February 25, 2025

Mark 8:31-38 – 8:31

Those who are ashamed of me and of my words in this adulterous and sinful generation, of them the Son of Man will also be ashamed when he comes in the glory of his Father with the holy angels.

Jesus was explaining to the disciples that he would suffer and be killed only then to be raised three days later. Obviously, this was a strange and distressing message for his followers to hear. And so, Peter rebukes Jesus for saying so. Rebuke is a strong term: to express sharp disapproval of someone or something. The meaning of the word used in the original Greek epitimaō is more complicated. It can of course mean disapproval, but it can also mean to judge, such as when assessing damages or a penalty. It can mean raising the price, in a sense making something more costly or perhaps of greater consequence. The original word is not only about saying Jesus should not have said what he said. It was an assessment of the wider effect or cost of what was said.

And I find that terribly interesting.

Jesus does not merely shrug it off. He shouts back at Peter, “Get behind me Satan!” Harsh, obviously. But then Jesus says that Peter is placing his mind on human things rather than divine things. Focusing on the matters of this world, rather than the next. I guess Peter was surprised and puzzled by this response. I am also guessing he was thinking, Jesus why are you depressing everyone with this talk of dying and coming back from the dead. Why not worry about the good work we are doing than dwell upon this prediction about a terrible fate you are imagining.

We as the audience know that Jesus’ death was not far off, but Peter did not know that. And in the Gospel of Mark, the disciples, including Peter, are depicted as being somewhat stupid. Yes, stupid. There is one translation of a Bible passage in which Jesus simply refers to people as blockheads, though a more accurate translation would be “fat hearts.” The heart was thought to be the center of human thinking—no one had any idea what the brain did. Blockheads is the nearest English idiom, I guess.

Jesus was not always kind of word to the people around him. In this case, he is calling Peter “Satan.” This is not an edifying term, obviously, but it is not bad in the way that we might think. We imagine the word “Satan” as representing evil. But for Jesus it was not evil, but something far more troubling: temptation. Jesus was being tempted not to follow through on his mission in the world. And that was to teach for a time and then to be crucified only to rise again. Peter was asking him to step away from that terrible burden and, I am guessing, Jesus did not want to entertain such an option.

This Sunday is the last of my sermon series on things we do not talk about. And this last installment fits that concern in more than one way. The topic is a very new sounding term, but it is not new by any means, even though the name for it was coined in the past decade or so. And that term is cancelling. It is when someone has said or done something in an unacceptable manner which leads to them being ostracized or boycotted. This is also referred to broadly as “cancel culture” meaning that there is a cultural dynamic leading to people being shunned for some reason.

A performer might have made a comment on social media that leads people to criticize them, calling for them to be “cancelled” which might literally mean cancelling their television show or concert or some other public event. An academic can be cancelled for expressing opinions or theories that are unpopular for some reason. They could be fired, they could lose tenure.

The idea of cancelling comes from the television industry, as when a television show is cancelled because it is no longer popular or profitable. So, you cancel the show. The term was borrowed by social media and that is where its effects have been truly magnified. Prior to social media, efforts to boycott certain people or their ideas clearly existed. But with the advent of the instantaneous sharing of information through social media, someone’s social gaffe or personal failure could be spread around the world in a few moments.

Did you hear what he said? Can you believe what she did? Do you have any idea what they liked? “Liked” meaning passing along another person’s statement or photo or off-color joke. The cancelling is not only about what was said or done, but about the identity of the person saying or doing or sharing it. You do not have to make the racist or sexist or homophobic comment. You can be shown to have approved of it in some way, such as merely passing it along to people you know.

Now, if you are not a person who follows or engages in social media, this may not seem like much of a concern. It is a tempest in someone else’s teapot. Who cares?

But there are many aspects of our American culture that are tied into these lightning-fast judgments. Judgments of consequence being made unbeknownst to those of you blissfully unaware of the shifting sands of internet opinion. It will filter out from the internet into regular news media, into more human scale communications. It might even affect stock prices of public companies which can impact the economy.

For example, there was an effort to cancel Bud Light, a brand of beer, because they presented an ad campaign involving a transgender woman. This did not sit well with some social conservatives and they called upon followers to boycott Bud Light. And there was a significant effect. Anheuser-Busch sales fell by 1 percent that year and their stock price fell by 20 percent.

Cancelling can come from any social or political direction. The Bud Light cancelling was conservative in nature, but the origins of cancel culture are arguably from left leaning sources. You might link it to the “Me Too” movement in some respects. People in power, men mostly, such as in the entertainment industry, had for many years been given a free ride when it came to sexist actions or even sexually abusive behavior. Someone who did bad things in the past might be called out for those actions years, later leading to them losing out on various opportunities and, occasionally, facing legal consequences.

Old examples of racist jokes might make your new television program problematic for the network. Past allegations of abusive conduct might make your continued leadership role in an organization unacceptable. The trajectory may be liberal, but the effects are by no means limited to non-liberal targets. This can and has happened on Fox News and National Public Radio.

There was a book published a few years ago that touched on this cultural dynamic. It was called “The Coddling the American Mind,” by Jonathan Haidt and Greg Lukianoff. The authors described a tendency toward intellectual coddling on college campuses. This might take the form of students trying to prevent unpopular speakers from sharing their views on politically polarizing topics, like race or gender or some other lightning rod topic. The concern is that this is a knee jerk rejection of ideas in a way that prevents them from being assessed before they are understood. This is prejudice, or pre-judging, in a literal sense. And young minds are being coddled because they are refusing to engage in the hard work of critical thinking necessary for a true academic environment, or that is at least the argument.

And while I can see the argument about getting people to think more critically, I think there are a few flaws in the concern about coddling the American mind. For one, there is nothing new about this. The only thing new about cancel culture and cancelling in general is that it can happen a lot faster because of social media. People can be quicker to judge now because news travels faster than a detailed explanation. And that so-called news can then be filtered through layers of opinion, pre-chewing it for those being targeted.

For example, if a politician said that they think the immigration system needs to be overhauled, that is not a surprising idea. But if they said it in a certain way, using certain words, it could be interpreted as Senator So-and-so wants open borders. They want to let in “unvetted illegals,” whatever that means, while we hard working Americans pay for their care an upkeep.

This is not an immigration sermon, so save your questions for coffee hour.

Now Senator So-and-so said nothing of the sort, but there are intellectual groves carved into our social fabric. Information gets fed into those grooves and it is worn down into the appropriate bite sized pieces to make you angry in predictable ways. That is currently the primary mode of operation for television media.

Take a story and filter it through the political biases of your most likely audience. You as an audience member are then sufficiently alarmed to keep on watching. Cancel culture is in this same way a symptom of the political polarization we are experiencing in our broader culture. There is no nuance, as I am fond of saying, no desire to integrate disparate information without major tailoring to fit a prescribed script in our fixed set of personal opinions.

But as I was saying, the main innovation of cancel culture is its speed, not its contents. There has always been something like cancel culture in American society. There has always been something like cancel culture in human society. There are actions or statements that will get you into trouble, possibly leading you to be shunned, ostracized, or boycotted. And it has always, always, always been that way.

When Jesus told Peter and the disciples that he was going to be crucified, Peter rebuked him: don’t say those kinds of things, you will upset everyone. And then Jesus famously says get behind me Satan. It might seem that the two men are trying to cancel one another, but I do not think so.

Peter is trying to silence Jesus and his downer of a message. That is cancelling in the sense that Peter is trying to shield the other disciples from this negative prediction. Do not burst anyone’s happy little bubble. But Jesus is not trying to cancel anyone, meaning to shield anyone from uncomfortable information or, in this case, uncomfortable truths. Jesus is trying to keep on his pathway toward the cross without the temptations of a nice easy life.

Cancelling is very old and very common. It is more often used to affirm existing ideas and practices rather than new and developing ones. Galileo tried to explain the solar system in a new way, so the pope canceled him literally, imprisoning him for the rest of his life.

When artists have tried to present new forms of art or music, people have reacted by calling them degenerate or corruptive. In 1950s America, rock and roll music was said to lead to moral decay. In the 1970s and 1980s, heavy metal music was criticized because it came straight from Satan hand. It was as true for jazz as it is for rap music.

One recurrent trend within religious circles is iconoclasm, the literal destruction of icons or idols. In modern times, we imagine this as fundamentalist Muslims destroying ancient artworks because they depict pagan forms. But that is only a recent version. Early Christians went through periods of rampant destruction of Greek and Roman art for the same reason.

I went to a museum in Jordan which was built around an old monastery. The monks had built a false floor over an entire Roman complex of beautiful mosaics. They built that false floor because other Christians were on their way to destroy every Roman mosaic and building and statue they could find. That is ancient cancel culture—cancelling the prior culture because it is thought to corrupt the newer and supposedly better and more pure culture that is currently in place.

In one sense, I have sympathy for the idea that we should not cast aside every image or idea or object just because it represents something with which we currently take issue. History has value and history is embodied in those images and ideas and objects. And the same is true for figures from history.

George Washington was an important figure in American history and he was unquestionably a slave owner until the day he died. Washington expressed having issues with slavery, advocating for its abolition, and he even called for the emancipation of his slaves upon his death—note that he did not do so in his lifetime. We might see that change of heart as a day late and many dollars short, after a lifetime reaping the profits of enslaved people.

You could make similar assessments about other key figures in American history. Thomas Jefferson not only enslaved people, but he also infamously raped his slaves and fathered children with them—and yes, “rape” is the accurate description and the only appropriate legal term here. Abraham Lincoln gave the Emancipation Proclamation and yet for many years thought that all Black Americans should be deported back to Africa even as he sought to free them.

And Booker T. Washington, the 19^th century American educator and advocate for Black Americans was in his lifetime fiercely criticized. For what? For allowing White Americans to roll back the political and social gains of the emancipated slaves. For being the figurehead of a movement of Blacks even as he courted Whites to support his personal fundraising efforts and personal finances.

As we sit comfortably in the present, the past is there waiting for us to judge the words and deeds, the actions and inactions, of the generations that came before us. And we can also judge the more recent past, sorting through the words and deeds, the actions and inactions, of people last decade, last year, or last week.

And the means by which we measure their successes and failures is our personal set of beliefs. Perhaps those come from a tradition like Christianity. Perhaps they come from a culture, like the United States, or a subculture like White Evangelicals or Black Millennials. Or perhaps even highly educated, New England professionals and retirees who attend Unitarian church services periodically. Perhaps.

There is always a backdrop of ideas that someone uses to assess the past, to judge the present, and to plan for the future. And how we make those assessment, judgments, and plans can change with the introduction of additional ideas and information. The preemptive quality of cancel culture can make for less informed decision-making. That does not mean you will change the decision, but it might be a better decision, one with a more nuanced plan to follow.

There was recently a declaration that in the City of Boston there should be 15 billion dollars paid for reparations for the enduring legacies of slavery and subsequent forms of discrimination. I have no objection to the idea of reparations, but if we leave such a conversation about reparations there, with a big price tag, there will of course be nothing but recriminations and endless criticism of the idea. Oh, that is just a money grab. That is a nonstarter of a plan that is fundamentally unfair to people who had nothing to do with slavery. My family only came here a hundred years ago, so leave me out of it. If you leave that conversation with the bold and broad statement that 15 billion dollars needs to be paid, it will likely go nowhere.

I remember asking religious colleagues of mine about reparations. Not white colleagues, not Unitarian colleagues. Colleagues of color, colleagues who live in the South. It was not a simple chorus of agreement with the idea of reparations. It was far more circumspect. Why? Because at what point in American history could any such plan be trusted.

I remember one woman in particular, whose family traces back to emancipated slaves who settled on the islands off South Carolina. She was very dismissive of the idea of reparations in the form of money paid to people in the here and now. She said to me, don’t give me money, fix the system. Fix the system. Because if you don’t fix the system, all that money will be gone in a few years.

It will be gone because the unfair banking system and broken insurance industry and skewed employment policies and dysfunctional educational policies will carve away at these people and their money until they have nothing left. Money can always be clawed back or misappropriated if you permit such a system. Fix the system because that is what has been the problem for the last 400 years.

This leads me to the aspect of cancel culture that truly concerns me. That bothers me for the same reasons that an unfair economic system bothers me. We exist in social environment without any mechanism for forgiveness. Forgiveness.

Our culture does not value forgiveness on any level. Our legal system does not rehabilitate, it punishes. Our political system has lost any means for compromise for the greater good. Our social interactions are about quick judgments and enduring grudges. And, to me, these flaws in our society are fundamentally about forgiveness.

If you are a follower of Jesus, the system for forgiveness should simple—and I distinguish between a follower of Jesus and a Christian specifically. Why? Because I have my doubts that modern Christianity cares one whit about forgiveness. So, I’ll stick with Jesus.

As a follower of Jesus, there is a formula of forgiveness. You need to repent and then to seek forgiveness. The person who made the mistake must acknowledge that they did something wrong in a public manner, say that they are sorry for what they have done and fix it if possible, and then ask to be forgiven. Not one of these steps is optional. Say it in public and out loud, with a sincere apology and some way to make amends, followed by a plan never to do it again. Now we are at the point when someone might need to forgive you.

Then, and only then, you should be forgiven. And according to Jesus, you must be forgiven. Yes, if you mess up once more, we start from square one. Yes, you will have a harder time showing the second or third or seventh time that your apology is sincere and that you are willing to make amends and never do it again. It is not easy, nor should it be. But forgiveness by this pattern of behavior is possible.

And yet we do not forgive. We as Americans do not forgive. We do not forgive, we do not compromise. We do not work for the greater benefit of everyone if it requires us to stand back from some ironclad belief. Polarization happens because there stops being any overlap of interests between opposing groups. And cancel culture reinforces those unyielding opinions by eliminating ideas and stopping conversations that might disrupt the seeming certainty of our beliefs.

I do not mean to suggest that any of this would be easy. But I honestly cannot think of an alternative. People are going to disagree, but they also need to compromise with each other in order to survive. People are going to hold different views, some that are mutually exclusive. That does not mean we need to rework society to make the loudest voices comfortable. That does not mean we have to accept the intolerance of others or time travel back to the 1950s to recalibrate our moral codes.

Compromises should not be made about the identities of anyone, about whether or how they should live. But what about compromises about money, compromises about language? Compromises that help one person save face while another gets what they truly need. Those are the sorts of compromises that have been lost the more we have decided to make our world seem perfect and pure. Not that it is perfect or pure, but that is how we wish to delude ourselves within our snow forts of frozen opinions.

And a compromise is a lot like forgiveness. It requires us to imagine that we might be wrong or that someone else might be right or that the answer falls somewhere in the middle. In a sense, a compromise is an act of humility. That even though we hold differing beliefs, there is the possibility of compromise in the inevitable grey areas in between.

Because if there is anything that I have learned as an aging White man talking to and working with young, and not so young, religious colleagues of color, it is that I do not always know what I am talking about. And I certainly do not know what they are talking about or what they truly want and need. Cancel culture makes assumptions about the world that may not reflect the other people who populate that world. Cancel culture assumes we know what is best for the culture.

So, it is with a personal sense of late breaking humility that I think we need to be prepared to ask others what they think. And to be prepared to forgive others, and ourselves, for the brittle certainties we have tried to impose upon a complicated world.

Yes, people will still stay awful things in need of a response. But it does not hurt anything to take a moment, and a deep breath, and think about the response before saying something we might regret given a moment’s thought and a more forgiving outlook. And we could all use a more forgiving outlook.

Amen.