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Translating the TraditionSermons from St. John of Shanghai Orthodox Church Author: Fr. Justin (Edward) Hewlett
Sermons and miscellaneous musings from St. John of Shanghai Orthodox Church in Vancouver, BC, Canada - mostly by Fr. Justin Hewlett. translatingthetradition.substack.com Language: en Genres: Christianity, Philosophy, Religion & Spirituality, Society & Culture Contact email: Get it Feed URL: Get it iTunes ID: Get it |
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The Diamond Rule: A Minecraft Story
Sunday, 4 October, 2026
In today’s Gospel reading, we have a principle, a command that we all know, and we all know it super well: “Do as you would be done by.” The Golden Rule, right? And so I want to use the classic fantasy technique of defamiliarization today, and tell you a story. More specifically, a Minecraft story.You may not know this, but in addition to being a priest and a teacher, I am also a Minecraft server administrator. This came about quite a few years ago now, when Minecraft was still a fairly new thing and everybody was like, “Oh, this is kind of cool.” And I thought, well, I’ll approach the principal of my school… I teach in a school that is a virtual school, if you will. We have students all over the province of British Columbia, so they don’t really get a chance to meet with one another. So the experiment I proposed to the principal was: “How about I start a school Minecraft server? It’ll be a nice virtual playground for everybody, and everybody will have a chance to actually meet with one another in this virtual world.”For those of you who don’t know Minecraft, if you haven’t been paying attention over the last however many years, it is a game made up of blocks, and these blocks make up an entire virtual world, and everybody can come and join in and work together and play together in it. So my vision was for a community of students who would be working together and playing together and having a good time together in this little virtual world. And I was the one who was going to create the world for them.In the context of this story, without intending any disrespect, of course, to the Creator, I am God. Because I actually have creative abilities. If you know Minecraft, you know there’s survival mode and creative mode. Everybody in this world was in survival mode, except for me. I’m the creator. And so I started up the server, and it was good.The students would join in and they’d be working together and playing together, and I’d come bounding across the grass to them: “Here, have a pickax, or here, have a hoe, or here, have a shovel.” Everybody worked and played together, and in the midst of what I called Diamond Town, I built myself a nice large tower, and I put in the tower for myself a diamond throne. And it was good.Then I went away to explore various regions, and when I came back to my tower, to my diamond throne, the tower was exploded, and the diamonds were stolen.Now, all of a sudden, this idyllic world, in which I had been building a community where everybody had been working and playing together very happily, was really, irretrievably, irreparably destroyed. Because rebuilding the tower and the diamond throne was, for me, the work of a moment. It didn’t matter. I can almost snap my fingers — well, do a few clicks of the mouse — and it’s all back to normal. But what I could not repair was the relationship that had been destroyed by this act.So I rebuilt the diamond throne, but now this was looming in the background, and I went away again and was exploring different regions of the world. And then one of the students — I had a little newspaper that I had these students make, called the Almost Daily News, which was basically just blog posts — posted that someone was trying to assassinate the king. That’s me.When I came back and started to investigate, I found this. If you know Minecraft, if you die, you respawn at whatever place you last had your bed. And right over top of my bed, at the top of Diamond Tower, was a continuous fall of lava. So if I had died and respawned, I would have been stuck in an infinite, horrific, hellish, eternal loop of: “Oh, I’m back. I’m dead. Oh, I’m back. I’m dead.” Very clever, if you stop to think about it.Then something happened that I didn’t anticipate. The relationship had been damaged, but now everybody in the server was wondering who did this. I didn’t have the investigative tools that I have now, so there was no way to determine who did it. But everybody wanted to know. And anything else bad that happened in the server was automatically assumed to be the same person. So there was a witch hunt going on. “It was you!” “Oh, no, no, it was you. I saw you skulking around Diamond Tower.” It was getting out of hand.And so I finally figured, okay, I’ve got to deal with this. I did two things.First, I replaced the entire Minecraft world with a bedrock box — just as boring as you could possibly get in Minecraft, because you can’t actually interact with bedrock — with signs all around the box saying, “If you continue to bite and devour one another, beware lest you be consumed.” If you know your Scriptures, that’s from Galatians, the Apostle Paul. The next time they logged in, they were like, “Whoa, what’s going on? Where’s the world? This is not good. This is looking kind of boring and horrible and hellish.” And I think they got the message.But I knew I also needed to do one more thing. I needed to get everybody participating in this world to make what I called The Commitment. And here’s the tie-in to the verse. I didn’t want to actually do the verse, so: “Respect one another’s in-game persons and properties at all times.” If you’re playing on my Minecraft server, the TLA Minecraft server, at the school I work for, you can only do so if you make the commitment to respect one another’s in-game persons and property at all times. In other words: “Do as you would be done by.”As I say, this was an experiment, and this is a school, so this is all supposed to be somehow educational. I got the students to reflect on the experience. From that point on, I enforced this commitment pretty carefully and pretty rigorously. I also introduced new tools so that I could actually see what people were doing in the server. If somebody did not abide by The Commitment, and was stealing from another player or doing something like that, I would kick them out of the server. Excommunication, of a sort? And the idea was always: you’re out for now, but you need to reaffirm your commitment to The Commitment, and if you do this and you apologize, then you’re welcome back. That’s the whole point, really, of excommunication.With this in place, I was maybe just a little bit worried, because I did have to come down fairly hard on certain students, who possibly were the ones who tried to assassinate me. Towards the end of the year, I asked the students to reflect on what they had learned from all this. And what I was actually really surprised by, and probably shouldn’t have been, given my experience as an Orthodox Christian priest, was that they were very appreciative of the enforcement of the law in the server. Because, they said, it made this server, this world in which we were all interacting with one another, a safe, enjoyable place to play with one another.So we have to think for a moment about how this works with us as human beings. Because of course, we have done the same thing. We don’t really want to do what God tells us to do. In fact, we’d almost like him not to be there at times, especially when we’re doing what we’re not supposed to be doing. And so God, of course, has introduced this thing called the Law.The Law was given by God to the people of God at Mount Sinai for their good. To establish a community in which the people who participated would all be committed to this set of rules, and would understand and know how to conduct themselves and how to love one another. Here’s what the expectations are. They’re really clear. This is why the Israelites, God’s people, always understood the Law as something good. Jesus himself says that the Law is good.But of course, there are a lot of laws, right? You have the Ten Commandments, and then you have a few more and a few more, and by the final count, it comes up to, I’ve been told, 613. I haven’t counted myself, but that’s a fair number of laws to keep track of. So there’s that problem — the problem of increasing complexity.But there’s another problem, maybe even deeper and more subtle. As soon as we … This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit translatingthetradition.substack.com
