Looking at the Mirror

October 23, 2012

Sermon by Marilyn Zehr

October 21, 2012

Texts: Psalm 15:1-5, James 1: 17-27

This morning’s sermon topic is as challenging as it is important. Its importance is so great that I view what I say this morning as merely the beginning and hope that others will experience a call to take it from here.

Our fall theme continues to be “Looking in the Mirror,” as you know and this morning I want to focus our attention on looking at ourselves corporately as a group of people who are enamored with communication technology, all kinds of communication technology, that has made our lives much more convenient and efficient and even entertaining. This morning when I talk about communication technology, I mean, smart phones and the internet and all their applications, including email, texting, facebook, twitter and other social media. Who doesn’t love and is often distracted by all that communication technology makes available to us? From ideas to conversations, to news from around the globe and weather forecasts, to MLS, to pictures of our families and vacations and cute animals and things that make us laugh? I read recently in Connected magazine that comes to my house for free from a telecommunications company, that Canadians spend more time online than persons in any other country including the US at an average of 45 hours per month.

The importance of this topic was underlined again for me just yesterday at the GTA cluster worship service. It was a really fine service of worship and we had just moved into preparing ourselves for sharing in communion and one of our GTA pastors was introducing communion by quoting Colossians 2:19, “held together by Christ who is our head, from whom the whole body, nourished and held together by its ligaments and sinews,” and as he emphasized the importance of our connection to each other in Christ with this metaphor of ligaments and sinews the cell phone in his back pocket began to ring. He pulled it out, turned it off, sheepishly said, “maybe we’re too connected.” He put the phone back in his pocket and we carried on.

Sure, much of this connection is useful, there’s no question, but flirting at the edge of our minds we know that if we are too unthinking about these technologies and allow ourselves to be too uncritically enamored by all that is available to us, we are in some kind of danger but we barely know what kind of danger that is. One thing we do know is that the ubiquitous nature of communication technology is powerfully shaping and changing our lives.

Lest we become too alarmed – the power of technology – all kinds of technology by which humans communicate with each other – to shape and change our lives is not new.

For example, writing, as it developed and became established in the Western world between 700 and 400 BCE was one of those huge transformations that allowed an oral culture to begin to preserve its knowledge for the first time outside of the human brain and outside of a fixed community. Our Scripture is one of the powerful results of this first technological transformation.

Did you know that the beginning of the era known as the dark ages in Europe– around the 4th century CE coincided with the drying up of a supply of papyrus out of which paper was made? The European movement out of the dark ages coincided with renewed trade with oriental countries – that included new sources of paper.

And we are all familiar with the great revolution caused by the printing press in the 1500’s. Our very existence as Mennonites in part was significantly influenced by a reformation made possible by the existence of Bibles in German that could be mass-produced by a printing press. Information and knowledge in the hands of many changed dramatically the locus of authority from Pope and priests to sola scriptura – only scripture. If increasing numbers of people could read and interpret the Bible then laity and their leaders could decide for themselves how the community would order its life together.

Skip ahead another few centuries and in the late 19th and then 20th century, the invention of the telegraph and the radio and the television are again game-changers in the world of communication technology and precursors to where we find ourselves now. Information is now set loose from its original context and location. Space and time is transcended. We no longer have to be in the same location to see, hear and experience similar things almost simultaneously.

As you can see, in this brief history lesson about communication technology, our current transformation is not entirely without precedence or is it? Where do we begin to get a handle on understanding what this particular transformation is all about and how it is shaping and changing our lives? Most importantly as a Christian community what is our most faithful response? I cannot answer these questions alone, but this morning I will begin the conversation and do so standing on the shoulders of others, including other Mennonite pastors who are wrestling with this topic.

It is tempting to respond fairly simplistically. We know from experience that all technology can be used for good or ill. Most or our technologies can promote and disseminate good news including the good news of the Christian story at the same time as they can be used to promote violence and explicit and unhealthy views of sexuality. Social media like facebook can even be used as a weapon so powerful that for one young girl only a week and half ago the tragedy of suicide seemed like the only way out. Also tragically there have probably been others like her. These are the dangers that we know exist. But to say that, for example, facebook can be used for good or evil and that we should only choose the good is both a simplistic look at the problem and a fairly simplistic answer. In keeping with this simplification, I find myself tempted to search in our scriptures for exhortations to moral or right living like those found in James and elsewhere, “let everyone be quick to listen, slow to speak, slow to anger; for your anger does not produce God’s righteousness,” or “rid yourselves of all sordidness and rank growth of wickedness,” and finally later in the verses of James that were read today we are enjoined to keep ourselves “unstained by the world.” These exhortations have their place. Who hasn’t learned the valuable lesson of the importance of not sending that angry email (being slow to anger) or the importance of first listening carefully before judging or responding and we know that we must be “wise as serpents and innocent as doves” as we interact with the world and worldviews where powers and principalities opposed to the goodness of God are at work.

But the realities and related problems of the way
our lives are being shaped and changed by our technologies go deeper than this and therefore the answers we seek for them must go deeper as well.

I found myself most helped in my examination of this topic by Shane Hipps, a Mennonite pastor in Phoenix Arizona who has written a book entitled, The Hidden Power of Electronic Culture. He suggests that the danger of being uncritically enamored by communication technology can be illustrated by the Greek myth of Narcissus. Narcissus, as you might know, is a character who falls in love with his own reflection in a pool and he is so besotted by this reflection that he cannot eat or sleep and eventually wastes away into death.

There are at least two ways to interpret the Narcissus myth. A common interpretation says that his problem was self-love, but you could also say that his problem was that he simply didn’t realize that his reflection in the pool was simply an extension of himself. He thought there was an “otherness” about that reflection that simply wasn’t true. He might have realized the falseness of this otherness if he had been able to tear himself away long enough to examine the nature of the pool itself and realize that his reflection was in fact only an extension of himself. And so if we see this morning that we are a people who have become, willingly or not, besotted by the content of our communication technologies, now might be a good time to tear ourselves away from the image in the mirror and examine the mirror itself. There is a moment in the movie the Matrix, where Neo needs to become aware of the mirror rather than his reflection in the mirror, in order to understand the reality within which he finds himself.

We too need to start by realizing that our communication technologies are really only extensions of ourselves. There is no otherness about them that justifies falling in love. They extend our sight, our hearing, our memory, and the storage capacity of our brains. In that way they are not in and of themselves good or evil but that doesn’t take away their power or the need to understand the power they have.

So how do we look at the mirror instead of the content of the mirror? We do so, pastor Shane suggests, by asking the same questions that Marshal McLuhan asked several decades ago when he said that “the medium is the message,” but we focus these questions specifically on how our faith, the authority of scripture, our communion as the people of God and even how we understand God are being affected. Just as print media ushered in the modern age and ways of knowing and being church so electronic media has ushered in the post modern age and ways of knowing and being church. We find out how that happens and is happening by asking some very straight-forward questions.

1. What do our technologies enhance?

2. In their extreme forms what do they reverse into?

3. What do they obsolesce or make obsolescent,

4. And what do they retrieve from previous ways of understanding God and ourselves because really there is nothing new under the sun.

For example Print media, if we go back 500 years for example enhanced individual notions of salvation and a personal relationship with God and it also enhanced our capacity for discerning scripture through critical reason and analysis. In the present our electronic culture that uses a lot of images in communication intensifies our right brain encounter with God. It enhances corporate approaches to faith, and it enhances a shift to valuing intuition and experience for knowing God.

Again Print media, in its extreme form encouraged us to reduce the gospel to a gospel for one and turn it into a set of abstract propositions to be believed. It also created the illusion that we can see truth with perfect objectivity. Our current modes of communication, in their extreme, reverse into relativism and reverse our capacity for abstract thought and critical reasoning skills.

Finally, Print media made obsolescent (or changed the function of) communal faith, and it eroded our intuitive faith or appreciation for mystery. Electronic culture and communication in its promotion of relativism threatens to obsolesce our belief in the metanarrative of the Christian story and obsolesces our belief that conversion is a one time binary event.

This is where I would like a Christian Education class to pick up this sermon – so that together we can wrestle with, disagree with if necessary and/or expand answers to these questions.

Suffice to say for the moment that our use of technology affects everything from how we understand conversion, scriptural interpretation and authority and even how we encounter and understand God – again not necessarily for good or ill, but in powerful enough ways that it’s important to understand them.

And yet, as Mennonites, we are still and will always be in one way or another People of the Book and it is this book, our Scripture to which we look for some of our guiding metaphors to help us navigate our current situation. No matter what age we find ourselves in we are still, the people of God, the body of Christ, a sign or foretaste of God’s Kingdom and according to our passage in James a kind of first fruits of his creatures, because we have been “birthed by the word of truth,” it says here. Just because we need to examine the mirror doesn’t mean we should forget what we look like in it. Again according to James, when we hear the gift of the implanted word with which we have been entrusted not only in this book but also in our very hearts and lives and don’t follow it we have become a forgetful people. We need to be doers of the word and not hearers only so that we become or remain the community that we have been called into existence to be.

Remaining the community that we have been called into existence to be is countercultural because it requires and fosters a high degree or intimacy, permanence and proximity. It requires meeting face to face regularly. Skype and video conferencing don’t count because by nature these encounters are fleeting and impermanent. But it is the very practice of meeting together regularly that enhances our shared memories and a shared imagination for the future – both of which are crucial components of our identity as the people of God. Mind you these practices also increase the likelihood of conflict, risk and rejection but regularly we are given the grace to navigate that reality as well.

Ultimately for a world that is connected and in touch more than ever the deep longing for authentic community has also never been higher. So with God’s grace, wisdom and guidance, let us together examine the powerful ways in which we are changed and shaped by communication technology so that we might regain some power over these changes and remember as our GTA pastor yesterday reminded us (even while being interrupted by his cell phone) that the connection that matters most is our connection to one who is the head of the Body, Christ Jesus from whom the whole body, nourished and held together by its ligaments and sinews, grows with a growth that is from God. Amen.