Hilton Head Island, SC – September 29, 2024
The Chapel Without Walls
Jeremiah 27:1-7; Jeremiah 27
A Sermon by John M. Miller
Text – “Do not listen to the words of the prophets who are saying to you, ‘You shall not serve the king of Babylon,’ for it is a lie which they are prophesying to you. I have not sent them, says the Lord, but they are prophesying falsely in my name, with the result that I will drive you out and you will perish, you and the prophets who are prophesying to you.” Jer. 27:14-15 - RSV
The closer I have come to the end of what no doubt has been a too-long-preaching-ministry, the more concerned I become about saying things I perhaps should not bother to say. In other words, I fret that old age may have made my judgment cloudier and murkier than when I had far more brain cells than I have now. But because I have been thinking about each of the topics of these final sermons for many years, I have stuffed each of the files I created for each of them with newspaper and magazine articles pertaining to their main ideas. Therefore, even though it won’t be much longer, you fine folks shall be subjected to the ruminations of the mossy musings of an ancient bloviator for several more Sundays.
At the outset, I want to alert you to two important realities. The first is that I have long nourished an ineradicable and perhaps indefensible bias against technology for almost my entire life. Whatever the essentials of technology are, I did not inherit a single one of them when brains were being passed out in the celestial obstetrical assembly line. I happily utilize technology in many ways every day, but it also seizes me in its remorseless clutches several times every day, and it enrages me on innumerable occasions, especially in what I perceive to be the great damage it is inflicting on the world through social media, even though only a tiny percentage of experts the field of technology ever intended that. They thought nobody with even half a brain would have the troubles I constantly have with technology. They were wrong, and I do.
The second reality I feel obligated to point out is that, in case this might not occur to you, in the 27th chapter of Jeremiah’s prophecy, Jeremiah was not talking about cybernetic computerized technology or social media. Those kinds of technology did not exist until the 20th and 21st centuries of the Common Era, and Jeremiah lived 2600 years before the present time.
Nevertheless, there are similarities between the kinds of concerns of Jeremiah’s time and our time that I believe contemporary Christians need to ponder. As I said in last Sunday’s sermon, God called the prophets to observe what was going on in their region of the world and to speak to what they believed were God’s assessments of the acceptability of their current events from God’s perspective as they understood it. Most of the time the prophets, in effect being God’s pundits centuries before there were magazines or newspapers, referred mainly to their present. However, because present occurrences have an inevitable relationship to the future, the prophets also predicted how they thought current affairs were bound to affect the future.
There were four colossal national calamities that were inflicted on the Hebrews or Israelites or Jews in biblical times. The first was the enslavement of the Hebrews by the Egyptians, presumably in in the 18th century BCE; the complete destruction of the northern kingdom of Israel by the Assyrians in the 8th century BCE, from which it never recovered; the destruction of the southern kingdom of Judah by the Babylonians in the 6th century BCE, from which it eventually did recover; and finally, the complete obliteration of Judea by the Romans in the first century, from 69-72 CE. Nearly all the Jews were driven out of what much later came to be known as “the Holy Land” from that time until the re-establishment of the State of Israel in 1948.
Not surprisingly, nothing is written about the Roman obliteration in what Christians called the New Testament. In my opinion, the first-century Christians thought it was religiously and therefore politically wise to maintain silence about that calamity. Ultimately the collapse of Judea resulted in the complete separation of the Christians from the Jews. Also in my opinion (of which I am giving you many in these last sermons), the historical Jesus would be horrified if anybody, Jew or Christian, might imagine that silence is what Jesus wanted or intended. I believe he intended for as many Jews as possible to join his newly-founded band of reformed Jews.
To repeat, Jeremiah was not writing about cybernetic technology anywhere in his prophecy. Jermiah saw the coming invasion of the Babylonians as the unavoidable punishment by God of the Jews of Judah by King Nebuchadnezzar of Babylon. The biblical prophets tried to interpret all things religious and political through what they believed were God’s eyes. But more often than not, they did that with negative, not positive, lenses.
Whenever any of the prophets wrote anything that their theological adversaries among the Jews opposed, in other words the so-called false prophets, the false prophets made rebuttals that the biblically-endorsed prophets opposed. That is what is going on in Jeremiah 27. Jeremiah insisted that the Babylonians were going to defeat Judah, and that their inevitable defeat was because Judah had turned against God, so God was going to turn against Judah.
I strongly disagree with Jeremiah that God intervenes in that way to try to straighten out theological or political disagreements. We humans do what we do, and God neither directly supports nor inhibits any of it. The notion of a mechanistic, reward-or-punishment kind of God is a theology I believe is badly misguided, but sadly I discarded it too late, in mid-life.
And now to the theme of this sermon: Social media are the primary issue here. I admit to blatantly using Jeremiah and a particular text of his as the pretext for putting my case against technology into a concocted context. Although computer technology is nowhere mentioned in holy writ, there are similar concerns about similar ethical matters throughout the Bible. Computers were developed during the last two-thirds of the 20th century, and that inevitably led to the widespread development of social media in the early 21st century. Both computers in general and social media in particular have thousands of features that are highly commendable. I assume all of you are aware of that, so I am not going to take time to note how the countless examples of cybernetic inventions have positively improved life on earth for everything human, animal, vegetable, or mineral.
It is the numerous dangerous examples of evolving social media that should alert all of us to the disastrous results that this type of technology has loosed upon an unsuspecting world. Thousands of teenagers have taken their own lives because they literally felt hounded to death by their peers who used Facebook as weapons against them. Other young and almost-always-male teenagers or young adults have killed tens of thousands of people all over the world because of their fascination with social media, but tragically, primarily in the USA because of the perversely misinterpreted Second Amendment in our Constitution.
A New Yorker cartoon from a while back shows a middle-aged man kneeling beside his bed. His laptop is opened on the bed, and with clasped hands while looking at the screen, he prays to God, “I’m sorry to trouble you yet again with internet issues.” God gave humans the intelligence to invent computers, and he will not intervene to block troubles caused by social media and other threats from the unregulated usage of this unique example of scientific advancement.
There are many stories in the news about Artificial Intelligence being utilized to create fake photos and videos or to put false words into the mouths of famous people. Young techno-whizzes also send out doctored nude photos of young women they want to humiliate or blackmail. Social media have become the purveyors of pornography to countless millions of children, some as young as nine or ten years old. Parents are the best monitors and gatekeepers for avoiding this, but many parents are unaware that their children are watching salacious material on the internet.
Several weeks back The Washington Post had a long story about a 15-year-old teenage boy who had been unmercifully bullied for years by his classmates, He decided his only defense against people like this was falsely to present himself on Facebook as a nubile girl who was seeking to establish sex partners online. Using Discovery, a social media platform, he contacted thousands of would-be child predators. When he had hooked them, he urged them to harm themselves or to commit suicide. In so doing, he concluded he would be hurting many of the kinds of people who had hurt him. The judge who adjudicated his case sentenced him to an eighty-year prison term. If the sentence is upheld, that unfortunate now-18-year-old has what amounts to a life sentence without parole. This whole tragic story occurred only because social media made it a possibility in the hands of an intelligent but abused young man to take action against the type of abusers who had abused him for such a long time.
Congress wants to outlaw the usage of the Chinese social media company TikTok, because they believe its lies undermine our national security. But they do far too little to regulate the many American media corporations that allow all kinds of injurious lies that millions of subscribers read every day. The Republican candidate for president in 2016, 2020, and 2024 would never have been their candidate were it not for his fraudulent claims on Twitter and Facebook, and now on his own Truth Social, which isn’t.
The authoritarian government of China quickly bans any media organizations it thinks undermine the power of the communist state. Our government could do the same thing for us, even though it would need to overcome inevitable assertions that to do so would violate freedoms of speech and of the press. However, to suppose that social media are not a threat in themselves is to bury one’s head in the sand. The federal government needs to establish draconian regulation of our own social media as well as TikTok.
The American government operates in the exact opposite mode as the Chinese government regarding social media platforms. Because of the First Amendment to the Constitution, our government and its courts tend to uphold the rights of individuals at the expense of the whole American people. Individuals can use social media to say whatever they want, even if the right to free speech poses a great threat to social cohesion. In 1787, when the Constitution was adopted, the concern was that Britain had thwarted the rights of individual Americans in the years leading up to the Revolutionary War. They wanted to avoid that situation by every possible means, Now the concern is that social media must be protected at costs.
Some communications experts postulate that under certain conditions, smartphones in smart hands could cause the entire stock market to collapse in a few seconds or minutes. Billions of dollars in stocks are instantaneously traded every day. Could it happen that a stock exchange could be instantly crippled by computers in the wrong hands? Some day we might find out.
Arthur Cleveland Coxe was the son of a Presbyterian pastor. He was drawn to the liturgical tradition of the Episcopal Church, and he was ordained in it after graduating from the General Theological Seminary in New York City. In 1840 he wrote a poem that later became a hymn.
The issue of slavery was tearing the nation apart, and Arthur Coxe knew a war with Mexico would also soon erupt. Sensing that America was confronted by what now is called an inflexion point, Bishop Coxe wrote,
We are living, we are dwelling/ In a grand and awful time,
In an age on ages telling/ To be living is sublime.
Hark! The waking up of nations/ Hosts advancing to the fray,
Hark! What soundeth is creation’s/ Groaning for the latter day.
This poem is the basis for our closing hymn. It is sung to the Welsh tune Blaenhafren, which is powerful, but tricky. Do the best you can with the tune, but concentrate on the text.
Without question, we too are living in a grand and awful time. It is grand that in an instant anyone can communicate visibly and in living color with anyone anywhere in the world. It is awful that computers can be utilized simultaneously to shatter people’s lives, to explode cellphones throughout Lebanon, killing hundreds and wounding thousands, and that people with genetically damaged minds can become programmed by means of social media to take arms against innocent people, killing as many as possible as quickly as possible.
It appears to me there only two ways to overcome the detriments of social media. The first is to use AI or to hire thousands of well-trained federal and international monitors who constantly surf the net for unacceptable posts, instantly obliterating them. The other is to obliterate social media altogether by an act of Congress. In my opinion, it would be best if social media were outlawed, despite their innumerable advantages. That is the good news.
The bad news is that none of that will ever happen. Legions of lobbyists from Silicon Valley with billions of dollars behind them, if not the Supreme Court as presently constituted, will prevent such an action from ever being passed or judged to be constitutional. Nevertheless, a “freedom to” must be lost in order that a much greater “freedom from” may be gained. But all of the “powers that be” shall prevent it.
God will not solve this huge problem. Only human beings can solve it, if indeed it can be satisfactorily solved. The evil genie is out of the bottle. We must do battle with him, using all the weapons we have at our command. Technocrats created the problems that have evolved because of social media. Humanity now needs to use technology to overcome or at least greatly mitigate those problems.
The social media have produced far more gains to society than losses. People, not the social media themselves, must work much harder to address the harm that has befallen us because good technology is creating more and more unintended bad results. May God inspire those who have the knowledge, the wisdom, and the ability to seek the solutions to this immense societal conundrum.