Many of you (if there are many of you) will know that I am more than a bit of a Technology Jones.  I Twitter.  I’m on Facebook.  I blog, I podcast (ok, sort of).  One of the reasons behind this is I love gadgets.  I like my phone.  I’m fond of my MacBook.  Some folks tinker with cars, I’ve always been interested in making connections with folks.

The convergence between my Techno-Jones interests and my desire to connect with folks and to connect folks I connect with has taken an interesting turn.

I want to share with you this blog post from a friend of mine that summarizes the current state of explosive growth on Facebook.

More than a year ago I reponded to two clergy colleagues who asked me to join Facebook.  For a time I resisted and then I looked in on it.  I liked the folks who asked so I gave it a shot.  After spending some time doing little with it, I dutifully updated my profile, started to add some of my background information about Schools and where I’d been and what I’d done.  After a bit I found that there were other folks doing the same thing.  I remember clicking through to my High School Class Group and finding that I was the 3rd of my graduating class to join a group on Facebook of folks admitting to having graduated in 1978 from Fairview High School in Boulder, CO.

One of the other guys I found there I hadn’t seen since we graduated HS some 30 years ago.  We started to exchange messages and found we had common interests.  I had managed to become more ‘friendly’ with him over 3000 miles of the country than we’d been in the same town and HS of 2000 students.  But, the circle was still small.

Once in awhile I’d stumble upon new ‘friends’ or more accurately ‘friends of friends’ or acquaintances of people and I began to be aware of how thin the separation between folks can really be.  I remember wondering if I’d ever amass as many as 50 ‘Friends’ on Facebook.  This week sometime I’ll likely pass the 400 ‘Friends’ threshold.

The connections continued and I’d check through my email address book every so often with tool on Facebook to see if folks I knew otherwise were in the FB world.  I’d come up with 2 or 3 every so often.  Last night I did it again and the tool came up with 67 ‘hits’.  It confirmed something I’d suspected.  Namely, that folks FB is getting older and it’s reach is getting broader.  People I hadn’t thought of in 30 years, much less talked to, are seemingly excited about making connections that they’d forgotten or at least put away.

So, where’s the connection to the Gospel?  it’s this.  Somehow, through people reaching out and carrying a message to other folks, connections are being made.  A community, albeit a virtual one if you will, is forming and the growth is geometric not simply arithmetic.

Simply put, the Good News of God in Christ has always grown and spread in exactly the same way the FB is exploding.  Someone tells someone else, who invites them to look and see and then the decision is made as to whether the relationships made possible give life or not.

FB is not the point…the point is this; we were created for relationship and we’ll suspend our disbelief and skepticism at times to take a chance on connecting with ‘the Other’.  If we can regain the sense of wonder and excitement of talking about Jesus as much as we do about saving the Rainforest with’Green Patch’ or playing the latest iteration of ‘Scrabble’ on FB then just like Facebook with it’s millions of users, the Gospel can go viral again, just as it did in the first centuries after Jesus’ death, resurrection and ascension.

We can hope and we can invite! Wanna be Jesus’ friend??

Dear St. Luke’s Community,

As some of you might know, I have succumbed to one of the latest trends in our increasingly digital and pluralistic world.

I am on FACEBOOK.

For those of you who don’t know of it, Facebook (www.facebook.com) is a social networking website in which folks can make connections with people of similar interests and communicate in real time in a virtual community. As with most of the internet, you have to take the good with the bad, but Facebook lets you choose your content and who has access to that content. But that’s not what I’m really writing about.

Earlier this week, I received a ‘bumper sticker’ on my account from on of my Facebook ‘Friends’. He is a freshman in college at St. Thomas College in St. Paul, Minnesota and the oldest son of one of my seminary classmates. He still finds it amusing that relics like his mother and me are on Facebook. The sticker he posted on my site quotes noted 20^th Century Anglican C.S. Lewis, saying, “You don’t have a soul. You are a soul. You have a body.” The implication, at least in part, is “there’s more to us than what you see….WAY more!”

Again last night while I was reading Ronald Rolheiser’s book The Holy Longing a similar claim barreled into my space. It said, to paraphrase, that the soul is what brings the chemicals of the body, the stuff of which we’re made, into animation. In that sense, according to Rolheiser, to lose one’s soul is to cease to live. It gave me pause to reflect. In fact, it’s still giving me that pause.

This morning I asked a gentleman who came to a meeting in my office, “How are things with your soul?” He pondered a moment and thend said, “I don’t know, I don’t think about it that much.” I was taken aback with his honesty and had to admit that though I ask the question of others fairly often, I don’t often take stock of how things are with my soul as often as I might. If my soul is that part of me that makes life fully possible, then you’d think I’d pay more attention to its health. After that meeting ended, (a couple of hours ago) I spent some time dealing with the question of how it is with my soul. It seems to me that is entirely consistent with what Lent call us to do. So, having said as much, here’s how things are with my soul just ahead of Holy Week…

Thus far this year my Lenten Journey has been, as it often is, about focusing my energies on the things that God is calling me to do and not being concerned so much with those things that I’m told I ‘ought’ to do (either by myself or others). I don’t know about you, but it makes it much easier for me to step out in faith when I sense that God’s desire is my invitation and not that the expectations of another are my compulsion. Make no mistake, some of what we ‘ought’ to do is God’s will, but I invite you to at least acknowledge the possibility that what we ‘ought’ to be spending our time doing might be taking time away from getting into the heart of God in which our souls find their true rest and most powerful inspiration.

Well, enough of the reflection, I ought to get back to work. (he said with tongue firmly planted in cheek).

May the Love of Christ and the song of God in your soul inspire you to hopeful living this Holy Week!!!!