By Dr. Lani Wilson

Good Day and I hope that your summer is moving smoothly! The middle of July sometimes feels like a lull in the normal busyness of the year. Godspeed if you are returning from, attending or preparing for a family reunion! Let’s continue to pray and fast for our little outpost in East Oakland and for the greater Body of Christ, His Bride, as we wade deeper into the 21st century. There are wonders unseen and as yet unveiled that await humankind that may make the societal changes of the 20th century appear timid and polite in comparison.

The word this week is “pass.” As with so many other words, it is used both as a noun and a verb. Etymonline.com (Online Etymology Dictionary) gives us its different uses in English and as a noun it is used in many ways. In geography it is a physical place such as a mountain pass; in academic settings, a grade on an exam as in “pass-fail;” socially, it can be a flirtation as in “to make a pass” at someone; in playing cards, it means to say “no” to a turn; in sports it is transferring the ball to another player. There seem to be fewer uses as a verb: We can use it to signal physical movement as in “going by,” hailing from the late 13th century CE. In 1809 it began to be used to mean someone “passing themself off” as something or someone else. Beginning in 1935 it also meant “passing oneself off” racially, usually a Black person slipping into White American culture: They were “passing.”

Interestingly, in Luke 4:27-29 we find a situation that we don’t often talk about.

And there were many lepers in Israel in the time of the prophet Elisha, yet none of them was cleansed except Naaman the Syrian.” When they heard this, all the people in the synagogue were filled with rage. They got up, forced him out of the town, and brought him to the brow of the hill on which their town was built, so that they could throw him down the cliff. Luke 4:27-29 (TMB)

Well before the Passion week when He knew He would surrender His body for sacrifice, Jesus’ life was threatened not just by Pharisees, Scribes, and Sadducees but by the people He was trying to liberate.

So the demons came out of the man and went into the pigs, and the herd of pigs rushed down the steep slope into the lake and drowned. When the herdsmen saw what had happened, they ran off and spread the news in the town and countryside. So the people went out to see what had happened, and they came to Jesus. They found the man from whom the demons had gone out, sitting at Jesus’ feet, clothed and in his right mind, and they were afraid. Those who had seen it told them how the man who had been demon-possessed had been healed. Then all the people of the Gerasenes and the surrounding region asked Jesus to leave them alone, for they were seized with great fear. So he got into the boat and left. Luke 8:33-37 (TMB)

We frequently cite ad nauseum the threat from the obvious powers in charge, but we don’t often discuss the fact that Jesus’ life was threatened before His appointed time of physical death by regular folk…folk like us. We know that scripture said that He would be rejected in His own hometown, but this is outside of Nazareth. What is that about?

Pass me not, O gentle Savior,
Hear my humble cry;
While on others Thou art calling,
Do not pass me by.
Frances (“Fanny”) J. Crosby and William H. Doane Library.timelesstruths.org

Hear that familiar tune? Spanning the 19th and 20th centuries, Fanny Crosby and William Doane also wrote classics like “Blessed Assurance,” “To God Be the Glory,” “Near the Cross,” “Safe in the Arms of Jesus.”

Jesus had to escape the very people He had healed, their neighbors, relatives, the crowd because it was scary (Luke 8:37) and threatened their livelihood or it was an indictment by Jesus (Luke 4:27). In the latter verse He is talking about who was healed and who was not (II Kings 5:1-27). “Naaman the Syrian” was healed of leprosy but not until some unnamed heroes and heroines convinced him to do as Elisha the prophet advised.

When the king of Israel read the letter, he tore his clothes and said, ‘Am I God, to give death or life, that this man sends word to me to cure a man of his leprosy? Just look and see how he is trying to pick a quarrel with me.’  II Kings 5:7 (NRSV)

But Naaman became angry and went away, saying, “I thought that for me he would surely come out, and stand and call on the name of the LORD his God, and would wave his hand the spot. Are not Abana and Pharpar, the rivers of Damascus, better than all the waters of Israel? Could I not wash in them, and be clean?” He turned and went away in a rage. Verses 11-12 (NRSV)

• Finally, Naaman is told by Elisha to wash in the Jordan River seven times to be cured of leprosy, but Naaman has been ceremoniously insulted by Elisha and chooses to pass on a potential healing until his unnamed servants petition him to do as Elisha tells him. The servants know just how to appeal to Naaman’s pride, his ego:

But his servants approached and said to him, “Father, if the prophet had commanded you to do something difficult, would you not have done it? How much more, when all he said to you was, ‘Wash, and be clean?’” Verse 13 (NRSV)

In the same passage Jesus cites the account in I Kings 17:8-24 of Elijah and the widow of Zarephath (“Sarepta,” biblegateway.com, All the Women of the Bible).

But the truth is, there were many widows in Israel in the time of Elijah, when the heaven was shut up three years and six months, and there was severe famine over all the land; yet Elijah was sent to none of them except to a widow at Zarephath in Sidon. Luke 4:25-26 (NRSV)

So here we have Jesus citing these ancient scriptures (that the people in the synagogue would surely know) stating that in Elijah’s time, of all the widows in Israel during the time of horrible famine and in the time of Elisha, of all the lepers in Israel, God chose to save the widow of Sidon and heal the Syrian Naaman. God passed over all the widows in Israel to rescue this one at Zaraphath and passed over all the lepers of this time to heal Naaman. This obvious indictment against status quo Jews in Jesus’ time prompted rage from His own people. What did Jesus do? “But he passed through the crowd and went on his way” (Luke 4:30 NRSV).

Thanks to our digitized culture we are able to be in two places at once vis-à-vis teleconferencing and the worldwide web where we can have “virtual meetings.”

A virtual meeting is an event or series of events where participants join in from multiple locations. A virtual meeting may be held “real time” where everyone is participating as the same time, often by teleconference or video conference. A virtual meeting may also have asynchronous components where participants are working at different times appropriate to their time zone or schedule. Six Critical Success Factors for Running a Successful Virtual Meeting facilitate.com, Julia Young 2009

It is an interesting phenomenon that is now commonplace; people prefer to not meet in person most of the time because everyone is “just…so…busy.” The Millennial Generation (those born from the early 1980s through the 2000s) more than likely don’t remember a time when there wasn’t a “virtual presence” via the web. In other words you can pass on being physically present because you can always be virtually present. And now the smartphone can place you at any event at any time anywhere in the world.

Now the man who had been healed did not know who it was, for Jesus had disappeared in the crowd that was there. John 5:13 (NRSV)

When questioned by Jews in Jerusalem during a Jewish festival, the lame man of thirty-eight years who had been miraculously healed redirected their wrath toward Jesus. “But he answered them, ‘The man who made me well said to me, ‘Take up your mat and walk” (John 5:11 NRSV). He passed the supposed violation of working on the Sabbath onto Jesus. John MacArthur (2006, John 1-11: MacArthur New Testament Commentary, The Persecuted Jesus) says that “he wasn’t much of a hero.” He knew that they were angrily searching for evidence against Jesus. And yet, what did Jesus do?

Later Jesus found him in the temple and said to him, “See, you have been made well! Do not sin any more, so that nothing worse happens to you.”  John 5:14 (NRSV)

But even after Jesus came looking for him in the temple, this cowardly man left and told the Jews that it was Jesus who had healed him, setting off greater antipathy toward Jesus.

What is our responsibility to each other and to God in this age when we can be “present” without being physically present? Is this technological convenience an improvement because we are all “just…so…busy” or does it smack of something else? It is almost as if we are transparent in our participation: We are “there” but not really. Much has been made of multitasking, doing more than one thing at a time.

It has been scientifically demonstrated that the brain cannot effectively or efficiently switch between tasks, so you lose time. It takes four times longer to recognize new things so you’re not saving time; multitasking actually costs time. You also lose time because you often make mistakes. If you’re multitasking and you send an email and accidentally “reply all” and the person you were talking about is on the email, it’s a big mistake. In addition, studies have shown that we have a much lower retention rate of what we learn when multitasking, which means you could have to redo the work or you may not do the next task well because you forgot the information you learned. Everyone’s complaining of memory issues these days – they’re symptoms of this multitasking epidemic. Then, of course, there’s the rudeness factor, which doesn’t help develop strong relationships with others.  “How Multitasking Hurts Your Brain and Your Effectiveness at Work,” Forbeswoman, Forbes.com, Jessica Kleiman, Interview with Julie Morgenstern, January 5, 2013

The issue becomes what does it mean to “be present” if you are focused on the effectiveness and/or outcomes of your meeting rather on the persons in the meeting? Doesn’t that make them more objects than human? Does that fact that we are all “just…so…busy” infer that there are more or fewer people in our lives? Or are there more or fewer activities in our lives? Is there less agreement on purposes or goals of a community because we focus on products of our meetings rather than on the people we are serving and who are in our meetings? Is our digital, ultra-stimulated daily functioning a symptom or attribute of the fallacy of multitasking? And as churches are more and more seen as organizations as opposed to organisms of Christ, is this why we are losing people to the non-denomination movement? The backlash against denominational identity is here.

I recently attended a non-denominational mega-church that seated 8,000 at each of two services on Sunday and about 6,000-7,000 at Saturday evening service. That’s approximately 23,000 people each weekend at one site alone, and they just opened up two other sites that will hold at least the same number of people per service. The attractions are obvious.

1. You are anonymous from week to week.
2. Your personal accountability as a member has no strings.
3. Your need for community is at least superficially met.
4. Doctrine is whatever your church leader says it is, Bible-based or not.
5. And finally, I didn’t see a 3-D cross anywhere inside the sanctuary; if it was visible, it was projected onto the three movie screens and seemed to be transparent.

Is this another by-product of The Great Recession when full-time employment was lost, bankruptcy rates exploded, and entrepreneurship grew out of a sheer need for economic survival?

The U.S. economy shed more than 8 million jobs during the Great Recession, the steepest decline since the end of World War II. But was there a silver lining to the downturn? According to this study, which is the first to use data from the recession to analyze its effect on people’s decisions to start new businesses, this severe shock to the workforce fueled a surge in entrepreneurship. The recession, which began in late 2007, sent corporate bankruptcy filings and closures soaring, of course, but its effect on business formation is less clear. Many sources of angel investments, bank loans, and venture capital dried up. However, the rapid increase in layoffs, the availability of newly unemployed workers, and a dearth of employment alternatives may have combined to create higher numbers of entrepreneurs than in pre- recession years. “Entrepreneurship, Economic Conditions, and the Great Recession: How the Great Recession Spurred Entrepreneurship,” Robert W. Fairley University of California, Santa Cruz, Journal of Economics and Management Strategy Published June 21, 2013, Vol. 22, No. 2

Churches are in the world and should maintain a distinct profile as different from the world. Yet, we are a part of the world around us. Has this entrepreneurial template imprinted on the Bride of Christ? Surely, people suffered financially and we know emphatically that African-Americans suffered more than any other demographic group in the United States (“A Balance Sheet at 30 Months: How the Great Recession Has Changed Life in America,” A Social and Demographic Trends Report, Pew Research Center, June 30, 2010). Might this mean that as people’s lives dramatically changed, their attitudes, sensibilities, and beliefs in faith-based institutions changed? Given that there are few full-time pastorates available, especially in economically-challenged cities, is it reasonable to expect that the ministerial class has moved to independent contractor status as part of the growth of entrepreneurship? Can we blame them if we cannot pay them? What does this mean for the Body of Christ? Is it a good thing that we can teleconference, webinar, and virtually worship anywhere and at a different church in any denomination every Sunday? Are we outsourcing ministry now to survive or was this trend inevitable given the reality of our individual digital footprints in the cyber-verse? Are we going to see more and more members take a pass at physically coming to church until the only people in the church are those who produce and upload the service (ministers, musicians, praise teams, media specialists) while the congregation “logs in” online from wherever they choose? Is the Bride of Christ finally going to be everywhere at the same time but not here? And…where is God, where is Jesus the Christ in all this?

Our modern understanding of the mind-body problem owes much more to Descartes’ theory of dualism than we'd think. Descartes theorized that the body and mind were two entirely separate entities. Thought existed on an entirely different plane than the physical. "On the other hand, the contemporary scientists they say, 'No, it’s the brain that’s the thing inside of you that does all that, it’s not the soul, the immaterial spirit. The truth of the matter is we don’t have any better idea today how the brain accomplishes what the spirit was supposed to accomplish. Sorry. We don’t have a better idea today how the brain does that than Descartes had how immaterial soul stuff does that." Contemporary neuroscience follows Descartes in conceptualizing consciousness as something that occurs internally. The difference is that for Descartes, the soul was the ghost in the machine, while for neuroscientists, the ghost is the machine. “The Ghost in the Machine: Unraveling the Mystery of Consciousness” by Megan Erickson, c. 2012 bigthink.com

Ironically, God sent Her Son down to earth to be physically present with us in our struggles, our suffering, our joys, our lives. And now the culture seems to be drifting toward a “hologramic” presence because we are “just…so…busy.” From worshiping the Great Unknowable YHWH to lifting up His Son as Savior to a transparent cross that appears with the click of a computer key…is this the journey that God had in mind and will the real Jesus materialize, please? We are getting a little lost.

Let me at Thy throne of mercy
Find a sweet relief;
Kneeling there in deep contrition,
Help my unbelief.

Trusting only in Thy merit,
Would I seek Thy face;
Heal my wounded, broken spirit,
Save me by Thy grace.

Thou the spring of all my comfort,
More than life to me,
Whom have I on earth beside Thee,
Whom in Heav’n but Thee.

Lord Jesus, we come hungry for Your Presence, not just Your precepts. We come hungry for Your real body, Your real wounds, Your real heart because it’s getting a little fuzzy. We think we are so busy and so important and when You strike us down to slow us down, we remember that “to live” is to follow You one footfall at a time. One step at a time. One heave at a time. One tear at a time. You created us to need You more than anything else and gave us the liberty to figure that out for ourselves. And then You created us to need each other to help us find You together as a group project. Remind us gently, if You can but forcefully if You must, that we can’t pass each other by and that we pass You by at our peril. Bring us back to square one, heads bowed, knees flexed so that we can find You in Your universe.

Savior, Savior,
Hear my humble cry,
While on others Thou art calling,
Do not pass me by.

Please, Jesus.
Please, Jesus.
Please Jesus.
Do not pass me by.
I can’t make it or take it without You.

I just can’t.

Amen.