18th Sunday after Pentecost (Matthew 22:15-22)  10/16/2011

A little more than two years ago my mobile phone experienced a few major failures…so, off I went to the phone store and found the perfect replacement. However, technology is advancing so rapidly these days I have recently discovered that my “perfect” phone is no longer on the market. My two-year phone contract has recently expired and, needless to say, throughout this past summer I was keeping an eye on the various speculations of the newest iPhone release, which just occurred this past Friday. The building curiosity behind this iPhone release was made more intense because at the same time there was interest in the health of Apple’s co-founder and CEO, Steve Jobs. Steve Jobs had been courageously fighting various health issues for several years before this past summer, but his condition caused him to once again step away from his daily duties at Apple and finally in the late summer to step down as the company’s CEO. These two stories, the iPhone release and Steve Jobs’ health, continued to be discussed as summer turned into fall. On October 4^th, Apple finally released news of their latest phone and just one day later the world learned that the man behind the company had died. As the world lost Steve Jobs to an illness that he could not overcome, we were reminded of the many great accomplishments he gave the world. During the past several days people have reflected on many aspects of his career and his contributions, but I was particularly affected by his commencement address to the graduates of Stanford University in 2005. Steve Jobs was a man with worldly success giving these graduates the wisdom of life’s lessons…and many of his lessons were forged from his experiences of challenging and difficult times in his life. A graduate who was there recently wrote: “Jobs was not a rousing orator. He looked nervous as he approached the podium. As he spoke, though, his voice gained the strength of someone who knows that what he’s saying is both true and very important. And something unusual happened: we all started paying attention.”[i] Steve Jobs had captured the attention of the crowd as he spoke the wisdom that he had learned from life’s challenges. Continue reading →