Noise

Propers: The Third Sunday after Epiphany, A.D. 2020 A

Homily:

Lord, we pray for the preacher, for You know his sins are great.

Grace, mercy and peace to you from God our Father and from our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ. Amen.

The essayist Andrew Sullivan has described secularism as white noise.

“The reason we live in a culture increasingly without faith,” he wrote, “is not because science has somehow disproved the unprovable, but because the white noise of secularism has removed the very stillness in which it might endure or be reborn.” And I think this is very perceptive of him.

Secularism isn’t an outright rejection of religion. Rather, it is a pervasive busyness, a ceaseless state of perpetual psychic motion, in which we are always jumping from one thing to the next. “No time for Big Questions; I have to purchase a duvet.” It’s what Pascal called divertissement—diversions, distractions, minor entertainments eating up our lives. And it’s exhausting.

From the moment we awake we are bombarded with the latest thing to buy, the latest show to watch, the latest news over which we must fret. And it follows us everywhere, this great consumerist economy, flooding forth from speakers and screens, at home, at work, in restaurants, on dashboards, and now through the phones that we carry in our pockets and place on our nightstands and pore over obsessively in the bathroom.

So then the obvious question becomes: What is it that we are so desperate not to see? What is it that we have dedicated our every waking moment to ignore? In the words of Alanis of Ottawa—Why are we so petrified of silence?

In the ancient world, the greatest luxury was leisure. And by leisure, mind you, I don’t mean simply laziness or entertainment. Leisure, rather, is healthy boredom. It is time taken to sit, to think, to read, to pray, to contemplate, and to wonder.

Leisure gives rise to all of our higher faculties. It is the font of art, literature, culture, and law. It’s Isaac Newton wondering why the apple fell. It’s Siddhartha Gautama, contemplating human suffering beneath the shade of the Bodhi Tree. It is the heart of creativity, of spirituality, and of all good and true religion—for indeed, the Sabbath is holy.

It is in the silence, in true leisure, that we contemplate our end, in both senses of the term: both our mortality, the brevity of life; and also our purpose, what to do with the time we are given. We ponder good and evil, reality and illusion, God and Man. And once upon a time, this was understood as the noblest of human pursuits. If only everyone could have the abundance and the opportunity necessary for silence, for leisure, for philosophical wrestling with the only questions worth asking.

Well, here we are, at the end of the Industrial Revolution, the Space Age, the Information Age. We are living longer than we ever have in history. We are conquering diseases that once laid low empires. We have access to the entirety of human knowledge and wisdom through little magic mirrors that we each carry about in our pockets.

And what do we do with all this opportunity? We watch silly videos of cats. We type angry comments to strangers over infantile politics. We order things with one-click two-day Prime free-shipping and wonder what’s streaming on Netflix. We fill every moment of every day with busyness and worries and distractions, so that we never have to be bored, so that we never sit in silence, because we are terrified, deep down, of what we will encounter there, in the silence.

Because God is in the silence. And so, I’m afraid, is your soul.

In our Gospel reading this morning, the imprisonment of John the Baptist appears to be a sort of signal, a call to action for the Messiah and His mission in this world. John, recall, is the Forerunner of the Christ. Everything that Jesus does, John does first. And so when the Baptist is taken by the whims of unjust power, Jesus knows that His time has come. No more preludes. Time now for the opening act.

He begins by calling Apostles, Peter and Andrew, John and James. And these men, mind you, are fishermen, laborers, raised in their fathers’ trade. They are not rabbinical students. To be called by a rabbi is a great honor; and for fishermen of the Galilee it must be something akin to a farm kid in rural Iowa earning a full ride to Harvard.

Immediately they leave their nets and follow Him. In part, I’m sure, because they had been followers of John the Baptist, who’d made clear to all Jesus’ identity as the promised Lamb of God. And in part because this was a high calling, a great honor bestowed not only on these men but upon their families as well. So of course they drop their nets and follow Him. It’s a no-brainer.

Thus begins the earthly ministry of Jesus Christ: healing the sick, feeding the hungry, forgiving the sinner, speaking truth to power, and raising the dead; all the while proclaiming the Good News of a Kingdom consisting not in worldly might but in compassion, service, self-sacrifice, and the liberation of the oppressed.

Christ is King, not by fire or steel, not because He’s descended from the one barbarian who could swing an axe with more ferocity than his fellows, but because Jesus Himself is God in the flesh, Goodness and Beauty and Truth in the flesh. And that infinity within Him is more true authority than all the emperors of earth or hell could ever hope to muster. Christ’s is the Kingdom of Truth, which undoes all the lies of this twisted, wicked, broken world.

We are entangled, you and I, in nets so fine and skillfully woven that we often barely notice they are there, strong as the roots of the mountain, subtle as the breath of a fish. They are nets of our own devising, though I am sure some diabolic intelligence had a hand in their inspiration. They are nets of worry and of fear, of outrage and distraction. They keep our minds restless, our hearts anguished, and our souls malnourished. They are the chains of postmodern life, the incessant web of white noise that strangles off silence and murders leisure in the womb.

Make no mistake: the society in which we live relentlessly pressures each one of us to become not a true human being but a consumer without end, forever hungry, never full. They give us a menu of infinite choice and tell us that this is a soul. Purchase the product. Consume the media. Belch back out nothing but marketing data. Feed the Beast behind it all, those ancient structures of power and greed. And never, ever let the white noise cease; never reveal the distractions for what they truly are—lest the silence creep back in, and all of Babylon comes crashing down.

Stop. Breathe. Let the world fall away.

For Christ has come, proclaiming the Kingdom. Christ has come, calling out to you. Christ has come, with the Good News of forgiveness, the Gospel of new life, the liberation of every captive in Creation. Seek Him in the silence. Speak to Him in prayer. Offer to Him this briefly fluttering flame of your life, and He will kindle in you a blaze fit to burn for all eternity.

Leave your nets behind. And follow the voice of the King.

In the Name of the +Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.