1 Corinthians 12:3-13<\/p>\n\n\n\n
May 23, 1999<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Sermon preached by Rev. Donald Ng at the First Chinese Baptist Church of San Francisco.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Guess what! You have been \u201cchipped.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n
You already have a computer chip in your car and your stereo and your rice cooker and on your watch. If you are watching the National Hockey League playoffs, you will see the hockey puck shown up with a tail because it has a chip in it. It\u2019s there: a small sliver of silicon made down in the peninsula\u2014a tiny chip of embedded thought. Someday you\u2019ll have one in your soup can, light switch, shirt hem, drill press, and even your basketball. There are 10 trillion objects manufactured in the world each year, and the day will come when each one of them will carry a silicon chip.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Don\u2019t believe me? I want all of you who have a cell phone and a pager to take them out and show us. How about those palm organizers? I was told that there are now car keys with chips on them. Who has one of them? This car key looks like most car keys but has a chip on each side. To get a duplicate of this key, one needs to go to the dealer or manufacturer to get the chip programmed.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The whole world is becoming chipped, at an astounding rate. Some of these are dumb chips, like the chip in your car\u2019s brakes. This is not like the chip in my notebook computer, sophisticated enough to do word processing, designing power point, printing out spreadsheets or playing mindsweeper\u2026no, it\u2019s a dumb chip, devoid of intelligence except for the wit needed to stop your car on a dime. And hey, that\u2019s okay with us, right? When we are about to rear-end someone, we want our brakes to prevent disaster, not produce a document.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
There are somewhat smarter slivers of silicon that are perched in the locks of hotel doors, blinking and beeping when we slide a key card to gain access to a room. Still other chips are clever enough like my Versateller Card, doing their duty in making financial transactions every day.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Because they have limited functions, and can be produced in great quantity, these chips are ultracheap to make. Since they can be stamped out as fast and cheap as candy gumdrops, these chips are known as \u201cjelly beans.\u201d Dumb, cheap, jelly bean chips are invading the world faster than personal computers did.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The world is rapidly becoming chipped, and these silicon slivers are going to be with us for a long time, opening doors, moving money, tracking packages, stopping cars, and making rice. We can welcome them or resist them, but we can\u2019t escape them.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Chipping the Church<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Something similar was happening in the first-century church, as the Christians of Corinth discovered their spiritual gifts.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
1 Corinthians 12:3-13 May 23, 1999 Sermon preached by Rev. Donald Ng at the First Chinese Baptist Church of San Francisco. Guess what! You have been \u201cchipped.\u201d You already have