Possessed by Media

sermon by Torin Eikler
Mark 9:14-27 2 Kings 22:8-11; 23:1-3

In the past couple of weeks, I have received a lot of call from people wanting me to do surveys – on politics or some product or some other issue. So, in the spirit of the season, I’ve got a few questions to ask you….

How many of you read the newspaper – oh, say at least 3 or 4 times a week?

How many of you watch television or stream shows off the internet regularly?

How many of you have the radio on most of the time?

How many of you surf the web – you know … on news sites or Facebook or any of the other places?

(pause)

How many of you sit down and pray or spend time reading the bible or poetry or something else that inspires your soul each week?


I don’t ask these questions to make you all feel guilty (though I expect that we all do), but they do point out a big problem with our lives. We spend more and more of our time with screens and paper, and less and less time interfacing with actual people let alone with God.
We say we don’t have time, but we find thirty-five minutes for Facebook and an hour or more to watch our favorite TV shows. We have half-an-hour for YouTube videos on this and that. We pull together hours over the course of the day to listen to the radio and check email and catch up on our favorite magazines or papers.
We have time. We just spend it elsewhere.

It’s not really a matter of a lack of desire. All of us want to spend more time in communion with God, but we fill all of our time with other things – things that we believe are important. And many of them are important, but, really, is the most recent episode of House all that important? We have tricked ourselves into believing that all these mundane, trivial distractions are more important than our spiritual lives.

So how do we get ourselves back to God?

In January, I told you all about the media withdrawal that attacked me when I got back from our trip to France. To tell the truth, though, I wasn’t really that detached from the technological world. I checked email regularly, and I still caught glimpses of the news in French newsstands.
What was refreshing … and disturbing about those two weeks was that I was not bound to media the way that I sometimes feel I am here. There were plenty of distractions – plenty of new things to do and see. At home, things are all familiar. Sunsets, I’ve seen them. Neighbors, I know them already. Concerts, … really … in a university town? Not all that interested – though I’m sure I would be if I actually knew what they were. At the end of the day, when I’m tired and I have time to fill, I don’t think of checking out anything new. I just want to distract myself with something on the TV.

And during the day, there’s my pride. I feel like I have to know what’s going on. How can I sound like I’m a responsible, intelligent member of society if I’m in the dark on what’s going on in the news. So, I read news online and I listen to the radio even though I know that the news cycle will just repeat the things I’ve already heard again.

Here or when I’m traveling, I fill up whatever space there is in my life with white noise or new things. There is no silence - no time left when I am alone with myself and God …, and there are many time when I could use some of that.

(pause)

But it’s not really silence that I need. What I need is stillness which is a very different thing. I need time to focus and rest. I need quiet space in my day, in my mind, and in my spirit. I need to bread down the bad habits – the fracturing addictions – that have taken over my life and build some new, healthy ones if I’m to indulge my desire for a healthy spiritual life.

Breaking down habits …. That’s hard to do, and if neuroscience is to be believed, it’s only getting harder. In 2010, The New York Times reported that …
Scientists say juggling e-mail, phone calls and other incoming information can change how people think and behave. The say our ability to focus is being undermined by bursts of information.
These play to a primitive impulse to respond to immediate opportunities and threats. the stimulation provokes excitement – a dopamine squirt – that researchers say can be addictive. In its absence, people feel bored…. [For] millions of people these urges can inflict nicks and cuts on creativity and deep thought, interrupting work and family life.
Researchers say there is an evolutionary rationale for the pressure this puts on the brain, [but] in the modern world, the chime of incoming e-mail can override [more important goals]….
“Throughout evolutionary history, a big surprise would get everyone’s brain thinking,” said Clifford Nass, a communications professor at Stanford. “But we’ve got a large and growing group of people who think the slightest hint that something interesting might be going on is like catnip. They can’t ignore it.”

And even after our multitasking ends, our fractured thinking persists. On the whole, we find it more difficult to think deeply about anything or stay focused long enough to find our way to deeper truths. I know people who can’t do any one thing for more than 15 minutes without getting restless (and I don’t mean my children) – people who get up in the middle of a concert or a play to go out and check their text messages (assuming they’ve turned off their phones to begin with which is become less and less likely). Others say they “need” to check their Facebook page just to catch up if they’ve been away from the computer for a mere 4 hours. I, myself, feel ill at ease if there is no music or news radio playing in the background. It’s just too quiet.

In many ways, we are like the boy in the passage from Mark. We are so consumed by the white noise made by the media all around us that we are unable to hear or understand the voice of God when it speaks to us. In a sense, we are possessed, and if Jesus is to be believed, the only way to put that demon behind us is prayer.


But media is not all bad. Email helps us keep in touch with people we can’t or don’t see very often. Cell phones are wonderful in emergency situations or even just when we can’t remember everything we were supposed to get at the grocery. Radio and the internet and even the television can teach us important things and give us a better understanding of how our actions affect people around the world. This book (hold up the Bible) not only helped King Josiah lead the Israelites back to the law, it helps us all as we walk the path of faithful discipleship.
The problems come when we let all those helpful tools that we have created take over. When we put set them up in the high places of our lives and pay no attention to how they shape who we are and how we live, they start to color everything. They demand more and more of our time and energy, and we begin to forget that there are others who have prior claims: our families … our friends … our God ….
Think about it for the next couple of minutes…. Think about it. If you had all the time back – all the time that media has taken up this past week … the past couple of days – what would you do with it? How would that shape you?