737 Max crashes. New Zealand shootings. Mozambique cyclones.
Where do your heart and mind go when the news of more far off human pain hits your ears?
Like many of you, I was raised in a family that valued staying current on world affairs. Walter Cronkite was a nightly fixture in our house. My father had the Times Picayune in front of him for an hour a night. Presbyterian faith + the value of education + access to newspapers and networks equaled regular conversation about current events, near and far. Surely one part of loving this world that "God so loved" is staying educated about its happenings. True enough.
But that was before the World Wide Web and the 24/7 news cycle. These days, with the onslaught of ticker tape news feeds and pundit-talking-heads and round-the-clock media, one wonders if discipleship calls for more restraint in the consumption of news. With so much data available to us now, I worry about a kind of spiritual-sadness inebriation that leaves us insensible to so much macro and maybe also numb to the micro in and around our own lives. Perhaps Lent is a season to take a step back from the Big News ... in order to take a step forward into our Small Souls? I am not adovcating retreat, merely rest, and reflection. Each of us must work out that balance for ourselves.
In Sunday's lectionary reading, Luke 13:1-9, Jesus' disciples are ruminating on the news of more human tragedy. When the conversation shifts to human causality — Who's fault is this? — and the matter is brought to their Teacher, Jesus offers a curious response. Redirection. To be sure, sometimes politicians and diplomats use redirection as a means of misdirection. But in Jesus' case, our Teacher uses a moment of public gossip to remind his followers about the frailty of life and the resulting call to spiritual readiness. Jesus: We can obsess about macro matters we cannot control ... or we can be spiritual stewards of those micro matters about which we can do something. After all, what good is worry for the whole world if it wrecks our ability to love locally?
