A Luddite speaks

By Jeff Long

A friend of mine, an admirer of Jesus and a pleasant but persistent critic of the Christian faith, likes to say I believe in Jesus with a halo.

That's correct. I do.

I am persuaded of the church's (small "c") consistent teaching that Jesus was fully man and fully God. Can't prove it, but I'm satisfied of its veracity.

You could make the case that the man Jesus, the Jesus of history, was a millennial.

One may do that if for the purposes of argument you set aside the historic position of orthodox Christianity. To wit: that Jesus was present at the dawn of creation ("In the beginning was the Word and the Word was with God and the Word was God" -- John 1:1).

The "Word" in John's prologue is not the Bible; that would be a silly assertion. Jesus is the Word, co-creating all that is with God the Father.

Still, though, it's hard to get around the stubborn fact Jesus of Nazareth, the man whose resurrection we celebrate in three weeks' time, came of age in the new millennium, the first century A.D., or as scholars like to term it now, C.E. (Christian Era).

Lots of mud gets thrown at today's 21st-century millennials -- that they require authentic experiences, that their heads are usually down gazing at a screen than looking around at nature or other people, that they have forsaken one-to-one conversation for the insular world of cyberspace.

It is for others to decide whether the preceding run-on sentence is fair.

As a first-century millennial, speculate on the effectiveness of Jesus had cellphones been part of the technological landscape of that era.

My surmise is had Android devices or iPhones been available as he taught in the Galilean countryside, nobody would have paused to reflect on anything he said.

Someone would have taken a picture and posted it to Facebook or Snapchat or Instagram. Someone else would have heard a single provocative line and tweeted it, missing the larger context of the message.

Somehow the Lord would have made it work.

His overarching theme of love, compassion and forgiveness would have been communicated in some measure, but I'm glad Jesus didn't have to live in the age of selfies.

The following musing will make me sound even more like a Stone Age Luddite, distrustful of all technology. So be it. Cellphones destroy conversation.

I cannot recount to you how many times I've been in conversation and had that talk broken by the buzzing or ringing of a device purchased at an AT&T store.

They take us out of the world around us and deposit us in a world, cyberspace, where we often need no one else.

Full disclosure: I have a cellphone. It's with me nearly all the time and is very useful. But if I'm having a conversation with someone, I mute it. If I'm in worship, I don't bring it into the sanctuary.

I don't wish to be distracted or to distract anyone else. There are times when we must be fully present.

Thank heaven Jesus of Nazareth lived when he did. Today, I'm not sure anyone would have heard or remembered a blessed thing.

Luddite out.