead of me.
I cannot know for certain where it will end.
Nor do I really know myself…and the fact that I think that I am following Your will
does not mean that I am actually doing so.
But I believe this:
I believe that the desire to please You does in fact please You.
I hope I have that desire in everything I do.
I hope I never persist in anything apart from that desire.
And I know if I do this You will lead me by the right Road, through I may know
nothing about it at the time.
Therefore I will trust you always, for though I may be lost-and in the shadow of
death-I will not be afraid, because I know You will never leave me to face my
troubles all alone.
Thanks be to God. Amen.
(1) “A Challenge for Churches: Adulthood Takes Its Time,” New York Times,
12/8/07.
(2) Bill McKibben, “Taking the Gospels Seriously,” The New York Review of
Books, January 17, 2008, p.44.
(3) Ibid, p. 42.
(4) New York Times, 12/8/07.
(5) Ibid.
(6) Quoted by Roger Nishioka in an article in Presbyterian Outlook, September 3,
2007.
(7) K.C. Ptomey, “A Homily on Psalm 139,” Westminster Presbyterian Church,
Nashville Tennessee, 9/9/2007.
(8) Ibid.
(9) John Calvin, Institutes of the Christian Religion, I.i.1-2
(10) As quoted by K.C. Ptomey.
(11) Joseph B. Mullin, “The Christian Lives With Joy,” First Presbyterian Church,
Greensboro, NC, 11/26/78.
(12) A Brief Statement of Faith, Presbyterian Church, USA.