“Have you heard the news?”
I hear this question a lot.
We like to be in the know,
to have the scoop,
the latest information;
to be informed,
on the inside.
As the news cycle
has gone from the morning paper
and the evening news
to real time,
live-tweeting,
video streaming,
24/365,
keeping up with the news
has become quite the chore.
In the early twentieth century,
German theologian Karl Barth
advised preachers to write their sermons
with the Bible in one hand
and a newspaper in the other.
As a smartphone has replaced a newspaper
this sort of preaching has become ever more elusive,
and I sometimes change the direction of my sermons
to address midweek changes,
sometimes even early Sunday morning changes.
Our screens have become extensions of our psyches,
even of our bodies.
TVs, computers, tablets, smartphones
have become part of how we communicate,
how we show up in the world
and how the world shows up to us.
As these technologies become more and more immersive
they become more and more subversive
of our ability to rightly perceive reality.
These devises, their apps, and their creators
are dividing us into market segments
in virtual spaces,
and into us and them, we and they,
the rational and the duped,
the sane and the insane,
the good and the evil
in actual spaces.
Algorithms sort and silo us,
monitoring and predicting our behavior,
radicalizing us with confirmation biases,
and then when they can predict
exactly how we will behave,
they hit us with ads,
a private form of propaganda,
and sell us whatever they are shilling.
These apps are free to us
because of what marketers will pay
for access to us.
Corporate pimps are trafficking us
and we are grateful for the opportunity.
And it is in exactly this contrived environment,
this virtual reality,
that most of us consume the news.
That news is rarely good.
The occasional feel-good,
human interest story
might sneak past the editors,
but crime, mayhem, tragedy, and terror
all sell far more clicks and downloads,
streams and views,
than 80-year-olds graduating college,
lemonade stands to fight cancer,
or dogs saving their owners from housefires.
Folks generally take one of two approaches
to the constant barrage of bad news.
First, escape.
Folks will turn to forms of religion
that promise the great by-and-by,
the ‘far off sweet forever,’
where suffering will be no more,
and my absolution here and now
not only frees me from guilt,
but also responsibility.
Others escape into a liquor bottle,
or a pill bottle,
or through a syringe, pipe, or straw,
through sexual encounters, junk food,
social media, video games,
or whatever habit or substance they can use
to ignore the terror and despair of reality.
Some even choose sheer ignorance,
a genuine unknowing of the state of things,
a sort of ‘plausible deniability’
for any responsibility
for the way things are.
Escapists are easily manipulated
because they’re already looking
for alternate realities,
and the creators of these screens
we all love so much
are the very folks selling you
their brand of alternate reality.
The second way folks respond
to the cavalcade of terrible news
is confrontation.
Some folks are fighting mad,
ready to mount an army
to take on the forces of darkness in this world.
But this is often its own form
of drunkenness,
an intoxication from too much consumption,
and while the fervor for justice is laudable,
they usually burn out quickly,
like gasoline.
And the purveyors of these screens we love
are counting on the combustion of this energy
to drive more and more time
with these very screens.
Ok.
What does any of this have to do
with the lessons for today?
Isaiah is written to the people of Israel
after they have been conquered and exiled
by a foreign power
and the prophet is calling the people
not to be persuaded by the glamour and glory
of the tyrant,
but to remember and return to the Lord.
The Apostle Paul writes to the city of Corinth,
a Greek city conquered by the Roman Empire
and living under Roman rule,
and the Apostle tells them to remember
that God rescued the Israelites
from slavery to Pharaoh.
Jesus’ entire ministry
happens in Judea,
which is also a Roman occupied territory.
Empires rise and fall.
Regimes come and go.
Principalities and powers
spring up and wither.
And in the meantime,
tyrants commit atrocities,
tragedies happen,
customs and cultures die out,
plates shift,
storms destroy,
pandemics disrupt and kill,
etc., etc..
Suffering is part of this life.
No one escapes it entirely.
And direct opposition
usually makes the suffering worse.
But Jesus proposes a third way.
Repentance.
And before you accuse me of victim-blaming,
stay with me.
We tend to think of repentance
in terms of guilt and reform,
of feeling bad
and trying hard to do better in the future.
But, given the context,
maybe there is a better way
to think of repentance.
Jesus is not blaming the victims of Pilate’s atrocity
for their own desecration.
Nor is Jesus blaming the victims
of a falling tower
for their own demise.
Instead,
Jesus calls his hearers to repentance—
that is,
to change their minds,
to set their minds on reality as it is,
and each time they find themselves
drawn to escape or confrontation
to return to reality as it is.
In our modern parlance,
we might call this mindfulness
or meditation.
The mystics and monastics
might have called it contemplation.
Others might just call it prayer.
And science is starting to discover
that this mindfulness, meditation, contemplation, prayer
literally changes our brains,
creating new neural pathways,
thickening the prefrontal cortex,
changes our brainwave pattern
and makes us less likely to feel anxious
or depressed.
And even for those who suffer
from clinical depression and anxiety disorders,
mindfulness, meditation, contemplation, prayer
are often part of the clinical approach to treatment.
This mindful repentance
anchors us in reality as it is
and disentangles us from the lies and terrorism
of tyrants and tycoons,
of algorithms and advertisers,
and roots us in reality—
that is,
it roots us in Christ,
who is “reality with a personality,”
as Richard Rohr says.
When Christ becomes our lens for reality,
we can see the cross as the form reality takes,
the intersection between matter and spirit.
Reality includes suffering
and reality transcends suffering
with meaning and purpose.
This is precisely what we mean by redemption,
the making something from nothing
God has always been doing in Christ.
This mindful repentance
is the path through the wilderness
in which our Lenten journey began,
the path through this wild, uncharted place
filled with bad news and anxiety,
and the temptations toward easy answers,
quick fixes,
and addiction.
The call to repentance
is not a call to feel guilty
and try harder.
The call to repentance
is the call to change our minds,
to reclaim our minds from those trying to co-opt them,
to reject all the false realities of tyrants and tycoons,
and to root ourselves firmly
in ‘reality with a personality,’
in Christ Jesus.
And when we find ourselves
anxious and avoidant
or anxious and confrontational,
the call is to return to reality as it is in Christ,
and to return and return
again and again
as often as we stray.
This takes practice.
This is practice itself.
But paths through the wilderness
are made by walking.
And there are many of us walking this path with together.
So, when you hear bad news,
be mindful,
return to the Lord,
remember that reality includes suffering
and transcends it.
We have to change our relationship to the news
in order to change our relationship to reality.
Mindfulness, meditation, contemplation, prayer
is the practice of repentance,
returning the heart and mind to Christ,
who is reality itself.
In changing our minds,
we make ourselves less manipulable.
We have to do some research—
which is not the same thing as googling—
and be much more discerning
about the media we consume.
We must seek our experts
and we must listen to them.
And when we have cut ourselves off
from the tools the tyrants and tycoons
are using to manipulate us,
we become little outposts within the empire
where “alternate ‘realities’” have no sway.
We become digital hermits,
leaving behind social media
and entering society.
We become pilgrims and sojourners
in an adopted land,
seekers of truth in the realm of false gods.
Have you heard the news?
The good news
that Jesus is calling us to repent,
to change our relationship to reality,
returning with all our heart and mind
to Christ,
who is the Truth,
reality itself.
Amen.