What Would Jesus Tweet?

Proverbs 17.1-12

Matthew 13, selected verses

What Would Jesus Tweet?

Fourth Sunday in Lent

            Gail Doktor and I were talking about the classes she is taking this semester, and she mentioned she is taking a class in Systematic Theology at The Episcopal Divinity School in Cambridge – probably because the Episcopalians do systematic theology better than Harvard’s Unitarians.  Systematics is the field that integrates the major traditional doctrines of the church:  the nature of God, the trinity, sin and atonement, revelation and reconciliation, in a historical and comprehensive manner.  Noting the depth and breadth of such a class, Gail both lamented and genuinely wondered how it could even be possible to squeeze two thousand plus years of theology, history and doctrine into one class in one semester.  I mentioned to her she doesn’t have to actually master it all in one semester – she has a whole vocation in front of her when she will be wrestling with those topics.   And it reminded me that one of the many reasons I so appreciate Second Church’s relationship with our seminarians is because it helps me connect their preparation for ministry with my own, and our conversation last week brought to mind my own experience with systematic theology.

            In the late 1970’s German theologian Helmut Theilicke produced his three volume systematic, The Evangelical Faith.  And one of the things I will always remember is when Debbie and I went out to our first church in northern Michigan, we didn’t have a television, and there was no morning newspaper, so I decided to read Theilicke’s theology from start to finish – the perfect accompaniment to those dark, snowy mornings on the Upper Peninsula!   And some of you will remember back in 2009, on the occasion of the 500^th anniversary of the birth of John Calvin, I took a week of study at Princeton to research and reread Calvin’s four volume systematic, The Institutes of the Christian Religion.  Then, a few years ago, I was finally able to save enough money to go out and purchase Karl Barth’s fourteen volume systematic theology which he called, Church Dogmatics.  And no, I haven’t read the whole thing.  Yet. But you can see Gail’s dilemma – how do you distill centuries of thought and thousands of pages of deep theological reflection into one class in one semester?  I guess if anyone can do it, the Episcopalians can.

            But it’s ironic, don’t you think, that so many words have been written, not to mention trees sacrificed, in the attempt to unwrap and unravel what we find in this comparatively brief work of sixty-six chapters.  And so much of it is predicated, not on all sixty-six chapters, but on just four, the gospels that tell the story of the brief ministry of Jesus of Nazareth, basically over a three-year span.  Surely there has to be a simpler way of going about it.

            I’ve shared with some of you before that I have a friendly running debate with our Northeast Area Minister, The Rev. Wendy Vander Hart, about the church’s use of social media.  If you were here the Sunday Wendy preached a couple years ago you likely caught a whiff of it.  It is Wendy’s conviction that the church should be able to get its message across in a Twitter tweet – that is, to proclaim what is essential in one hundred and forty alpha-numeric characters.  If you can’t boil it down to that, Wendy says, then it probably is not worth saying.  But I would ask the question why the church should agree to let the gospel be boiled down to an arbitrary number of characters defined by Twitter’s limited ability to transmit a message?  Is it really necessary, or even desirable, to dumb down our message in order to tailor it to fit one specific social media platform?

            But then I turn to the building blocks on top of which all systematic theology is built – the words of Jesus.  And even though they do not persuade me to agree with Wendy – completely anyway – Jesus’ way with words suggests that Wendy does have a point.  This morning’s readings from Matthew 13 are just a small sample of the way that Jesus taught, but it is a representative sample. More often than not, Jesus employed brief, memorable epigrammatic lessons couched in short phrases that were easily understood and repeated by his followers.  For example, George read, “The kingdom of heaven is like yeast that a woman took and mixed in with three measures of flour until all of it was leavened,” which is exactly one hundred characters long, (87 in Greek).  So does it tweet?  Yes, it does.  Do we understand Jesus’ point?  Of course we do – it is simple and elegant.  Here’s another:  “The kingdom of heaven is like treasure hidden in a field, which someone found and hid; then in his joy he goes and sells all that he has and buys that field.”  125 characters:  another tweet.  “Again, the kingdom of heaven is like a merchant in search of fine pearls; on finding one pearl of great value, he went and sold all that he had and bought it.”  126 characters.  “Again, the kingdom of heaven is like a net that was thrown into the sea and caught fish of every kind; when it was full, they drew it ashore, sat down, and put the good into baskets but threw out the bad.”  Ah, here’s one that is too long at 162 characters... and 183 in Greek!  “Therefore every scribe who has been trained for the kingdom of heaven is like the master of a household who brings out of his treasure what is new and what is old.”  131 characters.  Maybe Wendy Vander Hart is on to something.

            Jesus’ way of speaking in brief, memorable lessons is reminiscent of the Proverbs.  I asked Gail to read from Proverbs 17 today because they are random, mostly unrelated individual maxims that are nonetheless as memorable as they are succinct.  “Better is a dry morsel with quiet, than a house full of feasting with strife.”  We know what this means without having to wrestle very long with it, and I’d guess that most of us would agree.  “Those who mock the poor insult their Maker.”  Shades of the minimum wage debate we mentioned last week!  And here is one that, once heard, we don’t soon forget:  “Better to meet a she-bear robbed of its cubs than to confront a fool immersed in folly.”  You can say that again!  Brief epigrams, each one vivid, all of them potent – a wonderful and time-tested teaching tool.  And every one of them well within Twitter’s 140 character maximum.

            Jesus knew as well as anyone how to teach an effective and enduring lesson with a minimum of words.  In fact, in so many instances he used words simply as a means to draw pictures that would stay fixed in our minds.  For example, when I say the prodigal son, or the Good Samaritan, or the sheep & the goats, these are brief phrases that conjure up a story considerably longer than 140 characters, and not just the details of the stories themselves, but also the deeper meaning behind them.  We probably each have our own mental image of the father spying the returning prodigal in the distance, and running out to meet him; and of the Samaritan going out of his way to help his enemy the Jew who had essentially just been mugged; and of those faithful people who feed the hungry and visit the sick and advocate for the prisoner, welcomed into God’s waiting and loving arms.

            And so powerful are these phrases and stories that many of them have escaped the bounds of scripture alone and are ingrained in the vernacular.  Charles Dickens’ tale of Great Expectations, of Pip, and Estelle and Miss Havisham, is essentially the story of the prodigal son transported to Victorian England.  The act of a good Samaritan is what turns Jean Valjean’s heart from venal to valorous in Victor Hugo’s Les Miserables.  And the parable of the last judgment, of ministering to strangers even to one’s own detriment is a theme that Albert Camus employs not only in The Stranger, but in The Plague as well.  And the reasons these themes continue to resonate, not just among people of faith, but among humanity at large, is in part because Jesus’ stories are easily remembered by virtue of their brevity, which I think contributes to their universality.

             So what would Jesus tweet?  Quite a lot, it would appear.  But at the end of the day, I’m still not convinced it is in the church’s best interest to try to confine our message to the length of a tweet.  In fact I think there are two completely opposite reasons for this.  One is that Jesus’ words, as brief as they are, constitute the building blocks for who you and I are as people of faith.  Each lesson, every proverb or easily recalled one-liner, becomes layered upon the previous one in order to create a portrait of what it looks like to serve God and God’s children in our world.  We don’t require a fourteen volume systematic theology in order to live lives of faith and service, but consciously or not you and I continue to bear witness to the multiple stories and experiences, not only of people in biblical times, but of also of all those who have come before us.  Yet the exact opposite is also true, that it is possible to bear witness to the love and generosity of God with no words at all.  As St Francis may or may not have said, “Preach the gospel at all times – and when necessary, use words.”  When a single act of kindness or compassion or simple humanity is witnessed, it often speaks more eloquently than the most articulate sermon – and that’s a good thing.  And it is also something no tweet can ever do:  reveal the love of God in Jesus Christ – with no words at all.

            Remind me to tell that to Wendy next time I see her.

            Let us pray.