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 21st 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.
