If you turn on your television or open a news app, I’d bet some good money that you’ll probably find your spirits sinking. I was reminded of this recently when I was visiting my parents and sitting in front of their television. Since I haven’t had cable at home in over a decade, it’s rare that I’m sitting in front of live television news.
But last week, I became painfully aware that if you want 24-7 justification to destroy your faith in humankind, just watch the news. It’s one dramatically bad story after another, and TV anchors do their part to play this up. If it’s not one more shooting making the headlines, it’s yet one more medical scare or a political system in shambles.
With perpetual news coverage, every story, no matter how big or small, is elevated to crisis level, with a basso continuo of throbbing anxiety. And the recipients of such news coverage are in a constant position of high alert. In fact, just Google “high alert,” and see how many recent news stories pop up. You’ll be convinced that the world is spiraling out of control.
While pondering the fearful, anxiety-ridden nature of modern news, I also stumbled across an interesting opinion piece in The New York Times authored by an experimental psychologist. The title was “Your Brain Has Tricked You into Thinking Everything Is Worse.”[1] The author of this piece asserts that at least since 1949, there’s been a general tendency to assume that humankind is morally worse than it was in the past. But as the article claims, this simply isn’t true. The assumption that people in the past were more altruistic or more morally upright is the result of two juxtaposed psychological phenomena: biased exposure and biased memory. Biased exposure means that we tend to pay the most attention to negative news. And biased memory means that positive memories tend to have more power in our memory than negative memories, even if those negative memories seemed awful at the time. Combine the two and there’s a mistaken view that the past was an unvarnished golden age, and the present is infinitely worse.
This unfortunate juxtaposition of psychological phenomena has infiltrated our perception of Christianity, too. If you believe the new headlines or what comes at you from some pulpits or what many churches are saying, Christian discipleship was unquestionably stronger and less complicated in the past. Fifty years ago, church attendance was better. A hundred years ago, our culture was generally more supportive of the Church. In the past, being a Christian was not as countercultural as it is today, and it was more acceptable to be a Christian. There weren’t so many secular forces working against us. Today’s nonstop news headline about the Church is that the plane is getting closer to the ground, and the pearl of great price is circling the drain.
For this very reason, it’s imperative that we sit patiently, if uncomfortably, with Jesus’s most challenging words in the gospels. At the top of that list are several of Jesus’s sayings that we’ve just heard from St. Matthew’s Gospel. Jesus hasn’t come to bring peace to the earth, but a sword. The cost of discipleship is division and possibly even estrangement within families. There’s no following Jesus without the cross.
But these difficult words seem to have faded into biased memory. Most Christians tend to remember the positive memories of Jesus’s life. We love to recall the healing stories of Jesus. We love the stories about Jesus’s love and acceptance. We relish the moments when Jesus smacks down his opponents. We rest easily with crowds being fed or Jesus walking on water or the victory of an empty tomb. And the difficulties of Jesus’s passion and crucifixion can get lumped in with the resurrection in terms of our biased memories.
And so, when we stumble across Jesus’s more perplexing words, it’s difficult to know what to do. Could he possibly have meant what he said about bringing a sword instead of peace or in creating family divisions? Or are these words just the fodder of an angry evangelist? But consider for a moment the possibility that Jesus really did say what is recorded in the Gospels. Such troubling words will come back to haunt us as long as we come to Mass and our ears are open to God’s word. We can’t run from Jesus’s hard teachings.
The biased memory of the Church’s past is of a golden age with a Jesus of positive memories and glorious salvation on offer. And the biased exposure of the present day is this: a Church in perpetual decline that’s constantly at odds with the surrounding culture. Combine biased memory and biased exposure and you will wonder if there’s ever been a more difficult time than the present day to be a Christian.
But if the myth of a lost golden age of the Church is really just the confluence of two psychological phenomena, the truth is much more complex. It has always been difficult to be a Christian, and the great sin of the Church is that she has forgotten how difficult it’s supposed to be. She has failed to preach it. She has failed to live it.
It should therefore be no great surprise that amid today’s Gospel passage there’s a big, stinking elephant in the room. And this elephant has emblazoned on its side the word “fear.” Yes, Jesus names this elephant multiple times in just sixteen verses of Scripture. Have no fear of them. Do not fear those who kill the body but cannot kill the soul. Fear not, therefore; you are of more value than many sparrows. Here’s the sober truth of discipleship that’s masked when biased memory and biased exposure combine to have us imagine a nonexistent golden age of following Jesus. The sober truth is that fear has been around ever since Jesus’s disciples first began to follow him.
And Jesus doesn’t dance around this fear. He doesn’t sugarcoat the cost of discipleship. He doesn’t promise a life without struggle or illness or even death. Instead, he offers a Gospel far more powerful than fear but which rarely makes the news headlines.
In his lifetime, Jesus said much about fear. Fear is the enemy of love. Fear is living in darkness. Fear is the 24-7 news headline that won’t shut up and will scream louder and louder until you believe its lies. Do you hear the voices? Things are worse now than they ever have been. Everyone is actively working against the Church. You don’t have enough time for God and your job. People are after your money and your possessions, so cling to them as tightly as you can. If you speak up in the face of injustice, you will lose your friends. If you’re honest about who you are, your family will forsake you and God will reject you.
And while these incessant voices scream about fear, the soundless captions below on the TV screen scroll by with more news of fear. If you choose to worship God, do it quietly, or others will think you are foolish. Don’t be too vocal about your faith lest some think you are like those reactionary Christians. Why don’t you give up on a Church that has hurt too many people in the past? In fact, how can you even trust the Church at all?
By this point, it should be clear, shouldn’t it? Fear has always been with Christians. It raged in the mouths of lions devouring early Christian martyrs. It stoked the flames of the Inquisition. It unleashed dogs on those marching for civil rights. And it’s still doing what it’s always done: it’s trying to make us think that things are so much worse than they’ve ever been. Fear has always done what it could to silence the Gospel’s voice by wielding its weapon of biased exposure.
But the reason we shouldn’t ignore Jesus’s difficult words is because the best news of all is hidden within them. Amid the hyped-up anxiety of divided families, lost friends, and the specter of death, is the pearl of Gospel wisdom, which is not circling the drain after all. The past was never better than the present. Fear always haunted the followers of Jesus. And above all, the future is infinitely capable of beauty, promise, and goodness. There’s always hope, and God is always with us. And no matter what you’ve done, God will never leave you.
Although around us, there are many things to fear, Jesus tells us to fear only one thing: fear God. Fear God not with anxiety over hell but with reverence and gratitude because of God’s love for you and the love it asks from you in return. Fear God because the truth is this: even in the present moment, there’s never been a better time to find your life. And if we’re willing to lose our lives for Jesus’s sake, we’ll find the life that fear can never touch.
Sermon by Father Kyle Babin
The Fourth Sunday after Pentecost
June 25, 2023
[1] By Adam Mastroianni, June 20, 2023, https://www.nytimes.com/2023/06/20/opinion/psychology-brain-biased-memory.html