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This morning’s Gospel reading and sermon were about stumbling blocks. The Bible mentions this concept several times and, if memory serves, stumbling block stories are mostly about not causing other people to stumble or sin through your own actions. The reading meshed with something I’ve been thinking a lot about lately, specifically the stumbling blocks I put in front of myself.
My thoughts about this started a few months ago when I began to notice the number of links in my Facebook newsfeed that invited me to click and watch someone get told off, or to see someone doing something stupid or otherwise regrettable. One day, it struck me how often I was invited by my newsfeed to watch someone at their worst, to not only watch but to revel it in it and I began to wonder about the intent of these links. The stated purpose seemed to imply it was just entertainment, but it was always at someone else’s expense. It seemed pretty clear that I was supposed to watch and feel superior to the person who was featured in the link, whether it was someone doing or wearing something crazy in Walmart, or dealing with a situation differently than I would, or someone who I disagree with politically. I used to click on a few of those things – the political ones are particularly tempting -- but once it became clearer to me about what was going on, I began to question my own participation in it. My clicks felt OK because I wasn't sharing them. I was just looking in private and the illusion was that viewing and feeling the emotions they were designed to elicit had no effect on how I treated others. But those clicks were feeding something and I didn’t like what it was when I looked closer at it. These weren’t news links that provided me with information about world events or funny links where everyone was in on the joke. These were links that only showed someone at their worst, with no context or additional information. I realized that, by laughing at or judging someone’s embarrassment, or their ignorance, or their brokenness, I wasn’t living in the way I’m called to do. I wasn’t treating people – yes, even people I’ve never met or who I highly disagree with -- in the way I wanted to be treated. I wasn’t building a longer table to include them, I was building a fence to exclude them.
But what about justice, my head said. If someone is doing something hateful and another person tells them off, isn’t that justice in action? If a politician is ranting about the ethics of poor people while ignoring his own complicity in their poverty, isn’t it justifiable (not to mention satisfying) to see him confronted with this in a mic drop moment? Yes, it is satisfying on some level, but it’s not justice. Justice often requires speaking truth to power, but in a way that engages them in the solution. Justice involves action that actually helps the victims. Telling someone off doesn’t do that. It could even hurt because it can cause the recipient of the “takedown” to harden his position. Being angry at injustice is understandable and can be beneficial if it motivates someone to take action to correct that injustice. Telling off the prejudiced doesn’t do that. And watching this happen on Facebook links didn’t make me a better advocate for any victimized group. It only made me feel superior to the person on the receiving end of the takedown and I decided it was morally corrosive for me.
So, I decided to do a little editing. I stopped following pages that put out a lot of this kind of content and I unfollowed a couple of people who do the same. I still see these links occasionally, and I am still not perfect in how well I resist the temptation. The invitation to feel superior to others is powerful but it’s dangerous and I’m doing my best to change this, to be repelled by it instead of tempted by it.
