Curate’s sermon. 16.2.25: Luke 6. 17-26; Jeremiah 17.5-10

I remember the day when I first became aware of state propaganda. It was 7th August 2008, when Russia invaded Georgia. I was on holiday in Europe with my parents and my brother. Having heard of what had happened we anxiously turned on the TV. One of the great things in an international hotel in Europe is having lots of TV channels in different languages, so we had the BBC, the CNN, TV5 and the Russian Channel 1 among others. We were flicking between the channels, and my brother and I were translating what we could. Very quickly, it was clear that what the Russian channel said directly contradicted everyone else’s narrative. The Russian version was that Georgia had invaded the Russian territories, while others reported that Russia was the aggressor.
Until then, growing up, I had been convinced that the news on TV and radio was always by definition objective. But from 7th August I no longer trusted Russian news outlets. Today, I am no longer sure I should trust any news outlets. At the time of division, polarisation, decline of any concept of authority or integrity, information overload and the proliferation of social media channels, each essentially claiming to be its own news agency, it is no longer possible to see what is backed up by facts and research and what is merely an invention or propaganda. The answer to this dilemma could be not to trust anyone and to take every piece of information with a pinch of salt, because everyone inevitably lies. The problem is: this position is also a propaganda technique, based on sowing doubt, discrediting the trustworthy information sources and isolating the reader or the viewer, who is led to believe that they are on their own and everyone around them is an enemy and a liar. Moreover, I genuinely cannot believe that everyone is a liar – my view of humanity is much more positive than this. I am also not convinced that living in the atmosphere of complete distrust is psychologically healthy. I think as humans we need solid ground to stand on, we need people to trust and ideas to believe in. After all, if we don’t know what we stand for, we end up standing for nothing. I have come up with a method of discerning what to listen to and what to ignore, just for myself (you don’t have to use it). I will tell you about it in a moment, but bear with me for now.
Whatever we think of propaganda and whichever views we agree with, I think it is fair to say that the world is not black and white but instead shades of not even grey but lots of colours. I did ethical dilemmas with the children in Barnard Castle school a few weeks ago, and one of them was about a thief who stole money from a bank but gave it all to good charitable causes. Does he need to be locked up? Has he done the wrong thing? What he has done is both very wrong but also right and good, and both are possible at the same time. This is what life is like, you can’t put good and bad into separate compartments. With this in mind, I am usually weary of any generalising statements that do approach life in very categorical, black-and-white ways. And I’m afraid the Beatitudes before us do look dangerously black-and-white. There are four categories of people who are blessed and four categories of people who are cursed, and it does not even matter that Jesus most likely did not actually say anything about the latter four. The assumption is you either fit into one category or the other. But most of us are somewhere in between, aren’t we? Most of us are neither rich nor poor, neither always happy nor weeping, neither hungry nor satisfied. Are those of us from medium income households a little bit blessed and a little bit cursed? Or am I neither if I live a fairly boring life and am content with it? The categorical take on the prophets especially bothers me: if you are liked you are false, if you are hated you are ok. If we believe that the real prophets are always hated because they are awkward and speak truth to power, then our belief opens some rather dangerous doors. A cult leader, a manipulative criminal or a sociopathic ruler can always say they are persecuted or their actions are publicly condemned because they are the true prophets, not of this world, and this is why the world hates them. We have seen this in the course of history and continue to see it today, and in fact, this is also a propaganda technique! When I was at university, I did some work on propaganda. As part of research, one of my ideas was to watch nothing but Russian war propaganda for a week and see what happens. I suggested this to my supervisor and asked if I’d need an ethical approval. He said, ‘No, but you will need a therapist’. I watched some of it anyway and discovered that the ‘western Russophobia’ was one of the ideas promoted in Russia. The westerners hate the Russians and are out to get them because the Russians have a higher calling from God and the world does not like that.
So the Beatitudes neither reflect the true state of life on earth nor help us discern who to trust. In his book ‘Prophecy and Discernment’, the Old Testament scholar Water Moberly proposes the following as one of the criteria for discerning prophetic thinking today: there must be ‘a message whose content and searching challenge reflect God’s priorities and seek to engender unreserved engagement with God’. Well we know something of God’s priorities, we hear it every Sunday: love one another! Anything that promotes love stands a better chance of being true and prophetic than anything that promotes hatred. And this is what brings us back to my secret discernment method I promised to share with you. It is very basic and perhaps naïve but here it is: if I sense that the news I am reading is attempting to make me dislike a whole group of people or a category of thought or a conviction or value, I will not listen. There is a difference between saying a specific politician is corrupt when there is damning evidence of corruption and promoting a conviction that the whole party is rotten based on this evidence. There is a difference between convicting a Syrian refugee who has committed a murder and claiming that all refugees are murderers. There is a difference between asking questions of safeguarding in the Church of England and suggesting that all Christians are immoral.
When Jesus says that those who are disadvantaged and oppressed now will be blessed and those who are enjoying life perhaps too much will suffer in the eschaton, he does not invite us to ostracise anyone or to label anyone as ungodly or immoral. Instead, he invites us to have our priorities in the right place, believing that we have the power to make that moral choice. The way he says it is rather black-and-white, radical and dangerous, but hey – Jesus was a dangerous man during his earthly ministry! He says these things addressing the people who know God personally, who, in Walter Moberly’s terms, know what God’s priorities are and are able to discern the truth – he talks to his disciples, addressing them directly. On this note, it might be worth adding that in our reading from Jeremiah, which mirrors the blessings and curses of the Lukan Beatitudes, the prophet is speaking of a גבר (‘gabar’), not אדם (‘adam’), so not just a man (‘adam’ in Hebrew), but something like a man of power, a leader (‘gabar’). In both Luke and Jeremiah, the recipients of the message are not passive – they are people with responsibilities and in leadership roles. The Beatitudes is not a reality they are passively subjected to, it is a moral framework they are invited to live by. Jeremiah tells us to get our priorities right in this world and trust in the Lord in all we do, and Jesus tells us about how our priorities now will play out in the life to come. The bottom line is stated in Jeremiah: each of us will be rewarded according to our conduct and to what our deeds deserve. So the ball is in our court: do we seek to be well fed and comfortable at the expense of others or our relationship with God? Do the ideas we believe and the people we follow reflect God’s priorities? Do we even look for God amidst the daily information noise? Are we guided by love in the choices we make? Do we claim to be victims when we are the ones who have caused pain and damage? Are we living our lives hoping to be blessed or waiting to be cursed? Amen.