Thomas J Parlette
“Don’t Call it a Phone”
Phil. 3:17-4:1
3/16/25
It’s hard to imagine life without our phones. Have you ever forgotten your phone and left it at home in the morning? I have done that a couple of times – the anxiety is overwhelming. Who’s trying to get in touch with me? What am I missing? What am I going to do if I have to google something? What if I need to know the weather next week, catch up on some breaking news or place a quick Amazon order? How will I get through the day without my phone!?
And yet we used to do it all the time. In fact, there used to be a day when phones had one purpose – to talk to people. These days our phones are so sophisticated that we can do nearly everything on them. According to survey from electroiq.com, people report using their phones to make calls only 48% of the time, less than half the time they are using their phones are they making calls to talk to people. 75% of the time, people are using their phones to text message or chat. 71% of the time they are dealing with email, 63% for online banking, 62% for music or videos, 57% of the time for shopping and 52% for reading the news. (1) Phones have become something different than they once were. In fact, some people in the tech business don’t even use the term “phone” anymore – they think of our smart phone devices as a “user interface.” It’s a device that helps humans connect and interact with virtually everything – computers, machines, GPS systems, and almost any business you can think of.
Just take a moment to think about the ways we use our phones as an interface:
- Boarding a plane with a digital boarding pass
- Buying a soda or snack from a vending machine
- Navigating through a strange city
- Scanning QR codes while shopping at the mall
- Ordering food at a restaurant
- Paying the bill and tipping your server
- Turning off the light, locking the doors and setting the alarm when leaving the house
The list could go on. A good user interface – like our smart phones - makes our daily life easier and more enjoyable. It is intuitive, user-friendly – at least, it’s supposed to be.
You could think of the church as a “user interface” as well. We are a device, if you will, that helps humans connect with God, and with each other. Just as technology has changed everyday life, it has changed church life as well. Like the old-fashioned walnut phone on the kitchen wall, the church used to be in a fixed location for centuries. You had to go to it. You had to stop what you were doing and go visit the church.
But this began to change about 60 years ago. During the 1960’s, when so much was changing in the culture, the church, or at least parts of the church, got out into the streets, and suddenly the church was relevant again. Young, long-haired followers of Jesus, sometimes called “Jesus freaks”, left the walls of the church, and, anticipating the concept of “user-interface,” got out there among the people. Perhaps you saw the recent movie starring Kelsey Grammer called “Jesus Revolution” that told one of such story.
The church went out into the public square and got involved in cultural and political discussions. The church was no longer a stone edifice in a fixed location on a street corner, but was now something mobile and engaged. The concept of “church” changed. We once thought the purpose of church was to “save souls,” but now we know that church is about so much more.
Preaching shifted too. By the early 1970’s, preachers began to re-emphasize the concept of “every member a minister.” Narrative or story-telling preaching grew in popularity. (2)
Today, the church at its best strives to be a user-friendly organism that connects with its neighborhood, its city and its citizens in a variety of formats. Depending on the church, it works with city councils to provide affordable housing. It sponsors food bans to feed people. It opens its doors to all sorts of groups that try to lift the human spirit and better the lot of humankind. It supports the arts and artists. It takes care of little children. It helps single parents and provides counseling for the grieving and discouraged.
The church of Jesus Christ can be thought of as a user interface. It is an institution that, like a smartphone, offers access to a myriad of attractive, fun and important benefits to the user, not the least of which are interactions with other users, and opportunities to interface as a user with God.
In his book The Welcoming Congregation, Henry Brinton writes, “Every time people sit down to eat and drink together, there is the possibility that community will grow and people will be reconciled to one another. This is good news for a fractured and polarized world, and a strong sign of the importance of being a welcoming congregation that embraces all people with God’s love and grace.” (3)
The goal of the church – and specifically this church – is to make the Christianity user experience as smooth and effortless as possible and focus on the task of being a disciple. Not to say it’s always an easy road – but we needn’t complicate what our faith is either.
Paul has some valuable insights about this in today’s passage. This is Paul’s attempt to simplify how we go about living our faith as a follower of Jesus. Living as faithful Christians really isn’t rocket science. It shouldn’t be hard. After all, Christianity is an intuitive way of life, grounded in love, faith and hope. So, why do we make it harder than it is? Let’s see what advice Paul has for us today.
Paul tells his friends at the church in Philippi that they ought to follow his example and look to those who live according to the model he set. That’s it. Live like I lived when I was among you – imitate me. Following a mentor or modeling your behavior after someone you admire and respect is an excellent way to learn. The great golfer Bobby Jones used to caddie for the best players at his home club and he would imitate their swings, that’s how he learned to play golf. Christianity is often most effectively taught through example, by imitation, instead of through books and doctrines. For Paul, it was really quite simple – do what I do, live like I live, imitate me. That’s what the disciples did. Jesus modeled for them how he wanted them to approach life. Sometimes they were successful, but often they fell short. But they always had Jesus example to come back.
I remember when Thomson was little, Juliet used to take him on deck with her when she was coaching her swim team in Pennsylvania. She would coach and Thomson would nap or watch the swimmers from his pack and play on the pool deck. Turned out he absorbed a whole lot of swimming knowledge before he even got into the water. When we moved here and he started swim lessons, he could do all the strokes in about a week, including flip turns. I’m 61 years old and I still can’t do flip turns or the butterfly stroke. In two weeks, he was ready for the competitive team. All those hours watching the other kids swim and do flip turns, he just sort of absorbed how to do it. So when he got into the water himself – he knew what to do.
Is it really any different when we live out our faith? Paul’s message here today isn’t really all that complicated. He’s not concerned here with complex theological arguments, like he is in his letter to the Romans. No, this is a pretty straightforward call to live out what you’ve learned and observed in others who follow Christ.
In her book Out of Africa, Isak Dinesen tells a wonderful story about a young man from the Kikuyu tribe who worked for her on her farm for three months. Out of the blue, he suddenly announced that he was leaving her to go to work for a Muslim man nearby. Surprised by this, Dinesen asked him if he was unhappy working for her. He told her that all was well, but that he had decided to work or a Christian for three months to study the ways of Christians, and then work for a Muslim for three months to study the ways of a Muslim. After experiencing both, he was going to decide whether to be a Christian or a Muslim. (4)
Pretty simple – but pretty effective. Jesus kept it simple too. He simplified the essence of our faith when he summed up the law and the prophets with two commands: love God and love your neighbor. What is so hard to understand? Every believer can grasp and live out those simple tenets regardless of their level of theological education or life experience.
Sometimes we can overcomplicate our faith. We get caught up in debates about doctrine, ritual and tradition to the point where we lose sight of the simple truth at the heart of Christianity. This was what Jesus was warning about when he spoke of the Pharisees who “tie up heavy burdens, hard to bear, and lay them on the shoulders of others; but they themselves are unwilling to lift a finger to move them.” Jesus was on to those guys. They made faith something that was burdensome and complex, rather than something life-giving and intuitive.
So here’s the bottom line – our faith is not a religion built on endless rules and regulations. It is built on a relationship with a loving God who desires to transform us from the inside out. This transformation doesn’t require a Ph.D. in theology; it’s the work of the Holy Spirit that begins when we simply say “yes” to Jesus and allow him to guide our lives.
Just as we shouldn’t think of our phones as simply phones anymore, the church is not simply a place where we come to learn the rules and the policies of being a Christian. We can think of the church as a user interface for accessing God, as a place where we can learn from Jesus and from each other how to live out our faith, as we seek to imitate Christ.
May God be praised. Amen.
1. electroiq.com., retrieved3/10/25.
2. Homileticsonline, retrieved 3/3/25
3. Ibid…
4. Ibid…
