Entertaining Ourselves Into Oblivion

Hilton Head Island, SC – May 22, 2022
The Chapel Without Walls
Isaiah 55:1-5; Luke 8:4-15

A Sermon by John M. Miller

 

Text – “And as for what fell among the thorns, they are those who hear, but as they go their way  they are choked by the cares and pleasures and riches of life, and their fruit does not mature.” – Luke 8:14 (RSV)

  

The word “entertainment” used to connote a fairly limited list of activities. Up until the mid-1950s, it included such pastimes as playing games, movies, musical concerts, going to carnivals or circuses, sporting events, and listening on the radio to Jack Benny, Our Miss Brooks, Amos and Andy, George Burns and Gracie Allen, and other such entertainers.

 

With the coming of television, most people spent far more of their time glued to the tube than they had ever spent listening to the radio. We became best of buds with Steve Allen, Jack Paar, Johnny Carson, Archie and Edith, and all the others whom we befriended each week on the three networks that were then available. In later years other networks and broadcasters came along, and other channels, until now, even without paying for extra channels, we can get connected to perhaps fifty to a hundred television channels that will show us everything from how to cook rare Sumatran vegetables to how Alaskan Inupiak hunters go after seals in the Arctic Ocean. All this is in addition to the type of programs that were originally on TV.

 

However, Cecil B. DeMille, Arthur Fiedler, the Ringling Brothers, the Toledo Mud Hens, the Lone Ranger, and Lucy and Desi, together with all their other entertainment colleagues, could not hold a candle to a device that started out the size of a big beige brick and ended up almost small enough to fit into a watch pocket, if anybody had a watch pocket anymore, which no one does. The device of which I speak is, of course, the cell phone. Now many people have a cell phone in their watch, or a watch in their cell phone, depending on how you choose to perceive it. When I was a boy, Dick Tracy had a watch like that, but it took seven decades for the Apple Corporation to catch up with the square-jawed, hook-nosed detective.

 

Cell phones have become much more than mere means of communicating on the telephone without the necessity of a line running from a telephone pole into a house and through a wall into an invention Alexander Graham Bell created almost a hundred and fifty years ago. You can talk on a cell phone to anyone almost anywhere, without phone lines above or below ground to make it happen. Cell towers or satellites will make the connection for you.

 

But cell phones are not mainly used to telephone anyone anymore. They are also computers, and they are more capable than the earliest huge mainframe computers that stood in large climate-controlled rooms sixty or seventy years ago. You can Google, Tweet, You-Tube, text, Netflix, Skype, and use dozens or scores of other applications by means of your mobile phone. The cell phone has done more to transform human life than any other invention over the last hundred years.

 

Nine days ago we returned from a 17-day re-positioning cruise from New York City to Rome. A few days before we left, our land-line phone service ceased functioning. I decided to do nothing about it until we returned home. It finally got reconnected three days ago. While we were on the ship, our cell phones were working, but they rang very infrequently, and that was one of the best features of our outstanding vacation. If the screen didn’t tell me who was calling, I didn’t answer, and only once did it tell me who was calling. I answered that, because it was about setting a time for a memorial service.

 

I was absolutely astounded at how many people seemed to be on their cell phones for hours out in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean. I’m sure they were not talking on the phone all the time. They were using their easily portable computers to do many other things: play games, watch movies, do personal bookkeeping, find information via Google, read recipes, text their children or grandchildren back in the USA, or whatever. But literally hundreds of people were thumbing away as though they were back home two or three thousand miles away.

 

The prophet known as Second Isaiah lived in Babylon twenty-six hundred years ago. He and his fellow Jews had lived through the Babylonian Captivity under King Nebuchadnezzar. Now they were about to return to Judah and Jerusalem. After having lived in bondage for so long, and having been liberated by King Cyrus the Mede,  Isaiah felt they were wasting their time in pursuit of fleeting pleasures, and they were not seeking lasting values. Speaking as the voice of God, Isaiah said, “Come, buy wine and milk without money and without price. Why do you spend your money for that which is not bread, and your labor for that which does not satisfy? Hearken diligently to me, …incline your ear to me, and come to me that your soul may live” (Isaiah 55:1 ff.).

 

Isaiah was concerned that the Israelites were looking in the wrong kinds of places for the wrong kinds of values. They pursued pleasure too much, and too little the things that pertain to God.

 

Jesus told a parable about a farmer who sowed seeds in his field. Because the field did not have uniformly good soil everywhere, some seeds produced far more grain than others. People are like seeds, said Jesus. “As for what fell among thorns, they are those who hear, but as they go their way they are choked by the cares and riches and pleasures of life, and their fruit does not mature” (Luke 8:24).

 

Many kinds of technological advances have given us the opportunity to entertain ourselves as much as we want for as long as we want. Some of those advances have become necessities in the contemporary world, but some have become temptations for entertaining ourselves in matters that don’t matter.

 

I am the first to admit I have an irrational aversion to technology, which grows exponentially with every passing year. I am not averse to the telephone, though. I think it is one of the greatest leaps forward in the multitude of inventions that have revolutionized life very much for the better. But when computers shrank from large mainframes into desktops and laptops, and now into cellphones that easily fit into pockets or purses, too many people may be surfing the Internet for entertainment, and finding things there that were never meant to entertain, such as thousands of conspiracies theories. The cellphone has probably become the most useful as well as the most dangerous new technology of our time.        

 

For example, how many of us had even heard of the concept of “white replacement theory” until the eighteen-year-old went into a Buffalo grocery store eight  days ago with an automatic weapon, sending ten innocent people into oblivion, and wounding several others? That young man has likely also consigned himself into oblivion with a death sentence or a life sentence in Attica or some other New York state prison for the remainder of his life. Always after every such incident there are newspaper stories featuring comments by various experts about why such things happen. The main reason seems to be that automatic weapons are far too easily available to anyone who wants one, courtesy of spineless state and federal lefgislators, who is sufficiently angry at certain groups of people.

In a USA Today article, a professor in the Columbia University School of Social Work was quoted as saying, “Technology companies need to get serious about the implications of their platforms for enacting crime and violence.” Many immature and/or unstable individuals apparently entertain themselves by means of the multitude of titillating ideas they can discover on their cellphones, and it is obvious that far too little is being done to monitor and govern the content of social and other such media. Free speech can quickly become chaos if there are no controls on what is being communicated.

 

I had forgotten just how many entertainment options there are on a cruise ship until we were on one for seventeen days. Each evening we received a listing of all the activities for the next day. Those who were inclined to do so could find something to entertain themselves for every minute from early morning until very late at night. We attended several performances of three very funny and clever stand-up comedians, plus large-scale productions in the ship’s theater, which  accommodated five or six hundred spectators. The comedians and the theatrical productions were outstanding, but I was struck by how brief the applause was during and at the finale of these presentations. Eventually I timed them. On average, the applause lasted for five or six seconds for these extravaganzas, but if the audience was really impressed, they would clap for all of ten seconds. It seemed as though they had become sated with everything in which they had participated to fuel their desire for mind-clearance, and nothing really impressed them anymore.   

 

Entertainment can be a serious and even socially-constructive enterprise, but lives devoted primarily to entertainment cannot be serious. Too many people have become too committed to too much time spent entertaining themselves that their lives have lost much of their God-intended meaning. Why do they spend many hours each day on activities which are shallow rather than deep, and why do they waste energy on things which merely deplete them rather than nurture them? Why do they allow themselves to be choked by cares and pleasures which do not enrich life, but diminish life instead?

 

Retired people have more free time than most other people. Those who are still involved in the hustle and bustle of daily existence don’t have the luxury of being able to do whatever they want whenever they want to do it. Samuel Pepys was a seventeenth century writer and diarist. Late in life he wrote, “The truth is, I do indulge myself a little the more in pleasure, knowing that this is the proper age of my life to do it.” Retired folks naturally assume they have earned a more leisurely life, and probably most have earned it. But God does not give us, or anyone else, permission to withdraw from a meaningful life into a life of constant entertainment enjoyment.     

 

However, if retired people spend too much of their time being entertained, it is their loss. The world also may lose the value of their experience and wisdom if they withdraw from the world into a life of persistent pleasure almost all of their time. But I am concerned mainly about younger people who spend hours on their cell phones watching movies, sporting events, television programs, video games, and especially unsubstantiated conspiracy theories. Anyone who watches a cellphone screen for several hours a day is either addicted to technology for its own sake or is someone who may be incapable of understanding that time is a gift from God, and is not a commodity that should be thoughtlessly wasted. Life is too short to blow a sizeable percentage of it on momentary personal enjoyments and curiosities.

 

In many ways this may sound like an odd sermon, addressing a subject which no one except yours truly sees as a problem. I hope my concern is entirely misplaced, but it seems to me that the issue prompted by this sermon is a growing thorny issue in a culture which already has more than its share of thorny issues.

 

If you come away with nothing else from this sermon, I hope you will remember this: Too many people, especially young people, spend way too much time on social media. It is a perverse form of entertainment. The tech companies who produce it either need to spend multi-billions of dollars every year paying their own employees constantly to block dangerous false conspiracy theories or to be completely put out of business by the federal government. The issue is that large, and that serious.

 

Yesterday I read an essay which said that one in five Asian Americans has experienced personal racist attacks since the beginning of the COVID pandemic. That has happened mainly because irresponsible people using social media have blamed Asians, especially the Chinese, for starting the virus. An infamous American infamously called it “the Chinese virus,” and he is the primary culprit in this wave of anti-Asian hysteria. Social media have become the primary source of entertainment for millions of people, and the damage of that trend cannot be overestimated.

 

 Of this I am certain. God did not give us life in order for us to misuse it in the pursuit of frivolous and pointless pastimes that result in no benefit to anyone, including ourselves. Life is a precious gift, and God does not want us regularly to waste it on personal pleasures which have no lasting value for the world. All work and no play can make Jack a dull boy, but if Jack does nothing but seek constant diversions for himself, Jack is a jack of no trade, and a master of nothing. That, in a few words, is what this sermon, rightly or wrongly, is about. And I know that a preposition is a word you must never end a sentence with. Nevertheless, that’s the type of sentence this homily ends with. Amen.