
Pastor David Fechner and his wife Carole
From the Pastor’s
Laptop
When
I hear the name Thomas Edison, the first thing I (and many other people) think
of is the electric light bulb. The
second thing is sound recordings, for he is responsible for the invention of
both. But I read once that he is
credited with more than 1000 inventions, including the mimeograph machine,
which was patented in 1876.
Though
mimeos are a thing of the past, I’ve wondered how many words on how many tons
of paper were printed on mimeographs over the years. Years ago, the
congregation I was serving was going to make the switch from a mimeograph to a
plain paper copier. The copier salesmen
asked how many copies we currently made and then tell us that with a copier
that number would double! When computers
became common we were told the use of paper would go down. Actually it has gone up.
Suffice
it to say that since Gutenberg’s movable type printing press was invented,
mountains of paper have been filled with print, and we’re surrounded by
words—both printed and spoken.
If
you look at your Bible, you might say, “Now there’s
a book with a lot of words!” And it
is. But in some ways, even though it has
lots of words, written over the course of many centuries by many human authors,
the message is fairly simple. In it God
says to us, “I love you. I want you to
live with me forever.”
You
have your own favorite passages that give you that message. A few of my favorites are:
“God demonstrates his own love for us in this:
while we were still sinners Christ died for us” (Romans 5:8), and “This is
love: not that we loved God, but that he loved us and sent his Son as an
atoning sacrifice for our sins” (1 John 4:10), and of course a favorite of many
Christians is John 3:16.
Each
of those passages talks about God’s Son, Jesus Christ. St. John in his Gospel calls Jesus the “Word
of God in the flesh” (chap. 1), and the author of the Hebrews writes: “In the
past God spoke to our forefathers through the prophets at many times and in
various ways, but in these last days he has spoken to us by his Son” (Heb.
1:1-2a).
Many
words, one message: God is Love.