Babel 2.0 - a reflection
A sermon by Jamie Howison from Sunday November 6, 2022
Well, having observed the Feast of All Saints’ last Sunday, we’re back into the regular cycle of readings… and they reflect the fact that we’re in the final weeks leading up to the beginning of Advent. I’m only going to comment on them quite briefly, as I think it important to offer some thought on at least part of what we heard—and hopefully learned—at yesterday’s Babel 2.0 forum. Yet for me it is all but impossible to read such lessons as these and not offer at least a few words.
As Paul writes the 2nd Epistle to the Thessalonians, it is clear that he has a great crisis in view, as he writes, “that day—the day of the Lord—will not come unless the rebellion comes first and the lawless one is revealed, the one destined for destruction. He opposes and exalts himself above every so-called god or object of worship, so that he takes his seat in the temple of God, declaring himself to be God.” Paul is writing this sometime around the year 50, which is quite early in his cycle of epistles. While he offers encouragement to the community in Thessalonica, there is a tone to his words that essentially suggests that they’d better buckle their seatbelts in readiness for hard days. The hard days would come soon enough, with the ascendancy of the Emperor Nero in the year 54, and the destruction of Jerusalem and its temple in the year 70. Interestingly, though, it is during those very years that Paul writes his other letters, many of which begin to cultivate a community for the longer run; a community that ultimately includes all of us, who turn to Paul as a source of wisdom and insight in our own faith.
And perhaps it is his closing words from this reading today that resonate still with the most clarity:
Now may our Lord Jesus Christ himself and God our Father, who loved us and through grace gave us eternal comfort and good hope, comfort your hearts and strengthen them in every good work and word.
Matched with this reading is a story of Jesus’ confrontation with a group of Sadducees, who try to show that all of his talk about a resurrection life—a life beyond the bonds of death—is absurd. You see Sadducees didn’t believe that there is a life beyond the grave, but rather that life is carried forward by those who learn from us and continue to live after we have died. For them it is the tradition that lives on, not the individual. So they come with this scenario in which a woman marries a man who dies before a child is born, and then marries brother after brother after brother who all die before a child is born. They end their story by asking, “in your theoretical resurrection, whose wife would she be?” which is meant to undermine the whole idea of resurrection. Jesus’ answer is designed to both defend the idea of resurrection and to unveil the Sadducees’ question as facile, but what you really get from hearing it read is a sense of the tension surrounding Jesus at this late stage of his ministry. We will hear some of the same sort of tone next Sunday, as we prepare ourselves to enter into the season of Advent.
I’ll leave it there, and turn to some thoughts on the conference. As I do that, I’d like to formally welcome Katherine Schmidt this evening, who served us well as yesterday’s keynote speaker. If you weren’t with us yesterday, I’d also just add that much of the material from the conference will be available on the web site in video format, and will also be released in a series of podcasts. It will take a bit of time to get that ready for release, but we will have the first of the material up and running this week.
Part of what Katherine acknowledged yesterday was the pace at which changes and developments have unfolded in the digital world, meaning that scholars and church leaders are constantly running a bit behind, trying to discern what makes sense and what might be problematic. She said very clearly that digital spaces can be impersonal at best, and in fact violent at worst, and I suspect we’ve all had at least glimpses of that truth. And yet we desire community, and we value the way in which we can connect with people. There are people “attending” our liturgy this evening virtually, and for at least some of them this is their only real option right now. There will be comments in the side bar of the live stream, as those folks greet one another, share prayer concerns, and exchange the peace, and then later tonight or sometime tomorrow others will head to the web site to view the liturgy. I have to confess that for me this online Sunday eucharist is limiting, but then again I’ve come to really value the connections made at daily online Evening Prayer, so who knows?
Still, while we might have the opportunity to connect people virtually in a fairly good way, we can’t forget the vitriol that the online world seems to cultivate. Here Katherine asked us to consider whether these online spaces might be making sin simply more visible—the sin of racism, for instance—or actually increasing sin?
And she asked us to think about the opportunities, which include the following:
Evangelization – This calls for innovation and creativity, because in fact the internet is a culture, not simply a tool. Here the challenge is for the church culture to interact with and encounter internet culture, yet in a way that means we don’t lose our core identity.
Liturgy - As we discovered here when the pandemic first set in, we were on a steep learning curve when it came to offering liturgy online. You might remember the first week way back in March 2020, when we had just six or seven of us squeezed into a space at the back, with a laptop and microphone connected at the door between the church and the office in order to get enough WIFI to stream at all! We had to flex, upgrade equipment, work with All Saints to get WIFI into the church itself, and to be prepared to live with some mistakes and failures along the way. It still isn’t perfect, and we will want to have some discussions around the future of live-streaming for the church, but I do know that this is allowing some people to be here who’d otherwise be unable to join us—whether due to infirmity, geography, or a positive Covid test this week—and that’s not unimportant. In a sense, we’ve stumbled into a way to connect people, which is interesting.
Ministry – There have surfaced some new avenues for personal connection, including that daily 5pm Evening Prayer at which between about 8 and 15 people gather each day for a brief liturgy of prayer. We’ve also seen Zoom used for our Wellness group, for two different book study groups, and for meetings of various groups and committees. We could do that in the depths of the pandemic, but we will also have the option of doing that in the depths of January or when we’re hit with a solid snowstorm in early March. We have seen these shared spaces surface outside of this liturgical church space, and that’s not insignificant.
And Katherine also pointed us toward sacramentality. A classic working definition of a sacrament comes to us courtesy of St. Augustine, who referred to sacraments as “outward and visible signs of inward and spiritual graces.” “Outward and visible signs of inward and spiritual graces,” and here Katherine reminded us that we do have a mediated faith. We use words and texts, but also music and art and drama and stained glass (which you can’t see this evening, thanks to the early sunset!) and other things to deepen our understanding of God and symbolize our encounter with the sacred. We have been doing this for centuries, going right back to our earliest Christian forebears in the 1st Century, but now, Katherine challenged us, with this rapidly unfolding media called the virtual world we need to look again at what it means to say that our faith is mediated; that media is a part of the economy of grace.
And so, practically speaking, she invited us to take into account some very practical considerations:
Digital literacy is now a must of all in ministry, including but not limited to those in ordained ministry.
We need to make a sustained observation of online spaces—to study and know those spaces before attempting to intrude upon them.
We need to speak together about our terminology, and to be clear about what we mean when we venture into this realm
We need to make careful and intentional choices regarding what sort of tech we opt to use for online liturgies, and why we have gone in that direction.
As I said, we had to rush into some of these online realities when the pandemic hit, but now we have a mandate to step back and look again at why and how we might do the things we do as a church. I believe the same is true for each of us as individuals, because it has become all too easy to just ride the next wave—whatever that might be—into the online world, without stopping to consider what the costs might be, both personally and socially.
Katherine, thank you for challenging us to weigh the costs and to think again—in a careful and discerning spirit—about who we truly are.
