Preached at Christ Church, Worton
James 1.17-27; Mark 7.1-8, 14, 15, 21-23
“…let everyone be quick to listen, slow to speak, slow to anger…”
Angry people click. If there’s a catchphrase that captures the nervous mood of the 2020s, it’s that one. On the Internet, and on our TV screens, there is a brutal competition for our attention and our time. With thousands of articles and programmes available to us at the touch of a button, websites and TV channels have to find ways of getting people to read or watch their content rather than any of the myriad alternatives.

Self-Portrait (The Angry One) by Ferdinand Holder (1880-81), Hangs in the Kunstmuseum Basel, Switzerland.
There are various high arousal emotions that, if the right words trigger them in us, make us particularly prone to clicking on a link or watching a programme. Excitement, joy, and fear are all examples. But the most powerful of all is anger—if an editor can create a headline or a twenty-word synopsis that makes us angry, we are far more likely to read or watch their stuff; and that means the advertising revenue comes in to pay their wages.
How does it feel to live in a world where people constantly need to make us feel angry, or at least in some other sort of emotionally heightened state, to pay the bills? Look around you. Switch on the news. We are left feeling, permanently, that we are on the edge of some sort of civilisational crisis.
It’s tempting to think this started as some sort of nefarious plan by the dark lords of the Internet to make the world a worse place. But that wasn’t what happened at all. Around the turn of the century, the Internet put a tool into the hands of news editors and publishers that they’d never had before – they could try out different headlines and see which one brought most visitors to their website. Headlines that made people angry were often particularly effective. Then towards the end of the 2000s, social media emerged, powered by its algorithms that just worked out what content got people to spend longer on their platform, entirely blind to what the content was let alone the emotions it aroused.
The Internet is many things, and one of those things is a big mirror reflecting our instant, often unchosen, emotional reactions back at us. What they reveal about us isn’t particularly pretty. It turns out that we human beings have plenty of dark aspects to our character, even before we reflect on the way we seem to spontaneously form tribes and mobs. You might even say it confirms the doctrine of original sin.
Anger has a power. It tends to overwhelm other emotions, and crowd out reason. Anger demands our attention. Perhaps that’s why St James warns his readers in today’s epistle to be “slow to anger; for your anger does not produce God’s righteousness.”
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