The wide world is nothing but a spiritual Web

In a world of high technology and the Internet, I have one advantage over many folks my age and older.

I have a 13-year-old son.

He is happy to “explain” to his technologically challenged father why the thing I’m trying to do doesn’t appear to be happening.

One of our mutual discoveries a couple of years ago was the wonder of Internet radio. It seems that some enterprising person has discovered that the signals in the ether that we depend upon as radio can be snatched from the sky and channeled through the wires that reach my home as the Internet. What that means practically is that I can listen to local radio from Prince Edward Island, New Orleans, San Francisco, Tokyo and Melbourne without leaving my computer. I’m told that with enough trips to the computer store, the signals can be sent without wires throughout my home, turning my “audio soundscape” into that of any city or country I might choose. It is indeed, to quote the old song, “a small world after all.”

I remember seeing a documentary on the history of television a while back. It cited as a milestone the first time that live pictures of the Brooklyn and Golden Gate bridges were broadcast, side by side in real time, on Edward R. Murrow’s program “See It Now.” The year was 1951, and there was nothing interesting happening on the bridges; it was just another day. Nonetheless, I am sure those of you who remember that event understood that something about the world had changed.

What did it mean that for the first time folks were able to see the Atlantic and Pacific oceans simultaneously? That experience is now instantly available to anyone who views shots from Web cams that provide live pictures from some of the world’s most familiar locations. One can watch a friend cross the road to pick up his morning mail at the Camden, Maine, post office while simultaneously noticing that the evening traffic around the Sydney Opera House is a little light.

We live in a time when the boundaries between what is global and what is local are blurry.

For Christians, of course, that is nothing new. At the heart of Jesus’ message is the proclamation that those on the edges of religious and secular society are included in the proclamation of God’s love. Jesus, in fact, goes out of his way to interact with Samaritans ? a despised ethnic and religious minority of the day ? and even made one of them the hero of his most beloved parable. Jesus spoke with a woman at a well, undaunted by gender roles and her scandalous past. Jesus sought out the mentally and spiritually ill and cast out their demons, he visited the dying and the grief-stricken, he invited himself to dinner at the homes of social pariahs, and when “respectable” people asked him to stop by, he often showed up with prostitutes, “sinners,” and the culturally “impure” in tow.

It is difficult these days to emulate Jesus’ boundary-crossing life, even with the best of intentions. Our churches have walls now, and

thresholds that need to be crossed, and even “brand names” on the door used by folks to sort out whether they should enter or not. In addition, there are those who delight in articulating what divides one faithful group from another, while de-emphasizing the many things that unite them.

A central lesson of the Bible, however, is that God will not tolerate an exclusive community of faith. The vision of both the Hebrew Scriptures and the New Testament is of a people of God that stretches around the globe, across racial and ethnic boundaries, across economic and cultural and language barriers. We may be temporarily segregated by economics, politics, worship style or doctrinal differences, but increasingly God asks us to see the world with “Internet eyes,” understanding the interconnection of all human beings, and the inescapable unity of all those who would walk in the ways of faith.

The Rev. Thomas L. Blackstone, Ph.D., is a United Methodist pastor in Presque Isle and a brother in the Order of Saint Luke. He may be reached at tlbphd@yahoo.com. Voices is a weekly commentary by Maine columnists.