This summer’s worship series will feature members and friends Reporting the Good News, however they see it in the world around them. We will look to Jesus’ inaugural sermon (Luke 4:14-19) and Isaiah 61 for our guidance about what God’s kind of Good News looks like, namely liberation for all of us. Summer worship is at 10am in Willett Hall.
One of my regular tropes is that the media is so good at selling us on the bad news: all the crime, scandal, malevolence, harm, wars, pollution, and the worst of human behavior or cataclysmic events. Certainly, we can tout the value of being informed about what’s going on in the world. However, the media industry knows very well our human default setting for anxiety and fear. It’s knit into all animal behavior: always scanning the horizon for the nearest threat. And they play on that, because anxiety and fear sell news and promote algorithmic clicks.
Neurologists have shown that it’s harder for our brains to absorb and retain Good News. However, as Christians, we’re in the business of telling the Good News. It is our spiritual duty to pay attention to and proclaim the Good News of what God is doing in the world.
It sounds and reads a little pie-in-the-sky, right? We acquaint seriousness with paying attention to scary things and real threats and then fretting and complaining about them. What’s harder is to re-wire ourselves to pay attention to all the Good around us and to work with God to magnify it, to talk about it and encourage it.
This summer, we will hear from members and friends about where they see the Good News and why it matters to them. I’m looking forward to all the reporting and invite you to join us whenever you’re in town. It’s a good spiritual practice for us to strengthen. Especially now.
In faith,
Kent
