Eating with publicans and sinners…

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Jesus was not afraid of mixing with sinners and publicans to do His work on the earth. In fact, He was often criticized by the Pharisees for not being like them (self-righteous and focused on their own interests, I would say).

We read in Matthews 9: 10-13:

“And it came to pass, as Jesus sat at meat in the house, behold, many publicans and sinners came and sat down with him and his disciples. And when the Pharisees saw it, they said unto his disciples, Why eateth your Master with publicans and sinners? But when Jesus heard that, he said unto them, They that be whole need not a physician, but they that are sick. But go ye and learn what that meaneth, I will have mercy, and not sacrifice: for I am not come to call the righteous, but sinners to repentance.”

Where are the sinners and publicans of our generation? First of all, we are all, at least in part, sinners and publicans, but where are those who are lost in the world and don’t really know where to go or what to do to improve their lives? Probably at least some of them spend some of their time on YouTube watching videos, even those that may not be appropriate. Also, many very good people who are not members of the Mormon Church are constantly on the Internet looking for something.

I had an interesting experience with a very, very good man. I talked with him recently about our site MormonTestimonies and he was impressed and said that he would take a look and perhaps help with something.

However, the next day I received a call from him. He was very alarmed, “You have a major problem with your site” – he said. I got really concerned. He continued, “When a video testimony ends, there are links to several inappropriate videos, even against the Church.”

“This is not good, for sure”, I thought. I knew a little bit about this problem and we were already thinking of fixing it someway, but I didn’t think someone could be so concerned about it. I never watched those bad videos, but apparently my friend watched at least part of them. So, similarly to my friend, other people may think that we sponsor those bad videos. We don’t want to give that impression.

To fix it, we decided to “embed” videos from Google Videos instead than from YouTube, since we don’t have yet our own system for videos. When someone watches a video testimony from our site that is embedded from Google videos, there aren’t links at the bottom, so that there is no way to find negative content from our site, only the good testimony.

I am grateful to my friend for his suggestion.

However, I thought, what about YouTube in general, should we remove all of our videos from there because they can be listed close to a bad video?

Are we afraid of being seen with sinners and publicans?

So, should we avoid posting good content on YouTube or Google videos because we don’t want our name or face to be “seen” close to less positive material? Even more, are we afraid of doing anything on the Internet because – obviously – in some Google search our site can come up close to a bad site? If we go this route we are in serious troubles, since even Church websites show up in Google close to bad ones.

I believe that in order to do missionary work we need to lose some concern with ourselves and we need to be willing to be seen “eating with publicans and sinners” sometimes, because we want to help them find the truth. And the Internet is a very safe place to do it, after all, since we don’t even have to sit close to them physically, we are only sending a short video of ourselves and I don’t think we have anything to be afraid of.