Preach Magazine Issue 4 - Preaching in the digital age | Page 12

12 FEATURE GOD MADE A GOOD WORLD BUT THAT DOESN’T MEAN WE WEREN’T SUPPOSED TO WORK TO TRANSFORM IT. Hebrews 4:1–11 Digital technology is dramatically changing the way that many of us work, and that means that it’s also changing the way that we rest. As manufacturing becomes less important to the economy in the UK, more of us are working in service work, care work, or the creative industries, where we’re not just being paid to do certain physical tasks but to be a certain kind of person, have a certain kind of attitude, or bring our minds and our creativity to the work that we do. That makes it harder to leave work behind when we set aside time for rest. None of this is new – women have been struggling with these issues for as long as ‘housewife’ has been a job description – but it’s exacerbated by technology. These days, when potential employers look at our Facebook page before they hire us, when our Twitter page is a crucial part of work-related networking, and when smartphones mean that there’s almost nowhere in the world we can go to escape from our email, it gets a lot harder to separate out the time we’re working from the time we’re resting. When work is more and more part of who we are and not just something that we do, what does it mean to enter the rest that Hebrews promises us? How can we learn to be more like God, who showed us what it means to take time off? Revelation 21:1–22 Using technology to shape the world around us is such a central part of human life that some philosophers have suggested that it’s using tools that makes us human. God made a good world but that doesn’t mean we weren’t supposed to work to transform it: Adam and Eve lived in a garden, not an untouched wilderness, and they were encouraged to cultivate it. The vision of the new heavens and the new earth that we find in Revelation carries on this theme. After all, what’s more technological than a city? The New Jerusalem is beautifully crafted, but that doesn’t mean it’s finished. The kings of the earth will bring their splendour into it, and the gates will never shut, which suggests that won’t just be a one-off process. If the things we make can become part of the kingdom of God, how should that change the way that we think about technology? What would it mean if we went about our work, our play, and our rest with this vision in mind: a vision of the holy city into which we are called to bring all of the most beautiful and precious things that we have made? Shakespeare talks about finding ‘tongues in trees, books in the running brooks, sermons in stones, and good in every thing’. In the world we live in, which is being transformed by digital technology, this is the challenge for us as preachers. Can we find tongues in Tumblr, books in Google Maps, sermons in Spotify and good in every networked thing? Marika Rose Marika Rose is Research Fellow in Digital Discipleship at the CODEC Research Centre for Digital Theology, Durham University. She is currently working on a project about angels and cyborgs, whilst overseeing the development of a new online portal for digital discipleship resources.