The following text from Philippians 4.8 is deliberately printed here in the 1611 translation, the King James Version. Read it slowly like a prose poem about how to think and what to think
Finally, brethren,
whatsoever things are true,
whatsoever things are honest,
whatsoever things are just,
whatsoever things are pure,
whatsoever things are lovely,
whatsoever things are of good report;
if there be any virtue,
and if there be any praise,
think on these things.
Now ask yourself. What would change in our public discourse, our political exchanges, our preferred vocabularyin discussion and argument, or in our use of language on social media, if these criteria applied to our way of thinking, and our way of viewing the world and seeing and responding to other people?
Here's a fact that may now surprise us all. The Latin form of those words is chiselled into the stone in the entrance hall of the old BBC headquarters. (See photo below) If these were intended as criteria for content and overall policy, they were always going to be an ideal beyond fulfilment, a wish list destined to disappoint. And there are compelling reasons why they would fail. They set standards so high they would be unattainable given the way the world is. We live in a world where bad news dominates the news platforms because bad news has become the actual reality of some people's lives when it goes wrong, and bad news is the virtual reality of the rest of us sucked into the vicarious pain and borrowed brokenness of the people in the stories we consume. Further, that relentless flow of bad news sustains levels of anxiety and uncertainty that have an overall impact on how those of us who consume the news view the world, conceive of threats, and seek security in whatever political and economic structures might seem to offer the more credible protections. So the high ideals of justice, truth, honesty and the rest as the quality controllers of what is aired are already and always under huge cognitive and emotional pressure.
Then add this. The huge diversity of sources for news and comment, perspectives and prejudices, information and misinformation, means that the authority of any one source is questioned and contradicted by other sources. The result is a Babel of voices, a supermarket of opinions and standpoints from which the consumer chooses. The subject matter of the news is selected, edited and scripted from a world of stories, mostly of life gone wrong for others, often far away, and not us. Whether war in Syria, terrorist attacks in Afghanistan, ethnic cleansing in Myanmar, fires, floods, earthquakes, hurricanes and other planetary events that destroy and desolate human communities; whether organised crime, economic oppression as slavery, human trafficking, systems of economics that exacerbate poverty in a globalised world; or again, the use and abuse of technology so that breaches in cyber security are now a risk to national security, a threat to democratic processes, are capable of undermining global business integrity, or they adversely affect confidence in financial data and transactions. Any combination of these stories is told from one perspective or another, edited and presented and shaped by the assumptions and presuppositions of those who choose and tell the narratives. Again, what of truth, honesty, justice, loveliness and good report?
To go back to the text. Those words on BBC House are the ideals of an institution formed to report with informed authority on the events of the day. That was Lord Reith's vision. The world of human affairs has been spectacularly unco-operative with words like true, honest, just, pure, lovely, of good report. And yet. Those words are from an Apostle who knew his Greek moral philosophy, and was steeped in the ethics of the Hebrew Prophets. For millenia human thought, behaviour, values and character has been a central concern in the formation and sustaining of human community and culture, and therefore also values that historically have been held to quality-control rhetoric, discourse and debate. Ask any citizen of the 1st Century Greco-Roman world about the values that are foundational in a civilised culture and they would have naturally spoken of truth, justice, goodness, beauty. These values were expected to govern words and thoughts, actions and social attitudes, and therefore the instilling of such values was a large part of education and learning in the wisdom that sustains the good life.
What I find interesting about Paul's words, and their permanent inscription on a public broadcasting organisation, is that these words are about mindset. "Think on these things". Whatever words we use are to come from a mind open to truth, committed to honesty, insisting on justice, unembarrassed by purity, admiring of loveliness, and careful of goodness. In the harsh world of news broadcasting, entertainment production, and documentary reflection on the real world, those seem impossible ideals, ludicrous criteria, a strategy for saccharine sweetness and solipsistic sentiment.
All of the above reflections, admittedly pessimistic but I hope not cynical, are prompted by the text I'm preaching on this Sunday; Philippians 4.8-9, as written above. They will be explored with an ordinary congregation of folk whose lives are all entangled in the world as it is, and the world as it's portrayed on TV, online and on social media. And yes, Paul's words are for Christian individuals and Christian communities, and not for massive news organisations, even if one of them hijacks Paul's words as its earliest mission statement. It's a gift of a text if all I want to do is moralise, tell people to be nice, to think good thoughts and aim at a life of undisturbed peaceableness.
On the other hand it is a text that calls in question much that is now normalised in the speech, discourse and rhetoric of 21st Century global politics, economics and the deeper forms of human and cultural exchange. To preach on this text means taking seriously the way we speak and listen to others. It also means interrogating the lenses and filters that colour and may well distort the way we view the world and hear and see the other. Human discourse is the making audible of thought, it is in effect speaking our mind. Aa destabilised Peter was reminded within earshot of the Lord he had denied, "Your speech betrays you!". It's a searching, searing question; what kind of mind is exposed to public view and hearing through the words we speak? As an old preacher once said in one of the first sermons I ever heard, "It's not what you think you are, it's what you think, you are." The comma is of decisive hermeneutical importance.
The sermon isn't finished. Had I been content to moralise it would be done and dusted. But this text is not so easily domesticated. It cannot be confined to the personal and individual as if those 'whatsoevers' were merely about being nice to each other. Yes, to be sure, Paul's whatsoever imperatives have decisive purchase on the Christian mind and conscience. And yes, his words are addressed to you plural, so to Christian communities as witnesses to truth, justice and loveliness. But that witness will require, demand, resistance to all that is untrue, dishonest, unjust, impure, unlovely and disreputable. And that is a political imperative, a requirement that Christian thinking and speaking intentionally invade the polis, patiently pervade the human city, slowly soak into the cultural community. The Gospel of reconciliation, peace, love, truth and justice is to be thought and re-thought, spoken and repeated, lived and performed. And as Paul says at the end of his litany of community health, "...think on these things, and the God of peace will be with you."
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