Turn from evil and do good.
Seek peace and pursue it.
---Psalm 34:14
On Saturday our little town was visited by a few (hundred thousand) extra people. There was a pretty big football contest going on, and a show called Gameday broadcast from town on the morning of. During Gameday, folks endeavor to have their creative signs captured on camera and spread famously across the world for a few seconds. My son Sam told me a story he had heard about one college student's sign.
The sign was a riff on the familiar 'Hi Mom! Send $' scrawled by college students across the decades on signs, letters, and telegrams from State U to Hometown USA. This one, however, was for a new, digital age. This sign said, 'Hi Mom! Send ---' then had a symbol that looked like a combination of an upper-case B and a dollar sign, followed by a black and white jumble. The symbol was for Bitcoin, an "open source peer-to-peer electronic money and payment network." It is a traded commodity. The jumble was a QR code, which can be read and translated by smart phones. When folks saw the fun -looking sign, they scanned the code into their phones on a lark --- and this is where the magic began. Apparently the young man has so far made $24,000 in Bitcoin from the folk who scanned his QR code during the few seconds of air time his sign received during ESPN's Gameday broadcast.
He knew what he wanted --- and he went out and sought it. In the verse from the Psalm today, we are told to seek peace, to pursue it. We all dream of peace, visualize it, sing about it, long for it. And those are all important pursuits. But the time comes when chasing after peace is the noble pursuit. Here at Advent, we often extol the virtue of waiting. And a wise person said 'Good things come to those who wait.' But in our world filled with turmoil, mistrust, and violence, peace must be sought and pursued.
Peace must be made.
Don't wait for your Bitcoin to fall out of the sky. Get out your Sharpie and make your sign. Gameday's coming...
...so here we stand, whoever we are,
bathed in the light of a star...
In pursuit.
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