Hacking Complacency: Building on the Rock in an Algorithmic Age

Amen.

Good morning.

Good morning.

Good to see you all.

So we are into chapter six of Amos.

And I think one of the challenges is we go through a big book like this, and as we go through chapter and chapter, we can sort of lose sight of the bigger picture.

Because it can sort of start to feel, and maybe it's particularly true of Amos, that

It does get a bit whiny, doesn't it?

When you're hearing it week after week, you start to think, oh, blimmin', there came Amos.

It's going to be all right.

But actually, see, Amos is building an army.

He starts really big, and he circles all around the map.

He goes through the places surrounding Israel and Judah until he lands in Israel.

Do we remember that?

As Simon was talking to us there through Amos 3.

And then he begins to sing a lament over them.

They think that he's giving them a chance to turn around, but actually he starts to say, I'm sorry, it's over.

I told you again and again and you didn't listen.

I'm not singing about change, I'm singing for your funeral.

See, he's building an argument.

He's leading somewhere.

And in Amos 6...

he begins to draw closer even still.

So that no longer are we just talking about the whole of Israel or the whole of Judah, he begins to talk about the leaders.

Again, not ranting, but mourning.

Now the chapter we're reading this morning, it sort of naturally falls into two halves, which is good, because if I try and focus on anything more than seven verses at once, I'm in trouble, so...

Luckily, and by total coincidence, I discovered it falls into two bars.

So the first part, which is verses 1 to 7, is another funeral song.

It's a bit like last week's passage.

And the second, verses 8 to 14, is what we might call an oath oracle.

say we might call, scholars will call it that, I'm still not sure what that means.

But it's because God is saying, look, that thing I warned you about, well, it's happening.

As we might say today, mess around and find out.

You might have a different first word there.

See, in Amos' day, the question should have been,

How do we remain obedient in an age where the priority is comfort and convenience?

And we're blessed, aren't we?

Because we haven't got to answer that question anymore, aren't we lucky?

Now, it's not a bad question for us either, is it?

Let's be honest.

How do we remain obedient in an age where the priority has become comfort and convenience?

See, I was at an event recently that left me slightly frustrated.

A head teacher at a school stood up and he said, when the children come to look around here, we make sure we tell them that they will succeed.

Then he flicked to the next slide and he said, and the problem with children's mental health is smartphones.

I found that really, really interesting because, I don't know about you, but it does feel like we're missing the point somewhat.

Maybe it's not the thing which is the problem, but what is revealed when we see ourselves reflected back in it.

The temptation is to blame Amos.

All he's doing is whinging and whining, because it's a lot easier and more comfortable to do that than to see the image of ourselves that Amos is showing us.

See, Amos starts straight out of the gate.

Woe to you who are at ease in Zion.

Zion is the home of the national elite, the leaders, the comfortable, the secure, the successful, the ones that people look up to and say, well, they've made it.

They're the kind of people who aspire everything that we are told to aspire to today.

Stability, confidence, wealth.

But Amos doesn't recognise their status.

Amos exposes it.

It's a little bit like an influencer walking into a restaurant and sort of saying, well, don't you know who I am?

I should get this for free.

The problem is God does know who we are.

That's sort of the problem.

He sees through the polish and he sees when our heart is full of pride.

See, in verse 2, Amos takes us on a little kind of geographical tour.

Calner, Hamath and Gath.

Cities that I'm sure we all remember from GCSE Geography.

No, see, these are all cities that elsewhere Israel has boasted that they have surpassed.

Cities that Israel has said we are stronger and better and wiser than them.

See, Amos' point is he's not testing our geography knowledge.

He's giving us perspectives.

He's deflating the national ego.

Helping them see that what they thought was greatness is just a bubble.

Building and building and building until it's going to burst.

See, we move to verse 3, don't we?

He says, you have pushed far away the evil dead.

In other words, you've postponed reality.

You've put it to one side.

You've made a world of your own imagining.

You've used religious language to go and hide away from judgement.

You've made prophecies and forecasts just so you can pretend that all was fine.

Not today.

Not this week.

but the day will still come.

No matter the reality that we have created for ourselves, the reality God had for us is absolute.

And maybe that sounds familiar.

Coming back to the smartphones, have you noticed how we've started using the language of religion to hide some of the things that are going on in the modern world?

Have you heard as we pray to the God of the algorithm that actually maybe social media

the likes, the loves we need to create the reality that we want to shape.

See, we act as though something we're in control of can determine blessing or curse.

Who gets to be seen and who gets to be forgotten?

And the problem is when we do that, we start to serve it by feeding it exactly what it wants.

At its worst, this idolatry shows up in those dark corners of the internet, things that we may have heard of like the manosphere, where voices like Andrew Tate use biblical language to justify selfish, dominant harm.

Perhaps you saw Adolescence on Netflix, that haunting picture of a world where verses like Ephesians 5 are twisted, taken completely out of context to justify control, where religion...

simply becomes another prop for power.

As one commenter said, it's men who want to feel important that are drawn in because they are told, well, this is what God wants, and you don't have to do anything but be a man.

Religion co-opted not for the worship of the gods,

Ivory couches, bowls of wine, fine wings, endless music, the performance of luxury, privilege, while the world outside breaks apart.

One line cuts through that noise in our reading.

You are not grieved over the ruin of Joseph.

If you remember one thing from the sermon this morning,

Perhaps it might be this.

You are not grieved over the ruin of Joseph.

Joseph is family language.

It takes us back to that story in Genesis or in Andrew or whether, depending on where you want to go.

Joseph sits weeping in a pit while his brothers sit down to eat a meal.

And Amos says,

That's you.

Comfort anaesthetises compassion.

Wealth drowns out the weeping outside the window.

It's what comfort does.

It muffles the cries we don't want to hear, those awkward proddings, that splinter in the mind that says this is not the way.

But it is easier.

And so, in verse 7, Amos hits the pivot.

You who call yourselves first will be the first into exile.

Whoops.

You kept telling everyone you were going to be first, and God goes, yeah, absolutely, have what you want.

Oh, this isn't what he wanted.

Well, I told you so.

Those who claim to be the best will discover what being first really means when God acts.

That party that was drowning out the cries of Joseph will fall silent.

And it's not divine pettiness.

This is not an unfair God.

This is moral logic.

Houses built on worshipping ourselves and overlooking those cries, they cannot stand.

We cannot hear without doing something about it.

We cannot have religion without repentance.

We cannot have comfort without compassion.

It would be like building a house on sand.

So perhaps we take a moment now to ask ourselves, where has our comfort, hidden from us, someone we were meant to see?

Whose cry have we tuned out?

Where have I insisted on being first?

See, Amos then moves to this oath.

I abhor the pride of Jacob, says the Lord.

See, the diagnosis is clear.

We've seen the symptoms.

The diagnosis is pride.

Pride that builds palaces and policies around itself.

Pride that mistakes God's patience for God's approval.

See, God does not oppose the proud because he's touchy.

He opposes pride because it destroys the world which he loves.

It disconnects us from reality.

It takes us away from justice and from each other until all that is left is rubble.

See, and then Amos, he paints that horrible horror story, doesn't he, in the middle there.

Ten people in a house, all dead.

One survivor desperately crawling to the back.

hoping he doesn't catch movement in the corner of his eye.

Eyes accustomed to the gloom and he hears his friend from out the front desperately cry, is there anyone left?

No one.

Hush.

Do not mention his name.

A people who once stabbed God is with us on the coins they carry.

now whisper, do not say his name.

That is the outcome of pride, an alienation from the God of love so deep that even prayer begins to feel dangerous.

See, when verse 11 then says, God will shatter the great house into fragments and the small house into bits,

not talking about buildings.

It's about societies.

It's about communities.

You see, when palaces fall, cottages rattle.

Leadership carries others with it, for good or for ill.

The question is, what leadership are we supporting?

See, Amos then gets playful with

Have you ever heard this thing, the oldest joke in the world?

Have you come across this?

So the oldest joke in the world is apparently from 2,000 years BC.

And the oldest joke in the world is, and I'll look this up, hang on, something which has never occurred since time immemorial, a young woman did not fart in her husband's lap.

No, I don't get it either.

I'm not sure this is a joke, right?

And

We say, oh, Amos is being playful.

Amos is being playful, but this is something we feel a little disconnected with.

But what he's saying is that, look, this is absurd.

These statements I'm making are just madness.

Do horses run on boulders?

No, of course they don't.

That would be silly.

Does oxen plough the sea?

Because that's the point.

It's nonsense.

It's meaningless.

Just like a society that has turned justice to be bitter or righteousness to be something sour.

It's nonsense.

They've even began to boast about their victories.

Lodabah, which sort of means nothing, and Kanaim, which means strength.

They brag about winning nothing through their own strength, and they still don't notice what they're doing.

See, pride writes the story so that we make ourselves the heroes.

Pride writes the story so that we are always the main character.

And God is just in the background, so.

And of course, then in verse 14, we land from Lebahmat, which was right at the very north.

Amos is showing us again through geography what he's trying to tell us.

To the Wadi Arabah in the very south.

From the very north to the very south.

From Alpha to Omega.

From A to Z. Total defeat.

The map of their pride has become their downfall.

Well, our world is still fairly complacent.

I think we are now moving to an age where we believe it is built on algorithms, systems that are designed to soothe and predict and personalise our every desire until we live in our own little bubbles of pride.

See, the algorithm does not ask us to act, it just wants us to scroll.

It flatters us, pretending that we have choice,

while quietly discipling us into passivity.

It convinces us that ease is the goal, and that attention, compassion or repentance are just too costly.

We are lulled into a kind of drowsiness.

We are convinced that we can do nothing about it.

Who am I to change the world?

Why should I recycle no one else?

Why should we worry about the climate?

No one else is.

It is not that we rebel against God, but it is that we have let another system begin to make decisions for us.

We have stopped hearing, we've stopped noticing, we've stopped grieving what we've lost.

To paraphrase Amos, you have postponed the evil day.

with your personalised field.

So what does it mean to listen to Amos as a prophet in the algorithmic age?

There's a lady called Kate Ott.

She talks about a thing called ethical hacking.

She's a wonderful theologian.

She says that we can creatively disrupt these systems that make us complacent.

We can hack those habits that are meant to numb our hearts

We can retrain ourselves for attention, for compassion, for justice.

We can put Jesus back at the centre.

And so from Amos, I think maybe there's some things we could do.

We could hack our complacency, sisters and brothers.

The leaders of Israel were at ease postponing the day of reckoning.

And our screens, they can do something similar now.

They aim to soothe an outrageous and equal measure, keeping us always in the present and never reflecting.

So maybe we need a kind of digital Sabbath.

Not a nostalgic thing where we say smartphones are the problem, let's get rid of them.

But a time where we set it aside and ask ourselves, who am I not seeing?

Whose cry have I missed?

Attention is how we begin to wake up.

And then perhaps we can have our indifference and recover our compassion.

Amos saw people lying on their ivory beds while their neighbours were completely penniless, starving.

What might that look like for us?

Maybe it's the comfort of our routines, our church habits or our hobbies.

Perhaps we could run a visibility audit for our community.

Who's missing on our posters?

Who's not part of our conversations?

Who's not in the pews on a Sunday morning?

Whose stories are we not representing?

Compassion begins by noticing.

And then we can hack observity, nothingness.

We can recover righteousness.

Because Amos says turning justice bitter is as absurd as sprinting horses over boulders or running oxen over the sea.

So sisters and brothers, let us imagine.

Let us get creative.

Let us make sure our words and our meetings and our ministries reflect a kingdom that values people over image.

Every act of justice, however small, it begins to chisel the world back into the shape that God meant it to be in.

And perhaps we can hack isolation.

When crisis came, Amos says, the people were silent and alone.

See, pride isolates, but obedience it gathers.

How might we use our homes, our church spaces, our skills,

Perhaps you are wonderful at teaching.

Perhaps you have a skill at cooking.

Perhaps you are brilliant at mentoring or accounting or running a small business or talking to people or making coffee.

Maybe you make the best garibaldi biscuits in the world.

We're meant to be building together.

And finally, what does it look like to recover control, to curate those online bubbles we live in?

Well look, every like, every share, every comment, it tells the algorithm what we want to amplify.

And that algorithm, it wants us to hate each other.

Not because it's evil, but because that's how it makes money.

What does it look like if we go into that place as followers of Christ?

What does it look like if we go in there and we share what lifts up Christ and honors others?

What does it look like if we go in there to confuse the algorithm?

Go and shake it up.

Go and push ourselves into places where people look differently or speak differently from us.

Celebrate the good.

Amplify and share voices of grace.

Because each of these hacks is just another word for discipleship.

for hearing and doing and building on the rock.

You see, Amos names the leaders first because it's the leaders who set the tone.

And each of us leads somewhere.

In our homes, in our workplaces, in our friendships.

And so maybe Amos tells us four things.

Maybe Amos says that we shall not be content

decay so we can prioritize care over comfort and seek peace with god upon his terms and not on them we can give those triumphs back to god remembering who gave them in the first place and look maybe this all feels quite heavy if you see yourself in those ivory beds or those endless scrolls or this feels too much

The gospel doesn't say we're meant to become rock.

It says the rock has rolled away and Jesus has come to us.

On the cross, the only perfectly built house is torn down to our level.

It becomes accessible.

And in the resurrection, Jesus rebuilds on our foundations.

Repentance is not building those in our life.

It is allowing Jesus to build

Maybe we can sum up Amos 6 like this.

In verse 1, complacency.

By verse 6, comfort.

By verse 10, collapse.

By verse 13, correction.

And by grace and through Christ, the possibility of reconciliation.

could begin together.

So when the rains fall and the winds rise and they will