Prayer and the News
By: Pastor Aaron Syvertsen
“The difficult task of the prophet is to call God’s people to respond to the news of their day by the light of God’s eternal word.” Jeffrey Bilbo, Reading the Times
I often think about what it would be like to live the way much of the human race has lived across history: without a 24/7 news cycle. Imagine having to wait until evening when a single news anchor shared the headlines on a black and white tv, or until the next day when the newspaper came, or until the next month when your town received out-of-town news via telegram or letter.
Deep down, I know I don’t really want to go back in time because we can be guilty of having too nostalgic a view of the past (“everything was better back then” – it wasn’t), just like we can also be guilty of having too progressive a view of the future (“everything will get better going forward” – it won’t). Yet, I can’t help but think that in our day, when it comes to news consumption, the pendulum has swung too far in the other direction. News from local, regional, national, and global events occur in our pockets all throughout the day. As I sit and write at this moment, I am at any point just three seconds away from seeing the latest video, reading the latest update, and scrolling through the latest article.
At the core of it all, I know it’s not just the news cycle’s fault and how media companies are able to keep our attention on them, but it’s also my own propensity to always want to be in the know. It’s not emotionally or physically healthy to always go down the rabbit hole of media consumption, whether it be from breaking news, online debates, or hot takes on issues big and small. And yet, just choosing to disengage altogether from the news cycle is not healthy or realistic either. So, what do we do?
This dilemma is why when I came across a book recommendation called Reading the Times: A Literary and Theological Inquiry into the News by Jeffrey Bilbo, I bought it faster than my kids run to the kitchen when they hear a bag of M&Ms hit the bowl.
I highly recommend reading it, but for now, I’ll share how the concept of time impacts the way we view the news. Bilbo writes, “If we want to learn how to read the news Christianly, we’ll have to learn to tell time Christianly”.
Bilbo unpacked how the New Testament writers, inspired by the Holy Spirit, distinguished between two broad understandings of time via the Greek words kairos and chronos:
Kairos: Time that is right for a certain act – for example, the time to plant or harvest a crop. Kairos times is rhythmic, cyclical, and seasonal. What is happening in the here and now doesn’t disrupt the inevitable cycle of time. This can broadly be defined as “divine time”.
Chronos: This is closer to our modern understanding of time, as indicated by our English derivative in the word, chronological. This is time as a quantifiable duration, as something linear and sequential. Our modern news cycle is dominated by chronos, what is happening now. This can broadly be defined as “human time”.
A culture that overvalues kairos takes little stock in the news of the day because history is seen essentially in static terms, there is no possibility of news that would disrupt life’s inevitable cycles. The danger of overvaluing kairos is not entering into the happenings and sufferings of those whose lives get disrupted in a way where we can help.
A culture that overvalues chronos, which is where modern western culture finds itself, finds the current news cycle as the replacement for divine revelation. German philosopher G.W.F. Hegel said “Reading the morning newspaper is the realist’s morning prayer.” The danger of overvaluing chronos is the tendency to locate the significance of life in the context of current news feeds.
The beauty of the gospel and the person and work of Jesus Christ is that He stands at the intersection of kairos and chronos.
In kairos, the triune God is sovereignly reigning over all things. He is not disrupted in his character or controlled by the news cycle, and His plan for restoration cannot be thwarted. “But do not overlook this one fact, beloved, that with the Lord one day is as a thousand years, and a thousand years as one day. 9 The Lord is not slow to fulfill his promise as some count slowness, but is patient toward you, not wishing that any should perish, but that all should reach repentance.” (1 Peter 3:8-9).
In chronos, the triune God entered the human framework as the eternal Father sent the eternal Son to take on flesh and dwell among us. He inserted himself into a life bound by time, a time to be born, a time to live, and a time to die with the purpose of restoring and redeeming a fallen creation. “But when the fullness of time had come, God sent forth his Son, born of woman, born under the law, 5 to redeem those who were under the law, so that we might receive adoption as sons.” (Gal 4:4-5)
Bilbo writes that “the Word who created chronos stepped into the chronological history; hence, the mundane events of chronos now participate in the holy significance of kairos.”
With this concept of time in mind then, how can we think Christianly about prayer and the news today? If you’re like me, you may struggle when you see the increasing rage toward those who post “praying for ____” after a tragic event, and at the same time, you understand the sentiment that at some point, robust discussion about real action is needed.
I don’t have this figured out, but I’d like to suggest two misguided ways Christians engage the news and finish with offering a better approach.
1) Careless Avoidance
It is virtually impossible to physically avoid the news cycle, but it’s very possible to emotionally avoid it. Anytime we see it on our phones or hear someone bring it up in conversation, we have an emotional “off” button in our minds. We just keep scrolling or put the phone away, or if in conversation, we give short, one-word answers in response and quickly find the off-ramp to that dialogue as fast as possible.
Maybe we’ll write a short “thoughts and prayers” post to show some solidarity but more so
for the good optics of making it look like we care, but with no real intention to follow through and actually, pray.
Careless avoidance can be cloaked in language that we’re just trusting God and He is in control, and while true, it is often used as an excuse to resist thinking about, praying for, and empathizing with those who are suffering. It goes without saying that this approach of avoidance is only tenable as long as we don’t find ourselves in the middle of the news cycle ourselves.
The sovereignty of God should bring comfort, not carelessness. The fact that God is not controlled by the news cycle doesn’t mean that He (and we) don’t care about the news cycle. The posture of the people of God who reflect his character is to move towards those who are hurting.
2) Aimless Consumption
The other end of the spectrum is to fill our days consuming the news cycle and all the discussion surrounding it online. In aimless consumption, the first thing we do in the morning is look at our phone to check the latest headlines, or what has happened since we went to bed, and the last thing we do before we fall asleep is scroll through all the hot takes on what happened that day.
Here, the ease in which we can consume impacts the amount we consume. We follow it intensely, because we can, and there isn’t much more critical thought beyond that. The news feed is always more interesting than the Bible to us in this mentality because it’s always changing. There’s always a new update, or new voice chiming in, and we need to know. We start to get anxious when life keeps us from the news cycle, and I haven’t refreshed my feed in the last 30 minutes, or 2 hours, or heaven forbid, a whole afternoon.
The consumption never ends with information about events, but it evolves into opinion and choosing sides of an argument after an event based on political ideology, and we form good guys and bad guys amongst the people we follow. Social media turns more into a game, using tragedy as a way for a team to score points against a different team as long as a certain news headline or national tragedy aligns with our perspective on the world.
In this approach, we find eventually that we are no longer consuming the news, but the news is consuming us.
3) Purposeful Engagement: A Better Way
With these two misguided ways of engaging with the news cycle laid out, both of which I can be guilty of depending on the topic and season, is there a better way? I think so.
Bilbo offers a penetrating question to set us up for where we ought to be: What do we need to attend to in order to live faithfully in this place and in this time?
We can’t do it all, and we certainly can’t know everything there is to know. Therefore, we need help and power from the Spirit to discern, as Bilbo goes on, “what contemporary affairs we as Christians should seek to attend to as citizens of heaven who have been called to love our neighbors here and now. What do we need to know to love our neighbors well?”
This mentality will prioritize the reaction of prayer, not only to pray for those in need but to also settle our own hearts and spirit in us amid an anxious age, and it will serve as the fuel for action that the Lord is calling us to make. Faithful, desperate prayer leads to loving, selfless action.
Tish Harrison Warren, an Anglican minister who writes a newsletter for the NY Times, went to Uvalde, Texas to speak with pastors and citizens within the town stricken by tragedy. She wrote about what prayer means for Uvalde, and while millions of people are posting “we don’t need your thoughts and prayers” from their couches and smartphones, Warren was on the ground and saw it a different way.
“Prayer is what gave men and women strength as they helped search for missing children and sat with grieving neighbors. Prayer is what led a Methodist church to make sure kids have a place to play games all summer. Prayer is what encouraged a church to offer beds to homeless men and women. It moved them to make a cross, and the Wongs to drive across Texas to leave a note of encouragement to a town in crisis. Prayer is what allowed this small community to come together, to plan and hold a vigil, to mourn… Uvalde is grieving and heartbroken. Some want a revival. Some want mental health services. Some want gun control. But every single person I talked to agreed on one thing: They could use your thoughts and prayers.”
Christians will be led by the Spirit in different ways when it comes to taking action in response to the news cycle. Some will be called to comfort and help those suffering, others will be called to start and lead healthy discussions online, and still others will be in positions to influence or make decision at organizational levels to bring about lasting policy changes. But we all can pray, and we all can walk in our calling to discern what we need to know to glorify God and love our neighbor well.
We can do this, we can cross the divide between kairos time and chronos time, between the divine clock and the human clock, because God did it first when he took on flesh and dwelt among us. “We love, because he first loved us” (1 John 4:19). By His Spirit within us, we can hold the tension of prayer and the news with purposeful engagement, full of compassion and courage. The church that does this will surely shine bright in a dark world, so let it shine in the way you engage with the news.