Most of the time I’m happy to be ignorant of the latest fads, celebrity news, sports, movies, music, and the like. But I’m concerned about a trend that appears to be taking over. It’s the “cancel culture”. While there may be different definitions, it’s the phenomenon of promoting the “canceling” of people, institutions, brands and even shows and movies due to what someone considers to be offensive or problematic remarks or ideologies.
It’s an activity that’s done largely online through social media but is meant to make an impact more broadly. It can include calling for a person’s job, platform, or position of influence to be taken away. A quick scan of social media reveals the latest in a long list of celebrity victims declared “over” by the cancel culture are Jimmy Fallon, Ellen DeGeneres, J.K. Rowling, as well as the popular Broadway musical “Hamilton”.
Even within the liberal community there is a backlash against this ideological coercion and conformity. Recently some 150 journalists, authors, educators, and activists, signed a letter against this form of dogma. They said, “The free exchange of information and ideas, the lifeblood of a liberal society, is daily becoming more constricted. While we have come to expect this on the radical right, censoriousness is also spreading more widely in our culture: an intolerance of opposing views, a vogue for public shaming and ostracism, and the tendency to dissolve complex policy issues in a blinding moral certainty.”
For the past five Sundays, we’ve addressed how to live in a world full of anxiety, injustice, heartache, and clashing ideas. As Christians we understand the need to stand up against injustice and evil. But who defines what is right or wrong? And how do we “let justice roll down like waters, and righteousness like an ever-flowing stream”? This Sunday we’ll look at the words of Jesus in the Sermon on the Mount where he says, “Do not judge, lest you be judged.” Make no mistake, Christ was no stranger to controversy or going nose to nose with evil. Jesus was not saying Christians should never discern between right and wrong or to identify and resist evil. This Sunday we’ll see that God’s Word makes both the material and the method for our actions very clear.
Friends, let’s not adopt worldly ways to accomplish heavenly objectives. Jesus perfectly lived out Paul’s description in 2 Timothy 2:24-26: “and the Lord’s servant must not be quarrelsome but kind to everyone, able to teach, patiently enduring evil, correcting his opponents with gentleness. God may perhaps grant them repentance leading to a knowledge of the truth, and they may come to their senses and escape from the snare of the devil, after being captured by him to do his will.” Let’s follow in the footsteps of our radical trailblazer Jesus!
See you Sunday,
Kurt Jones
P.S. Two of our sisters in Christ went to be with Jesus recently. Jane Anne Walters and Gloria Steele are both worshipping Jesus “face to face” now. At this point their families don’t have any plans for memorial services, but we’ll let you know if that changes.