social media

A Story of Celebrity and Mobs: Sermon Preached on 13th April 2025 (Palm Sunday)

by

Preached at Holy Cross, Seend, St Peter’s, Poulshot, and Christ Church, Bulkington

Philippians 2. 5-11; Luke 19. 28-40

“the whole multitude of the disciples began to praise God joyfully with a loud voice for all the deeds of power that they had seen”

A large group of people dressed in ancient, flowing robes gathers outside a stone building with an arched doorway. Some sit or lie on the ground, while others stand or lean against the wall. A central figure in a blue robe stands on a carpet, addressing the crowd, with a donkey nearby. The scene is set under a partly cloudy sky with a tree on the right. The painting has a warm, earthy tone, capturing a moment of communal listening or teaching.
Nikolay Koshelev, Christ’s Entry into Jerusalem.

Palm Sunday speaks into an age of celebrity culture and social media in a way that few other Bible stories do. On Sunday, Jesus is the darling of the crowds, who mob Him like a modern day celebrity. It’s as if Taylor Swift turned up in Morrison’s in Devizes on a Saturday afternoon. Then, in the space of just five days, Jesus falls from favour so spectacularly that the crowds are literally calling for him to be strung up. We’ve seen so many stars fall from their pinnacles in recent years, sometimes deservedly and sometimes not, often because they said something on social media that outraged people.

The Internet is often the first thing that gets blamed for any social or cultural problem these days, and celebrity culture is never far behind. As with any technology, the Internet is an amplifier for both the good and the bad, and here are good and bad sides to social media. On the positive side, it keeps in touch with friends we haven’t seen for years and with family who live too far away for us to visit often. It could be why over the last ten to fifteen years mental health problems among young women have spiked and birth-rates across the world have collapsed.

But, hang on, Palm Sunday happened two thousand years before Facebook was invented! Our most serious problems are just modern variations on problems that have been with the human race since the dawn of time. Selfishness, greed, bigotry, and violence didn’t arrive with the smartphone. Nor did the way that being part of a crowd can turn normally decent people toxic, nor our tendency to abandon our most noble principles once it means risking unpopularity. Our problems today aren’t really caused by social media, or by the mainstream media, or by the way we chase after celebrities who are so often empty. Our problems are caused by the sickness in our souls.

Read more

Making it in the World to Come: Sermon Preached on 24th March 2024 (Palm Sunday)

by
A painting in mixed media: Christ, riding donkey and approaching from the left, is welcomed by a large crowd, greeting him with palm leaves; two angels appearing at top left.

Preached at St Peter’s, Poulshot, Holy Cross, Seend, and Christ Church, Bulkington

Philippians 2. 5-11; Mark 11. 1-11

“he humbled himself and became obedient to the point of death—even death on a cross.”

If you want to make something of yourself, you’ve got to get out there and sell yourself. The modern world is no place for humility, especially with the job market being the way it is. Pay close attention to your image, not only in the physical world, but especially on social media. To build your profile there, never forget that outrage sells and angry people click.

In the style of Giotto, Jesus riding on a donkey gives blessings to some passersby, some of whom have a halo and some of whom don't.
Giotto, The Entry into Jerusalem (1305). In the Scrovegni Chapel, Padua, Italy.

That’s a reasonable summary of the sort of advice that might be given, in an entirely well-meaning way, to an ambitious young person trying to make it big in a bad old world.

Now, we all know that St Paul has the reputation of being a real old curmudgeon, with views completely incompatible with the modern world. That is clearer nowhere than in this morning’s Epistle reading, when he writes:

“Let the same mind be in you that was in Christ Jesus, who … emptied himself … humbled himself and became the obedient to the point of death—even death on a cross.”

Holy week turns the values of the 21st Century West upside down. Then again, it also turned the values of the Roman Empire upside down, and it turned the values of Second Temple Judaism upside down. Our Western obsession with self-fulfilment dies on the Cross, just like the Romans’ obsession with power, and the Jewish leadership’s obsession with piety.

And within Holy Week, if there is one story that really speaks to our own times, to the manias and failings of the 2020s, it is that of Palm Sunday. At its core, Palm Sunday is a story about the fickleness of celebrity.

Read more

Reflection on ‘Fame’ for Holy Week: Tuesday 4th April 2023

by

Given at Christ Church, Worton

Matthew 21. 12-16

“Fame! — I wanna live forever.”

Seven young adults in a posed photograph, some sitting, some standing, on a promo graphic for the 1980s TV show 'Fame'. Another young character is in a box top right.
Soon, anyone old enough to remember the original Fame will pretty much have lived forever

So ran the theme tune of a popular TV drama of my youth, about a group of teenagers at a specialist high school in New York for those aiming at a career in the performing arts. The young characters wanted to be famous for their talents – as did the young actors who played them. But we live in a time when people don’t become famous necessarily for their talents or achievements, but often become famous just for being famous. The celebrity lifestyle is one that some people actively chase, indeed that some are willing to degrade themselves to achieve, drawn like a moth to the flame of being a household name.

The Gospels present Jesus as something of a celebrity, followed by crowds everywhere; sometimes, as when he overturned the money-changers’ tables, he could even carry out what we might call today a ‘PR stunt’. Yet the crowds’ attention was often exhausting to Christ; in Galilee, after a day surrounded by throngs of people clamouring to be healed and to be entertained, he would retreat into the hills, or out into the lake on a boat. Sometimes, the crowds followed him even there. As we believe that Jesus Christ was God in human form, we see something here about the character of God that is perhaps a little surprising.

One of the hallmarks of the early 21st Century has been the way that technology has eroded the distinction between public and private life – for celebrities and public figures, certainly, and also for quite ordinary people.

Read more

Celebrity and Humility: Sermon Preached on Sunday 2nd April 2023 (Palm Sunday)

by

Preached at St Peter’s, Poulshot and Holy Cross, Seend

Philippians 2. 5–11; Matthew 21. 1–11

If Jesus made his second coming in the near future, how would we know about an event like his triumphal entry into Jerusalem on that first Palm Sunday? I suspect we might learn about it from TikTok, or a YouTube video, probably made by one of the army of professional YouTubers trying to cash in on Jesus’ popularity.

When I talk to primary school children, one of the most common things that both boys and girls say they want to be when they grow up is a “YouTuber”. You might wonder if that can actually be a job. Well, the highest paid video-maker on YouTube in 2020 earned US$26 million in that year alone. He is a boy from Texas called Ryan Kaji who reviews toys, and 2020 was the year in which he had his ninth birthday.

A watercolour painting in dull colours by James Tissot of Jesus riding into Jerusalem on a donkey carrying a palm surrounded by cheering crowds.
James Tissot, The Procession in the Streets of Jerusalem, (1886-94). Hangs in the Brooklyn Museum

So, the Palm Sunday story should resonate powerfully in our era of celebrity. Jesus rides into town like a king, and He is quite conscious of what he is doing; He seeks to fulfil Hebrew prophecy, with a direct quote from Zechariah. What comes next has clearly been carefully thought through, and Jesus seems to have made preparations for His triumphant entry to the Holy City with people in Jerusalem who call him “the Master”, but who aren’t known by even the closest disciples who have travelled with him from Galilee. The crowds greet Jesus like a conquering king entering his new capital, spreading their cloaks in front of him and forming a guard of honour.

Today, we break the story here, with Jesus the darling of the masses. Yet within just a few days, the story will take a dramatic twist. To be a darling of the crowd and greeted as a coming king is, needless to say, a serious threat to the actual kings and rulers of a society. The authorities soon launch a campaign of black propaganda against this preacher who some people see as a prophet. The propaganda is effective and soon enough the masses turn against Jesus. When He is brutally executed just five days later, those members of Sunday’s crowd who come to see Jesus on the Cross do so not to cheer, but to jeer.

Read more

Reading the Signs of the Times

by

This article first appeared in the September 2021 edition of Franciscan magazine.

“In these last days [God] has spoken to us by a Son.” So begins the Letter to the Hebrews. These days, we might joke that God should speak to us in a collection of social media memes or a Zoom call. After all, that’s the way everybody else communicates these days.

The joke is fair enough, but it also misses the point. The people of 1st Century Palestine may not have been able to log on to Zoom to take part in a heavenly videoconference, but they could and did expect God to communicate in all sorts of ways. Receiving enlightenment and instruction from divine visions is a repeated theme in both the Old and New Testaments. Peter and Paul are both recorded as receiving direct instruction through visions. But the Father didn’t send the divine Word to people in visions, although presumably he could have done – instead He sent the Word directly, in the person of Jesus Christ. Personal presence matters; the Word was made flesh because we are creatures of flesh and blood.

What might the digitisation of human relationships, accelerated by necessity due to the terrible pandemic we are enduring, mean for the Church? Let us first explore its wider societal impact to shed some light on that.

It is now a generation since communication started migrating into digital spaces, mediated by screens. I notice this shift most profoundly in pubs; people on their own are much less likely to strike up conversations with strangers or the barman than they were when I first discovered their amber-tinted pleasures in the mid-1990s. Instead, singles constantly flick through their phones to pass the time. A more specific example: gay bars have closed at an astonishing clip, rendered commercially unviable after losing the section of their custom primarily interested in casual sex to dating apps which leave many of their users experiencing incessant digital rejection. Gone with the bars is the broader sense of community they provided, including for those who had no interest in hooking up. A good pub, gay or otherwise, allowed people to meet in a way that transcended class, politics, race, and educational levels, at least to the extent their locality or workplace environs did.

On social media, in contrast, people often slip into clusters of the like-minded, forming small and cohesive online communities trapped in their own groupthink, increasingly incapable of assimilating any alternative viewpoint, and regarding their very expression of such as at best fake news and at worst an act of hostility.

Read more