The Transfiguration of Technology: Sermon Preached on 11th February 2024 (Sunday Before Lent)

Preached at St Mary’s, Potterne and Holy Cross, Seend

2 Corinthians 4. 3-6; Mark 9. 2-9

“He did not know what to say, for they were terrified.”

We seem to be hardwired to giving more credibility to information that comes from a screen than things we hear in-person from other people, or even things we see directly with our own eyes. Last month, after falling for a so-called Deep Fake, an employee of a large multinational firm in Hong Kong transferred twenty million pounds to fraudsters. Police in the territory think that the criminals faked an entire video conference, with perhaps fifteen computer-simulated participants, using Artificial Intelligence to add made-up dialogue to real recordings. Because the people in the video conference looked and sounded just like people the victim knew from the real world, she fell for it. Would she have fallen for a similar con attempted in the flesh by a troupe of actors?

And so to our first reading, from St Paul, writing another of his letters to those perpetually troublesome Corinthians. “The god of this world”, he warns them, “has blinded the eyes of the unbelievers to keep them from seeing the light of the gospel.” The “god of this world” is, fairly obviously, a reference to the Devil. But the quote sets off all sorts of reflections about what the actual god or gods of today’s society are. We seem particularly prone to worshipping our own supposed cleverness, and the products of it. Above all, technology seems to be the Zeus or Jupiter of our 21^st Century gods, the solver of problems and the bringer of enlightenment. That’s why we are at risk of falling for scams delivered via a screen, in a way we never would for a real-life cold caller at the door.

I’m hardly opposed to technology. I make quite heavy use of social media and the Internet and all sorts of gizmos and software for my photography. Technology is a morally neutral thing, neither good nor evil – at the end of the day, a computer is just a fancy tool. Difficulties start when we forget that humans are supposed to use tools and not the other way around. Technology often seems to be our master rather than our tool.

The Church seems besotted with technology as a sort of magic bullet to appeal to young people and reverse Church decline. In particular, during the pandemic, we tried to convince ourselves that Zoom services were the future of the Church rather than an emergency response to an unprecedented situation. By the end of all those lockdowns, however, I think we all knew that being on a videoconference call with people was emphatically not the same as being in a room or a Church with them. Electronic presence is not the same as physical presence; and, as already noted, experiencing things through a screen can make it harder, not easier, to discern the truth.

We have three accounts of the Transfiguration, one in Matthew’s Gospel, one in Luke’s, and today’s Gospel reading, which comes from St Mark. One thing that distinguishes Mark’s account from the other two is the way he spells out that Peter, James, and John were absolutely terrified. Peter is reduced to babbling nonsense about making little huts. Jesus ignores this offer entirely, and then a disembodied voice comes from the sky, telling the three chosen apostles that Jesus is the Son of God and they should listen to him.

The three chosen apostles are granted a vision of what Jesus and the world are truly like when we see them through God’s eyes – infused throughout with God’s glory. This transcendent vision can’t last forever, not in these earthly realms anyway. The chosen threesome have to come down from the mountaintop. What they experienced up there, however, has changed them forever, made them a little more ready to face the trials that soon await them, for Jesus will almost immediately afterwards start on his final journey to Jerusalem.

The vision may have changed them, but Mark wants us to know, that even as he wrote these events down several decades later, Peter, James, and John didn’t truly understand and didn’t pretend to truly understand an experience that left them bewildered and terrified, yet still sure they had heard the voice of God.

Not all intense emotional or spiritual experiences in our lives come from God; we are more than capable of tricking ourselves into feeling them as a tool for our own purposes. If we have an experience that neatly fits a particular emotional or practical need in our own lives, it is a good clue that it is something we have confabulated for ourselves. Something that truly comes from God must somehow reveal the signature of a being who cannot be in our control and is beyond our true comprehension.

The thinking of today encourages us to suppress and dismiss the intuitions and feelings we all have throughout our lives. Only cold and passionless logic, we are told, can give us truth rather than superstition. I think this is profoundly damaging – we should listen to our gut instincts. While we need discernment so don’t just use our feelings to fool ourselves into believing the falsehoods most convenient to us, it is also true that stern trials are an inevitable part of our lives – illness, infirmity, betrayal by friends and lovers, the usual run of bad things that confront us all. If we do not listen to our instincts, our visions, and our dreams, how can God possibly prepare us to face them?

Instead of listening to ourselves, our feelings and instincts, instead of listening carefully for those brief moments when God shows us the world as it truly is, inflamed with His glory, we are surrounded by propaganda telling us we can only understand the world through cold reason. That is probably part of why we give such credibility to our screens and machines. Technology fits with the spirit of the times, and promises us clarity of vision – but it’s increasingly clear that it can obscure truth just as easily as it can reveal it. It has three particular problems. Firstly, as we all know but are sometimes inclined to forget, a computer can only give you answers as accurate as it has been programmed with. Secondly, as that poor multinational employee in Hong Kong found out, we are as at least as prone to misinterpreting the information we get from our computers and our screens as to misinterpreting the evidence of our own senses and instincts, indeed perhaps more so. Most profoundly, screens produce their own sort of Transfiguration, reducing the world from three dimensions to two, and engaging only our senses of sight and sound rather than all five. They show us the world as somewhat less than it actually is, unveiling some things but obscuring many others. This is very obvious when we think about it.

A true vision of God, in contrast, should leave us clear that we have been touched by something we don’t understand and never can fully understand. It might bewilder us or even frighten us, as it did Peter, James, and John, and it is something we can only ever perceive for brief moments, breaking into the world on metaphorical mountain tops. Yet it should leave us changed when we come down the mountain again, reaffirmed in our sense of God’s presence in the world, strengthened to face whatever life might throw at us.

And now to God the Father, God the Son, and God the Holy Spirit, be ascribed all might, majesty, dominion, and power, as is most justly His due, now and forevermore. Amen.