I am in the process of buying a laptop computer.  It seems, as I look, that this field is changing month by month, but then so is much of what is happening in our lives.
How do we as Christians and as a faith community face these changes?
I will begin to answer that question with what I now believe is one of the most important Bible stories for our time.  It is found in the Gospel of Luke, chapter 7 verses 36-50.
A Pharisee invited Jesus to have dinner with him, and Jesus went to his house and sat down to eat.  (Jesus ate with anyone who invited him to his house, and sometimes invited himself to someone's home for dinner.)  In that town was a woman who lived a sinful life.  She heard that Jesus was eating in the Pharisee's house, so she brought in an alabaster jar full of perfume, and stood before Jesus, by his feet, crying and wetting his feet with her tears.  Then she dried his feet with her hair, kissed them, and poured perfume on them.

(Now imagine, you have just spent all day preparing a feast for a famous guest, and the person in the community you least wanted to come to your dinner comes barging into your home like this?  How would you react?  This very proper Pharisee turns out to be the model of restraint.) When the Pharisee what the woman was doing, he said to himself, "If this man were really a prophet, he would know who this woman is who is touching him;  he would know what kind of sinful life she lives. (And... if Jesus were a proper man, he would not have even let such a woman touch him.) (Jesus who could read minds spoke up, and said to the man,) "Simon, I have something to tell you." "Yes, Teacher," he said, "tell me". "There once were two man who owed money to a money lender.  One owed him five hundred silver coins, and the other owed him fifty.  Neither of them could pay him back, so he canceled the debts of both.  Which one would love him more?"
"I suppose (I imagine that Simon said this with the same enthusiasm with which I would tell my sister I was sorry when my mother made me.) that it would be the one who was forgiven the more. "You are right", said Jesus.  Then he turned to the woman and said to Simon, "Do
you see this woman?  I came into your home, and you gave me no water for my feet, but she has washed my feet with her tears and dried them with her hair.  You did not welcome me with a kiss, but she has not stopped kissing my feet since she came.  You provided no olive oil for my head, but she has covered my feet with perfume.  I tell you, then, the great love she has shown proves that her many sins have been forgiven.  But, who ever has been forgiven little shows little love."
Then Jesus said to the woman, "Your sins are forgiven."  The others at the table began to say to themselves, "Who is this that even forgives sins?" But Jesus said to the woman, "Your faith has saved you, go in peace."
Woody Allen once said that "Life is what happens to you when you are planning to do something else."
Simon the Pharisee in our story knew that saying first hand.  He had carefully prepared a fine meal, for his distinguished guest, Jesus.  He had invited the best people in town, brought out the finest linens, dug out the family china.  He had planned every detail of this special occasion to honor Jesus, (except of two details of which Jesus would pointedly remind him where he had failed.)
Then, sometime between the main course and the dessert, just when Simon thought he could lean back in his chair and congratulate himself on having pulled this dinner off, a woman, known by most of the people at the table as sinner, bursts into the room, and begins kissing the feet of Jesus, washing them with her tears and drying them with her hair.
And Jesus rather than sending her away like any other good guest would have done according to the dinner etiquette of the day, chastises Simon for not washing his feet or providing olive oil for his head, and then if the dinner party has not already been ruined,  Jesus destroys much of Simon's religious faith by not following the proper ritual for forgiveness, Jesus simply told her not only that her sins are forgiven, but that she now is more holy than Simon who had carefully lived every moment of his life, trying to please God and to do exactly the right thing.

So, why do I say that this may be one of the most important Bible stories of our time?  I say so because two thousand years later, this woman who broke into the nice quiet dinner party of Simon represents how current events and God is like this woman breaking into individual lives and into churches and turning things upside down.

An illustration of how the world is changing is that my granddaughter will be entering first grade in the fall.  Here are some of the changes that have taken place since I was in public school.
The only violence I knew in school was a fist fight.
The only STD you could get was VD
No one tried to lure me into a dangerous encounter via the Internet.
The only drug, I had ever heard about was Marijuana.
If I got an education, worked hard, I would expect to have the same job except for promotions until the age of sixty-five.
The only churches in town were a few mainline Protestant churches, Roman Catholic Churches and a Jewish Temple, and most people worshipped in one of them on Saturday or Sunday.
Stores were closed on Sunday.
Divorce, I believed,  was rare.
Sex was making out
Addiction was something that only happened to bums on skid row.
Few women worked outside the home, unless they had to.  Women certainly would not become pastors or bishops or command space shuttles.
I had no e-mail or cell phones or beepers, my television could get at the most 11 channels.
My world was like the dinner party at Simon's house before the woman broke in.
The world of my granddaughter is like that of the dinner party while the women as crying at the feet of Jesus and Jesus was scolding Simon for failures at giving him the proper welcome.

If this woman only represented changes created by human beings in our world, this story would present more than enough of a challenge for us,  but, I believe, this woman represents an even bigger challenge for each of us and for our church.  This woman is the presence of God bursting into our lives and into our churches, stirring things up, challenging our ways of living and doing things, as Jesus used her to challenge the way that "religious" people treated people they called sinners.  And what I think -- and despite my title as pastor, and my ordination, I speak for God with a great deal of uncertainty-- is that in this story, at this neat dinner party, God used this woman not only in her time, but in ours to make the statement that what happens to human beings is more important than what happens to churches, and that our real business as a Christian community is not creating a church, but saving human lives that are precious to God.
I was taught in preaching classes that I should be building up at the end of my message to a climax., a conclusion, a neat package that you can take home with you.
I can not create such a neat package  because the final lesson of this story is that we are all going to be living  to live with an unpredictable future, so what God is asking of his people today is not the creation of neat plans, as I am sure Simon's dinner party was meant to be a neat plan, what is most important is that we live by our faith in God that instead of making plans, perhaps we need instead to be  listening to God. We are not the first people to have both human history and God come bursting into our lives like the woman at this dinner party.  Some people have been destroyed by
those changes, others have flourished.  The difference, some see such a time as a problem to be corrected, one in which people attempt to recreate the past.  Some see such a time as an opportunity.  Much of what we do as a church and as Christians is because some in the past saw a time of change as a time of opportunity.