Scripture: John 20:11-18; 1 Corinthians 2:1-5; Matthew 3:2 Series: 2021
Concluding the ‘Songs of the Bible’ series, this Easter-themed sermon on Mary Magdalene meeting the risen Christ (John 20:11-18) asks where the good news of Jesus fits in an age of 24/7 news, social-media algorithms, and societal mistrust. Using extended illustrations of Facebook’s attention-harvesting algorithm, SEO, and engagement-driven outrage, Pruitt argues the gospel cannot and should not ‘go viral’ or be sold like a product. The good news is simply that Jesus is risen, God is with us, and God loves you in particular. Drawing on Paul (1 Corinthians 2:1-5), James, and Bauerschmidt/Campbell, he insists faith is shown in deeds and fruit, not clever presentation, and that the risen Christ forms living bonds of friendship (the Holy Spirit as grace). Children grasp this friendship best; the church exists to share this still-new news person to person, transformed life to transformed life.
Illustrations: facebook-newsfeed-algorithm, al-khwarizmi-algorithm-etymology, zuckerberg-congratulations-tweak, seo-plumbing-job-2009, you-are-the-product, salesmen-from-evangelists, indulgences-prosperity-gospel, writing-childrens-bible-songs, mirror-forgetting-reflection
August 15
Tell Everyone That Jesus is Alive
Mary stood outside near the tomb, crying. As she cried, she bent down to look into the tomb. She saw two angels dressed in white, seated where the body of Jesus had been, one at the head and one at the foot. The angels asked her, “Woman, why are you crying?” She replied, “They have taken away my Lord, and I don’t know where they’ve put him.” As soon as she had said this, she turned around and saw Jesus standing there, but she didn’t know it was Jesus. Jesus said to her, “Woman, why are you crying? Who are you looking for?” Thinking he was the gardener, she replied, “Sir, if you have carried him away, tell me where you have put him and I will get him.” Jesus said to her, “Mary.” She turned and said to him in Aramaic, “Rabbouni” (which means Teacher). Jesus said to her, “Don’t hold on to me, for I haven’t yet gone up to my Father. Go to my brothers and sisters and tell them, ‘I’m going up to my Father and your Father, to my God and your God.’” Mary Magdalene left and announced to the disciples, “I’ve seen the Lord.” Then she told them what he said to her. John 20:11-18
Facebook came out around the time I finished college and went hiking. And when I got back, I was nannying for my sister and my nieces. I had just been taken off the wait-list to seminary and I got my duke.edu email. So I had early access to the Facebook. There was this weird thing going on and you could share pictures and put up quotes and I was meeting people in grad school for the first time and so I was super earnest about it. And it was just like a more organized aim or instant messenger or ICQ messaging. There was no newsfeed in early facebook. It was just chronological updates of people. You had to have a college email to start an account and it was restricted to only a few colleges first. For instance, first Harvard and then the other Ivies, and then I think Duke was included in that next round. It was a while before they included all universities and community colleges and yet still you needed a .edu email. The biggest change in the evolution of Facebook wasn’t when accounts were opened up to everyone but when they added the newsfeed. Instead of sharing pictures with you as they were shared, facebook started to use an algorithm. The way the word algorithm is thrown around in popular discourse makes it seem like a magical box, but that is not the case. The word comes from the name of a Persian mathematician from the ninth century, named Abdullah Muhammad bin Musa al-Khwarizmi, which would often be written in Latin as Algorithmi. A modern algorithm is a finite series with well-definied parameters used to solve a problem or perform a computation. With the case of Facebook, they create a set of parameters that process the inputs of your age, race, job, pictures, likes, comments, friends, family, etc., and then tailor the posts you see based on those parameters. They are trying to keep you engaged as well as find ways to include purchased posts or ads in your feed. The Facebook algorithm changes pretty constantly, usually at least once a month, sometimes more. And it’s all hyper-focused on us as individuals. So it’s not this idea of the generic human, what a generic person would think is relevant, but who you are. And relevance is also a very relative idea because the point and the goal of Facebook and other social media is to keep you on social media. The point is not to give you things that are interesting or that improve your life. The point is to keep you staring at your screen even more. Because if you’re staring at your screen, you’re staring at the ads on your screen and they are gathering information and then Facebook can sell your information to marketers. They have a set of micro demographic data of you because of your likes, friends, locations, etc., that’s much more precise than any other source of data. They also track you outside of Facebook, which is why you may search for a pizza oven on Google. And then suddenly you’re getting ads for pizza ovens on Facebook or Instagram. Facebook is only one of many active social media companies that seek your attention. And out of this mesh of algorithms and ads is the way most people get their news. News is is a funny word in English. What is news? What is worthy of news? Most of us have news that we trust in news that we don’t trust. The church word ‘gospel’ comes from the Greek word euangellion, which means good message or good news. In this era of 24/7 news, social media, and deep levels of societal mistrust, where does the good news of Jesus Christ fit?
My brothers and sisters, we are concluding our series on songs of the Bible that looks through the scriptures in a way guided and retold in music. There are a lot of explicit songs in the Bible, but it all can be turned into song. For God’s love for us is so great that we cannot help but sing. Today: Tell everyone that Jesus is alive. What is good news? Let’s go back to Facebook and an early story that transformed the news feed. Mark Zuckerberg, creator of Facebook, found out, belatedly, that either a friend or his sister had had a baby and it hadn’t come up on his newsfeed. And he was really annoyed. He thought that that’s the kind of story people wanted to see. And so he tweaked the algorithm personally to weight the word, ‘congratulations’, more than other words. And so if someone says, congratulations, the posts are more likely to come to the top of a person’s feed. The same thing happens to a similar degree on Google and every other search and social website. The process of trying to get your product high on a list is called SEO or search engine optimization. My job after seminary was working SEO for a plumbing company in 2009, when the economy crashed. I had to think of a bunch of different words for plumbing parts. SEO changes constantly because the algorithms change constantly because the trends and Memes change constantly. There are so many people all over the world trying to optimize their language, optimize their message, so you will see it or hear it. People constantly doing A/B testing. They make two different posts or emails with different headlines to see which gets more clicks. So there are people whose jobs are to constantly change the words, change the meaning of words so that you will stay engaged. Another thing about Facebook is that there’s an early internet adage: if something is for free on the internet, that means that you are the product. We are the products in social media. We are what is produced, consumers with unquenchable desire. Is it ever enough? How can we share good news in a world with this unquenchable market set desire? The Christian faith has been distorted and abused over the years, as well. We must admit it. There are so many different churches and denominations and messages out there that it is hard to keep them all straight. How do we separate the noise from the really good news?
Tell everyone that Jesus is alive. Tell everyone that God loves them, too. Tell everyone that Jesus is alive. And remember, that God loves you.
This is good news. Jesus is alive. God loves others. You are not your mistakes. God loves you in particular, even those things about yourself you don’t like. God loves you so much that he doesn’t want you to stay on a path of self-destruction. This is the good news of John the Baptist when he says, “Repent, for the kingdom of heaven is here.” It is about changing our lives to lead towards what builds up rather than what destroys, but someone telling us we need to change doesn’t feel very good. We don’t like to be reminded of the mistakes we have made.
There are very few viral news stories about people admitting their mistakes. We like the idea of heartwarming news stories, but the most shared content on Facebook every week is about how the other side is wrong. It is almost always a tribalist appeal. “Look how foolish they are!” Or “look how dangerous they are!” This is the news that people share, that the algorithms promote. The good news of Jesus Christ can’t compete on the level with this.
As well, for a lot of us today, though, the question may be what is new about Jesus? It is a story people have heard again and again and either accepted it, denied it, or just don’t care about it.
People were talking about Jesus when this country was founded in 1776. The second great awakening, which spread Methodism far and wide across the continental United States, took place almost 200 years ago. There are churches in every town in America and prayers that start most state legislatures and Congress.
Because there is a saturation of Christianity in this country you might think there would be a saturation of Christians and Christian behavior, but that is not the case. Either the good news is wrong or it is misunderstood or it has been distorted and abused and turned from good news to bad news. The first door-to-door salesmen took their cues from door-to-door evangelists. The reason why some sleazy preachers seem like used car salesmen is because used car salesmen learned how to be sleazy from preachers. A whole reformation took place 500 years ago to stop the sale of indulgences only to have indulgences come back in the form of the prosperity gospel.
For some people, Jesus Christ represents the harms that people have done in the name of Jesus. We must admit the harm that has been done by Christians. The good news is not found in the mint condition brand of Christians or the United Methodist Church or even Bee Creek.
The good news is that “Jesus is the one point where God has come to us, fully entered into our situation so there can be no confusion and no excuses, and (God has) revealed what he is really like.”1
Emmanuel, God with us. The good news is not about social mores or who to vote in the next election or what posts to share on Facebook but that God is with us. Jesus is Lord of heaven and earth. Creator of everything out of nothing and Jesus still chooses to be with us and save us and love us.
And like Moses on the mountaintop, we cannot leave that encounter with God unchanged. But the good news does not end there. Because God is with us, we can turn around our lives. Our lives, how we live and respond. Faith is not just a head thing but a whole life thing. James says faith without works is dead. If you hear the good news but go back to doing the same harmful things, it is like looking in the mirror and forgetting what you look like.
Christianity from the beginning, has been shared more with deeds than with words; by the fruit of the spirit more than the cleverness of the presentation. Paul says to the Corinthians,
“When I came to you, brothers and sisters, I didn’t come preaching God’s secrets to you like I was an expert in speech or wisdom. I had made up my mind not to think about anything while I was with you except Jesus Christ, and to preach him as crucified. I stood in front of you with weakness, fear, and a lot of shaking. My message and my preaching weren’t presented with convincing wise words but with a demonstration of the Spirit and of power. I did this so that your faith might not depend on the wisdom of people but on the power of God.” 1 Corinthians 2:1-5 CEB https://bible.com/bible/37/1co.2.1-5.CEB
All this summer, I have been sharing these children’s songs that I have written over the years. I started writing them five years ago when I started to do chapel for the school at my previous appointment. I was frustrated with existing children’s songs. So I started writing songs based directly on the Bible with an attempt to grab the attention of 1 year olds and 5 year olds. Creation and Eden and Noah’s ark were really easy stories to turn into songs because the stories are filled with animals. Some stories in the Bible are trickier to make engaging. Instead of dumbing them down, I have attempted through out to offer the stories of God in clear ways, even when they aren’t as goofy and funny.
Good news is for the two year old as well as the adult. And we share good news not just with words but with singing and dancing and service. We show it because it is not about us at all. This is where Christians have seriously missed the mark. It has never been about us to begin with. If it were all about us, our job now would be to game the algorithm and maximize exposure and protecth the brand. Christians should be an army of online trolls pouncing on any bad word so we can feel better about ourselves by tearing others down.
If Christianity is about us and Jesus is just a brand or a figure who lived long ago and said important and laudable things, then let’s focus on the brand and the next viral message. As Paul says, if Jesus didn’t rise from the dead, let us eat, drink, and be merry for tomorrow we die. Let us post whatever and do whatever because it doesn’t matter anyway.
But, if Jesus is truly risen from the dead, then everything changes. Paul also says we are not peddlers of God’s word but people of sincerity. We don’t need to sell God because God isn’t a product.
The claim of Christians is not that Jesus was a figure of the past who did some good things and taught some valuable lessons from which we can still learn today. The claim is that Jesus still lives – indeed, is more truly alive than we are - and continues to form new bonds of friendship with people, bonds of friendship in which we come to share in his life. This bond of friendship is the Holy Spirit, whose effect in our lives is what we call Grace. Bauerschmidt 44
Children understand friendship, often better than grownups. Children seek friendship and are open to it quickly without expectation. When we sing songs for children and share children’s time in worship, it is not only because children are cute and we want to teach them life lessons. Jesus said let the children come to me because to them belong the kingdom of God. The kingdom of God is here with the child. With the stories and the songs and the playground time.
The good news of Jesus christ let’s us be friends with God at 2 or 22 or 102. No friendship is ever finished, and we show friendship not just by talking but by doing and playing, by giving and receiving, by partying and caring.
Friendship never goes viral. Friendship is concrete. Friendship takes time. The good news for us is we don’t have to sell anything. We don’t have to make Jesus go viral or sell him. In fact, God tells us not to do that. Instead, we share good news by serving and giving and loving and praising and saying that Jesus is alive, with our words and our fingers five. This is why the church exists. To share this news. To live out God’s kingdom here. We worship and pray and serve and give together because of this news. Let us share this news that is still new; person to person, transformed life to transformed life.
In the name of the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit. Amen.
Footnotes
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Doug Campbell, 184 ↩