In 1452 - as we often appreciate on Reformation Sunday - Johannes Gutenberg invented the printing press, bringing together the technologies of paper, oil-based ink and the wine-press.

In 1836 Samuel Morse invented the telegraph, transmitting information over wires with an alphabet composed of a series clicks he called “dits” and “dahs.”

In 1929 Vladimir Zworykin created the cathode-ray tube named the kinescope, a device that eventually led to the reproduction images in the form we now know as television.

Each of these inventions, while so common to us today, was in its time a world-changing development.  With the printing press, after all, information could be reproduced and disseminated without the painstaking work of an individual scribe.  With Morse code news traveled hundreds miles with a simple tapping click.  With television words were partnered with pictures and sound, animated images filling homes as never before.  Through the course of these last five hundred years our methods of communication have evolved spectacularly, inspiring us to now call this huge planet a “global village.”  From the printing press to the Xerox machine, from the telegraph to our email accounts, from black and white television sets to flat-screened, satellite-dish TVs, we live in a new world.  Like the ads used to say, we just have to “let our fingers do the walking” so we can “reach out and touch someone.”

And according to recent studies, that’s just we’re doing.  As I mentioned last week, Christians and non-Christians alike are using every form of technology available to them to make their homes more comfortable, work places more productive, and their communications increasingly effortless and cost effective.  We are a people eager to integrate new forms of technology into our lives, research showing that it’s not just our offices and living rooms that have become multimedia environments but even our children’s bedrooms.  Of children nine to thirteen years old, nearly sixty percent have a TV in their room; thirty-nine percent have video game equipment; thirty percent have a VCR; twenty percent a computer and eleven percent Internet access.  We are a nation living in a technological age and a media saturated society.  What would Gutenberg or Morse or Zworykin think?  Could they ever have imagined how their inventions would eventually lead to such significant social change?

It was the Russian-American physicist himself who said of television, “I hate what they've done to my child...I would never let my own children watch it.”  The “tube,” as we most appropriately refer to his invention at times, never lived up to Zworykin’s dreams.  Rather, he watched it evolve into a commercial vehicle controlled by network and advertising executives.  Compensated just $150,000 by RCA for his efforts back in the late twenties, we can imagine Zworykin nodding sadly in agreement when the great entertainer, Groucho Marks, uttered these words:  “I find television very educating. Every time somebody turns on the set, I go into the other room and read a book.”

As we know too well, this is not the response of most people.  Instead we see literacy rates going down as television-viewing times go up.  The average American watches more than four hours of television a day, a figure that adds up to two months of non-stop viewing each year and nine years in a 65-year lifetime.  Nielsen statistics also show that the average child views over one thousand hours of programming every twelve months - compare that to just nine hundred hours spent in the classroom.  According to a recent TV ad for the Boston Globe (Did you hear that?  An ad on the television for the paper!), we want to be informed.  That’s what the salesman in the commercial proclaims with religious fervor in the style of a street preacher:  “You are committed to being informed!  You deserve to be informed!”  But how much information and entertainment do we really need?   How can we faithfully respond to the seductive powers of the media?

Let’s take a step back and think first about the news.  There’s no denying that we have access to more information than any generation that’s come before us.  From reports of a car accident injuring a driver across town to the news of an earthquake killing thousands on the other side of the globe, we are constantly offered information about what’s going on - and what’s going wrong - in the world around us.  As we experienced with the live broadcasts of the World Trade Center Towers falling in New York and the bombs exploding in Iraq there’s no delay in coverage, prompting one critic to observe, “If it bleeds, it leads.”  In this culture, news, it seems, is never good, as pages and programs are filled with dramatic portrayals of violence, crime, and trauma, prompting the ex-newscaster David Brinkley to once comment, “The one function TV news performs very well is that when there is no news we give it to you with the same emphasis as if there were.”  Information surrounds us in the form of “news.”  But are we really better informed?  Dare we ask if all this information really makes us good citizens, more caring neighbors, more compassionate Christian people?  Or is onslaught simply overwhelming, leading us to feel powerless, complacent, and afraid?

Then there’s the force of advertising.  No matter in what direction we turn we find ourselves confronted by commercials in print, on screen, in busses, on billboards, the artistic genius of our times used to create marketing campaigns and loyal consumers.  Like the news that isn’t often good, advertisements are designed to make us feel uncomfortable, offering, then, the appropriate panacea - or placebo - for our problem.  Think about it:  you’re concerned about being a good parent and look, here’s an enriched fruit drink that you’re children will not only love but also love you for buying; you’re feeling trapped in the seemingly dull routines of your daily work and home life, and wow, here’s a car that can cross rivers and climb mountains, bringing a sense of adventure to your life; you’re worried about yellowing teeth, graying hair, acne or dandruff or bad breath - well, worry no more because there’s a product that can save you.

With reports in Advertising Age finding that in 2001 $46 billion was spent on TV commercials alone we realize that it’s not just soft drinks and fast food chains that spend millions of dollars to attract our attention.  We who watch television are exposed to between ten and twenty thousand commercials a year - on top of all the other forms of print and public promotions - making us recognize that while branding was once a way of marking cattle on the open range it’s now a way to lure buyers into the confines of consumer loyalty, stamping then, the indelible imprint of a product in our hearts and minds.  “Brands,” writes critic Ryan Bigge, “have become cultural belief systems.  We continue to pay an ever-larger tithe to maintain the sect of consumerism. Today's corporate leaders don't spike our kool-aid -- their job is to ensure we're constantly thirsty.”

Oh, it’s a complex world we live in today.  It’s a culture filled with artful forms of manipulating distraction.  Understanding the power of the media we may laugh when we hear that Darryl Zanuck of 20th Century Fox said back in 1946, “Television won't last because people will soon get tired of staring at a plywood box every night.”  How wrong he was.  Like the head of Warner Brothers asking impatiently back in 1927, “Who the [heck] wants to hear actors talk?" the early executives of these industries grossly underestimated the potential of these media forms and of celebrity culture.  But now we recognize their opiate power; now we live daily with their numbing influence.  As one psychologist claims, “The television is the easiest, quickest and cheapest way to distract yourself from how you feel that's ever been invented,” and Jerry Mandler, author of the radical book titled Four Arguments for the Elimination of Television, adds this caution:

Television offers neither rest nor stimulation.  Television… does not lead to freedom of mind, relaxation or renewal. It leads to a more exhausted mind. You may have time out from prior obsessive thought patterns, but that's as far as television goes.  The mind is never empty…What's worse, it is filled with someone else's obsessive thoughts and images.

The Swiss novelist and playwright, Max Frisch, once said, “Technology is a way of organizing the universe so that man doesn't have to experience it.”  In a similar way, our own Ann Landers pointed out, “Television has proved that people will look at anything rather than each other.”  In a time when the world is filled with the realities of war and its ongoing implications, when this planet is in dire need of healing and peace, we have the chance to confess our need for God’s grace so that we can live not as isolated, fear-filled individuals but as members of Christ’s reconciled community.  Looking past our newspapers and television screens we catch a glimpse of a world very different than the one in which we are surrounded:  it’s the reality of God’s realm filled with hope and peace and purpose as offered in Christ.

And so what do we say to the skeptic this morning?  We say, like the Sprite commercial, “Obey Your Thirst,” not like Sprite’s poster boy, Kobe Bryant, who’s recently been charged with sexual assault, but by recognizing your need for God’s love and healing grace.  We say, like the Nike ads, “Just Do It,” not by running away from the realities of living but by turning to the true source of Life through moments of silent meditation and prayer.  We say to the skeptic like the Coke commercials, Christ is “The Real Thing,” the One who came to this world not to fill our lives with fear and needless distraction but rather to give us meaning and to make us instruments of his fearless love. Stepping back from the mainstream of our society we say to the skeptic - we say to our selves - there’s a breaking story, an eye witness report that’s coming in live from downtown Boston:  it’s the Good News that Christ is here, loving us - loving each of you - eagerly waiting to lead you to the wellspring of God’s salvation.  That’s Good News we receive today.   Can we let it change our lives?

Let us pray.
Merciful God, you know the pain that fills our lives, you experience the suffering that covers this globe.  Turn us away from needless distraction that while informed we may never be afraid, and while seeking truth and justice and mercy we may always find you, through Christ, our Savior and salvation.
Amen.
 
 

Now when Jesus learned that the Pharisees had heard, “Jesus is making and baptizing more disciples than John” - although it was not Jesus himself but his disciples who baptized - he left Judea and started back to Galilee.  But he had to go through Samaria.  So he came to a Samaritan city called Sychar, near the plot of ground that Jacob had given to his son Joseph.  Jacob’s well was there, and Jesus, tired out by his journey, was sitting by the well.  It was about noon.

A Samaritan woman came to draw water, and Jesus said to her, “Give me a drink.”  (His disciples had gone to the city to buy food.)  The Samaritan woman said to him, “How is it that you, a Jew, ask a drink of me, a woman of Samaria?”  (Jews do not share things in common with Samaritans.)  Jesus answered her, “If you knew the gift of God, and who it is that is saying to you, ‘Give me a drink,’ you would have asked him, and he would have given you living water.”  The woman said to him, “Sir, you have no bucket, and the well is deep.  Where do you get that living water?  Are you greater than our ancestor Jacob, who gave us the well, and with his sons and his flocks drank from it?”  Jesus said to her, everyone who drinks of this water will be thirsty again, but those who drink of the water that I will give them will never b e thirsty.  The water that I will give will become in them a spring of water gushing up to eternal life.”  The woman said to him, “Sir, give me this water, so that I may never be thirsty or have to keep coming here to draw water.”