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Dear Friends,
Former Cardinals baseball manager, Tony La Russa is known for lots of accomplishments in the world of baseball. But he also has had a strong impact on social media. In 2009 La Russa sued Twitter because someone had set up an account using Tony La Russa’s name and tweeted things that Tony would have never said.
Later the lawsuit was dropped. But Twitter took action to prevent this kind of thing from happening again by developing a system for verifying identities. Verified Twitter accounts have a blue check mark.
Prior to developing this verification system, as I understand it, anyone could create a Twitter account using any other person’s name and send Tweets from that account. So, ostensibly, the person tweeting as the Pope, could have been your nextdoor neighbor’s second cousin who lives in Seattle. (Based on what I have read, the Pope does have a verified account, so we don’t need to worry about that.)
I think lots of us might appreciate a verification system to determine the fake among the genuine, what is false versus what is true in the news, the reliable versus the unreliable plumber, or as Jesus put it in the parable we will read this Sunday, the wheat from the weeds because sometimes it’s hard to do this! And as Jesus noted, when we try to separate the weeds from the wheat, we will most likely uproot some of the good wheat.
So, how do we know what to do?
This Sunday will be a hope-filled day as we learn Jesus’ way of dealing with the “weeds in the wheat” in our lives. We will also have the joy of baptizing two sisters, Josephine and Maggie, during worship. I hope you will be present for worship as the community of faith who will promise to surround and nurture these two young children in Christian love.
God’s grace and peace be with you,
Pastor Kim
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