When I was a kid, television was only about a decade old. Shows were in black and white, broadcast over the air, and nothing was on for 24 hours. Sometimes you’d turn on the TV and get nothing but “snow,” a Poltergeisty, white-noise static.
These days we can’t get away from broadcasting. In addition to the broadcast and streaming networks, everyone with a smartphone is a broadcaster. This often reminds me that just because you can do something doesn’t mean you necessarily should.
The astounding amount of media humans produce today has outgrown the TV set itself. We consume most of our content on smartphones, and TV is no longer a piece of hardware: it’s one of many apps we use to access all the stuff we’re making to fill the airwaves 24/7. There’s so much content being produced by so many creators (including me) that finding something decent to watch, read, play, or listen to is a daunting task.
Even with an explosion in the number of programming options and 24-hour, on-demand entertainment, most of us still settle on only a handful of channels worthy of our ever more-limited leisure time. I can say this is true for us. We subscribe to Hulu + Live TV, and their Live TV section keeps track of your recent channels. There are usually only six or seven channels on the list. Three are news, and the others are Comedy Central and cooking channels. Because after I watch the news, I need comedy and knives.
We intentionally tune into the shows we want to watch. We consciously change channels or open different apps to receive a broadcast. This process is so second-nature that, in many cases, we are unconsciousreceivers of whatever’s being fed to us. We’re simply in the habit of turning on our screens and watching stuff. Too often, we let stuff mindlessly play in the background.
Only, it’s not mindless. The habit of watching without thinking has disastrous consequences and makes our minds susceptible to a subtle yet pervasive form of brainwashing.
If we can so easily tune out, then with a bit of practice and some serious attention to what we’re doing and what’s programming us, we can also tune up. Buddha, Jesus, Mohammed, Lao-Tzu, and other spiritual masters throughout history teach us to tune very precisely into the allness of being, the original Om of the universe, the sound of love, not merely a concept but a physical force, perhaps the physical creative force.
Tuning-in to God’s Lovecast
It’s time to change the channel and tune into God’s Lovecast, a 24/7/365 always-on signal of life- and world-changing love. God is love, and love is an energy field, like electricity, magnetism, gravity, or spacetime. Consider God as the ultimate broadcaster, sending a signal of pure, unconditional, energizing, creative, and transformational love throughout the multiverse, to every reality, to anyone and everyone open to its reception. And we’re all capable of receiving the universe’s lovecast. In fact, we’re doing it right now and all the time.
We are physical receivers, just like the apps on our phones or the old antennas some of us had on our roofs. We’re gathering God signals — the love force — right now! Take a second to experience God’s lovecast coursing through your soul, a great ball of light energy forming in your heart center, loving its way through your veins, infusing your being, atomically energizing you with lightness and love.
Imagine you are a living receiver of the Universe’s unconditional, recharging, invigorating, unifying love.
God’s Lovecast calms and inspires us to unite as human beings to resist and eliminate unjust systems. Jesus teaches that to change the world, we must change the channel from the fear-filled programming of slumbering and easily manipulated people to the grace-willed jamming of God’s love revolutionaries.
What Jesus Says About Lovecasting
The message of Jesus and the actions of his life are an invitation to change the channel. Jesus invites us to open our hearts and minds to new programming that’s not of this world. Jesus broadcasts good news, a program of love that transforms our very being. Tuning in to the always-on God Channel conforms us to a Christ-like image and teaches us a new program of compassion, love, forgiveness, generosity, and selflessness.
I see this message of selfless generosity all over scripture — it’s foundational to the Jewish idea of divine covenant — but I notably see it in the Gospel of John.:
John 17:20–23 (NIV)
My prayer is not for them alone. I pray also for those who will believe in me through their message, that all of them may be one, Father, just as you are in me and I am in you. May they also be in us so that the world may believe that you have sent me. I have given them the glory that you gave me, that they may be one as we are one — I in them and you in me — so that they may be brought to complete unity. Then the world will know that you sent me and have loved them even as you have loved me.
The author(s) indicate that the Spirit of God resided within Jesus — and that the Spirit lives in us, which was and continues to be a radical idea. You mean we don’t need a priest to tell us what to think? You mean we don’t need a mediator between God and us? We don’t need someone to make a blood sacrifice for us?
Jesus says, “No, we don’t.” We just need to tune in to the appropriate cosmic channel — the God Channel. A broadcast that’s older than creation, a transmission that is eternal creation itself, a show that we don’t just sit on the couch and watch, but one which invites us to participate. This broadcasting is so powerful and personal that it compels us to take loving action in the world.
Tuning Out Our Distractions
But we’re so distracted by all the other, often vital channels in our lives (although there is still a lot of white noise static) that we forget we’re naturally formed as God’s perfect receivers. We have the power to change the channel and receive God anytime, anywhere. We just have to remember to do it. We have to be conscious. We need to wake up. More than once a week on Sundays. More than once a day, even.
Next time you’re grabbing a quick meal between appointments, tune into God instead of reading the news. At a stoplight? Don’t rant at the idiot in front of you (thereby becoming the idiot in front of someone else); tune into God. The latter is still a lesson for me.
In between breakfast and the first task of the day, tune into God’s Lovecast. When you hit a block doing whatever you’re doing, stop and tune in to God. Every time you think about it, tune into God’s Lovecast, even if it’s for 15 seconds. Tuning in is one of the few things we can do anywhere without any preparation or accessories. All it takes is us and God, which is an always-on partnership.
God’s love is nature taking its course within you. Just become aware that the Lovecast is on and ready for you to tune in. After you’re intentional a few times, you’ll find you tune in more and more often — naturally, no supernatural anything required.
We Are God’s Network affiliates
We should consider ourselves God’s network affiliates. The old-school broadcast networks like CBS, NBC, and ABC, have affiliates: local stations that rebroadcast the network feed from national headquarters. We’re affiliates, too, of and in Jesus Christ. Like the network affiliates, we’re tasked by headquarters to rebroadcast Jesus’ international, eternal signal of God’s unconditional love. Jesus very much intends for us to be Lovecasters in our own right.
Matthew has Jesus say that “it takes more than bread to stay alive. It takes a steady stream of words from God’s mouth.”
Matthew 4:1–4
Next Jesus was taken into the wild by the Spirit for the Test. The Devil was ready to give it. Jesus prepared for the Test by fasting forty days and forty nights. That left him, of course, in a state of extreme hunger, which the Devil took advantage of in the first test: “Since you are God’s Son, speak the word that will turn these stones into loaves of bread.” Jesus answered by quoting Deuteronomy: “It takes more than bread to stay alive. It takes a steady stream of words from God’s mouth.”
A steady stream is a signal. Jesus is talking about God’s Lovecast, which he frames as our foundational lifeforce. We might need food for our bodies, but it is the Godstream that truly sustains life.
Increasing Our Spiritual Sensitivity
We are innately, naturally sensitive to God’s signal. By the way, sensitivity is more than a mystical term. It’s also a technical term that describes the ability of a device to “tune in” to different frequencies in the electromagnetic spectrum. Radios, TVs, X-ray machines, cellphones, and microwaves are all devices designed to operate on specific naturalfrequencies. Your microwave uses the 2.4GHz range, for example.
We’re sensitive to God because we’re created from and exist in the God frequency. Everything does. We don’t need a more powerful tuner to receive God’s love. We don’t need televangelists screaming at us to repent. We merely need to practice using the tuner we’re born with. If we begin regularly tuning into the Lovecast, we will quickly find ourselves fully immersed in it and ready to cast our own love: to ourselves, our families, our neighbors, and even to our enemies.
Which is all Jesus ever demands when he tells us to love the Lord our God with all our heart, mind, and soul, and love our neighbors (and enemies) as ourselves.
Question: Why might it be helpful to think of love as a physical force, not merely an ideal?
