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