8th Sunday At the mercy of a view of life

This year here at the college, I am teaching a course in the second term, on Religion and the Media.  It attracts a lot of attention, not because of me, but because it is true, as many have noted, that we live in a media age. The amount of our exposure to television, as any parent knows, is quite extraordinary. By the time kids come to university they have seen thousands and thousands of hours of television.  One statistic that is particularly frightening is that by the time we die we will have seen an entire year of commercials. This being the back of my mind, I find that this passage from Paul's second letter to the Corinthians (which is a continuation of last Sunday's second reading), can be addressed from the perspective of that course.

I don't know whether it is true that we are more superficial as a civilization today than any prior civilization has been.  Superficial, from the Latin, meaning living on the surfaces of things, the appearances of things.  Are we more superficial than anybody else has been, I don't know but a lot of people have argued for that.  But one thing that is indubitable, is that we who live in the so-called "developed world" - and more and more in the underdeveloped world as well - we are at the mercy of a view of life artificially constructed by other people. In other words, our understanding of the world, more than at any other time in human history, is being manipulated, structured, organized by other human beings.  And a collateral fact is that, today image is all.  Appearance is all.  Style is all.  The evidence for this everybody knows.

As I said last Sunday, Paul's severe problem with this group in Corinth that he had brought to this Jesus movement, had been reached by a group of emissaries from Jerusalem, which Paul has referred to as "super apostles".  They came with letters of recommendation from the Pooh-Bahs in the Jerusalem church, Peter, James and John. They came, as the second letter to the Corinthians points out, doing wonders and miracles. They came with very high, flown rhetorical style.  They also came, of course as we saw last Sunday, contemptuous of Paul. 

There are many problems in this situation. But certainly, one of the one's that Paul was concerned about, besides the fact these people were being led down the primrose path, was that the surfaces of these emissaries from Jerusalem were very attractive. Enormously attractive.  Paul was worried as to what people might be converted to, if they were to be converted to all that glitz and flash and glory and bright and shiny surfaces.  Thus, the problem in Corinth was not all that different from our problem: trying to construct human lives, in a society in which what we think is real or worthwhile or good or valuable is very largely determined by other people. 

Paul's counter argument is very interesting. As I said last week, the standard response that Paul had to all problems in these early communities, was to call people to themselves: judge for yourselves, he would say, over and over and over.  And here too we have an extraordinary contrast with the emissaries from Jerusalem because the judgement seems to be that they are validated, they are the real thing, they are authentic, and Paul is unauthentic. But he is so because of their letters of recommendation, because of their bright and shiny appearance that they make to the people in Corinth.  They, as people today, could be seduced by those surfaces, and were. 

So Paul says.  You must go inside yourselves.  You must go deeper.  You must not be seduced by these alien and alienated forces.  You must consider. You must stop, in silence, to think about who you are and where you are and how you got to be who you are and where you are in your lives.

Appearances counted for very little with Paul.  What was essential was this appeal to one's own self.  You can look at the whole great panorama of Jewish history as a movement towards to that interiorization of religiosity. As one of the prophets says, “I will take from them hearts of stone and give them hearts of flesh.  I will write my law, I will present myself on their hearts.”   (I put it to you that I find it very difficult to shut out the world of the media, which argues against any effort to reflect deeply on oneself)

But then Paul's further, and climactic argument is even more interesting.  You may remember that he goes through this enormous and terrifying litany of all that he has suffered for the sake of these people.  Shipwrecked.  Beaten.  Jailed. Terrorized throughout his life.  In other words, he appeals to his way of life as validating his presentation of the gospel.  It is a mode of presentation that is radically at odds with these glitzy types from Jerusalem, which has no point at all with the kind of attractiveness and appeal that these people offered to the Corinthians.  So Paul will say “think about who you are.  Think about who I am and what I have done.” In other words, the gospel is not bought cheaply.  The gospel is not purveyed with any great, facile style.   The gospel, in fact, is disguised and sublimated and made remote under the pressure of flashiness, even religious flash.  And God knows, anybody who has watched so called religious television knows exactly what I am talking about. Or anybody who lives in the church knows how subject we are to appearances, significant appearances, where putting the best foot forward is absolutely de rigueur. 

The problem here is enormous.  The problem here is the truth of one's own humanity.  It's not to be found in the surface but in one's own depths because that is where God is found and sought.

As you can see, today we are going to have Rob and Brenda's baby baptized. In the context of what I just tried to say, we take on a fairly well specified role.  What are we supposed to do?  We are supposed to be real with each other.  We are supposed to provide an alternative to the world-mediated to us by Ted Turner and company, and Walt Disney and Conrad Black etc. etc.  We are supposed to provide an environment in which this child can resist the seductions of the superficialities of this world, for the child's own sake and for our own.  But the simple point of that is, unless we move beyond the surfaces we will never meet each other. We never form a community and that is what we are supposed to be all about.