Sermon for October 17, 2010

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1 Corinthians 12:4-13

4Now there are varieties of gifts, but the same Spirit; 5and there are varieties of services, but the same Lord; 6and there are varieties of activities, but it is the same God who activates all of them in everyone. 7To each is given the manifestation of the Spirit for the common good. 8To one is given through the Spirit the utterance of wisdom, and to another the utterance of knowledge according to the same Spirit, 9to another faith by the same Spirit, to another gifts of healing by the one Spirit, 10to another the working of miracles, to another prophecy, to another the discernment of spirits, to another various kinds of tongues, to another the interpretation of tongues. 11All these are activated by one and the same Spirit, who allots to each one individually just as the Spirit chooses.

12For just as the body is one and has many members, and all the members of the body, though many, are one body, so it is with Christ. 13For in the one Spirit we were all baptized into one body—Jews or Greeks, slaves or free—and we were all made to drink of one Spirit.

1 Peter 2:4-10

4Come to him, a living stone, though rejected by mortals yet chosen and precious in God’s sight, and 5like living stones, let yourselves be built into a spiritual house, to be a holy priesthood, to offer spiritual sacrifices acceptable to God through Jesus Christ. 6For it stands in scripture: “See, I am laying in Zion a stone, a cornerstone chosen and precious; and whoever believes in him will not be put to shame.” 7To you then who believe, he is precious; but for those who do not believe, “The stone that the builders rejected has become the very head of the corner,” 8and “A stone that makes them stumble, and a rock that makes them fall.” They stumble because they disobey the word, as they were destined to do. 9But you are a chosen race, a royal priesthood, a holy nation, God’s own people, in order that you may proclaim the mighty acts of him who called you out of darkness into his marvelous light. 10Once you were not a people, but now you are God’s people; once you had not received mercy, but now you have received mercy.

The Great Ends of the Church

The great ends of the church are the proclamation of the gospel for the salvation of humankind; the shelter, nurture, and spiritual fellowship of the children of God; the maintenance of divine worship; the preservation of the truth; the promotion of social righteousness; and the exhibition of the Kingdom of Heaven to the world. (From the PCUSA Book of Order, G-1.0200)

Maintenance of Divine Worship: Webs, Wikis & Water, Oh My!

The largest and most comprehensive encyclopedia in in this history of reference works contains 16 million articles today, written in over 270 languages. I happen to be one of the editors for this encyclopedia. Yesterday, as I took a short break from writing this sermon, I worked a little bit on the article for "atonement" theory in Christianity. This may sound prestigious, until I tell you what some of you have already guessed -- that the encyclopedia I'm referring to is none other than Wikipedia: The online encyclopedia that anyone can edit. That's right, anyone. If you want to, you can change, add to, or even undo all of my work on the atonement article with a few clicks of mouse and keyboard. So how in the world, one might ask, did Wikipedia get to be the largest encyclopedia in the world, and is it really anything more than a bunch of random, chaotic junk compiled by ignorant amateurs? Well, that's certainly the criticism that some of my distinguished professors at Princeton Seminary, or other elite scholars might make--and indeed often do. But a few years ago, a very well-known and respected journal of science did a head-to-head comparison between similar articles in Wikipedia and Encyclopedia Britannica (the oldest continuously published reference work in the English language). The study found that across a wide diversity of subjects, there was very little difference in accuracy between the two encyclopedias. However, the errors found in Wikipedia were immediately corrected upon publication of the report, while those in Britannica...well, they had to wait a few years until the next edition came out. As someone who has participated in the wikipedia project for several years now, I can tell you that the reason it works, the reason it's accurate, and reliable despite the potential chaos of "letting anyone contribute" has to do with two things: First, over the course of its existence, several policies, procedures, and standards have evolved from the community, most of them centering around how to move forward when two people disagree about something. The second reason is that people tend to edit articles about things they are passionate about--things they know about. The person most likely to spend his or her valuable spare time contributing to an article on molecular biology? A molecular biologist. When my son first becomes a Wikipedia contributor, it will most likely be to an article on Bionicles, Bakugans, Transformers, or Star Wars. He's an expert. Corinthians tells us that there are "varieties of gifts, but the same Spirit . . . to one is given faith, to another the working of miracles, to another prophecy, to another the discernment of spirits..." Wikipedia taps into this sort of idea, but on a massive scale.