Easter 4 29th April 2012

We live as ‘the connected generation’ and we live as Christians.

When we make our communion we network with all those in this Church and with angels and archangels and all the company of heaven.

It’s great to be just a small part of such a wonderful whole that’s going to be revealed in its fullness beyond death. It’s great to have faith in the Risen Lord who connects us with one another, with the whole church and the risen Christ’s transformation of the cosmos.

The great priest and thinker Teilhard de Chardin reflected on the passages in scripture than speak of all things being brought together in the risen Christ. He looked for signs of this happening and saw them in a pathway of creation moving from inanimate being to the animation which is life, then from life to self-consciousness as in human beings made in God’s image. He saw that the next obvious stage would be the connecting up of human consciousness globally, which we now see in the internet.

Teilhard de Chardin prophesied almost a century ago the connecting up of conscious beings into the collective consciousness we call the World Wide Web. The picture that came out of his thought and prayer is of the whole cosmos resembling a cone with the movements within it converging upon Jesus as the apex or omega point. Our individual futures, that of the universal church and the whole created order rests in Jesus and is to end in Jesus.

This is the ultimate vision of what it is to ‘be connected’ and to be Christian and it is based on the truth of Christ underlined to us year by year in the Easter season.

The internet and the growth of high speed electronic communication seems to me, to be part of a God planned connecting, but, it has a great downside which I hint at in this month’s P&P Rector’s Letter about the lack of space in lives.

Electronic communications have facilitated ever tighter personal and work schedules that seem to be squeezing out family and village engagement, though of course they can and do serve these. The great flow of e mails I’m being copied into about the Jubilee Village Day on Monday 4th June is one indicator. Hopefully we’ll all be the richer for that extraordinary flow of e mails! Nevertheless there seem to be people living in the village deprived of time to stand and stare which is harsh for them and for us. Villages lose heart when people haven't time for one another.

Connecting is different nowadays. Half of teenagers will send 30 texts today, some of them in their sleep. The internet is officially an addiction so that 73% of 13-17 year olds say they couldn’t stop going online even if they wanted to. They know ‘e-anxiety’, the feeling that comes on as soon as you’re unable to check your email or take a look on Facebook. How many of your children or grandchildren will sit with you this Sunday lunchtime with their phone on the table?

Of course they’re only doing what human beings have always done – polyphasing, keeping in with different networks, only simultaneously – simultaneously, there’s the rub. You can’t be with someone truly if you’re on the phone as well!

To bring ourselves back to the sorts of connecting that gel with the Christian vision, that rests and ends in Jesus, we need to be reminded about the nature of friendship and how it is rooted in friends being fully present to one another in space as well as time. Living in a village, worshipping at a parish Church, provides the opportunity for making lifelong friendships through being regularly present to one another.

You can have friends on Facebook – I have and I tweet them – but the friends that really matter are those you’ve lived close to over time. Through the common life of village and church we build friends who can help rub off our rough corners and make us better instruments of bringing all things together in Christ.

Friendship’s a spiritual reality. We see our inner selves, as if in a mirror, through our friends, with their honesty about us, something we can best bear from a friend.

Friendship holds us to principle. It’s also empowering to know someone who’ll be on your side through thick and thin.

I still engage in friendships made at public school fifty years ago. I was comparing notes with such a friend who’s now in city finance to whose children I’m godfather. John and I still ‘do our chair’ every night, heaping up our clothes for tomorrow in reverse order, as we did 50 years ago in our Dormitory. In this way he gets quicker to the City and I get quicker to my prayers! Typical advantage of a boarding school education! John can speak truth to me that few others are able to as the close friend he is.

The other day I bumped into a young man at the gym with an eight digit number tattoed on the inside of one arm. Curiousity got the better of me. Jokingly I asked him which jail he’d been in. ‘No jail’ he said. ‘It’s the military number of my best friend. He died in Afghanistan four years ago’.

I praised him for keeping his friend’s memory and sacrifice alive.

It got me thinking. Christianity’s a religion of friendship. God made us for friendship. Sin came in as a barrier. By his dying and rising Jesus Christ removes that barrier making us friends with God.

Just as that young man had his friend’s number tattoed on his arm so Our Lord has got your name and mine written on him. See, I have engraved you on the palms of my hands the Lord says in Isaiah 49 verse 16.

In this Church, through its worship and supremely through the eucharist, the memory and sacrifice of our friend Jesus are kept alive. Christianity builds beyond earthly friends and networks towards a communion with angels and archangels and all the company of heaven. Through friendships with Our Lord built up as we engage with scripture and sacrament it populates heaven, no less!

Gathered as we are once again, at his Table, I invite you to place your trust in the One who knows you by name and who is always present with you however distracted you are.

May our hearts burn as he speaks his word to us and may our eyes be opened as he makes himself known to us once more in the Breaking of the Bread.