A Prophetic Community

A Sermon preached at St Martin-in-the-Fields on September 27, 2026 by Revd Dr Sam Wells Reading for address: Matthew 21: 23-32 Until lately Ed Sheeran was in the David Attenborough category of global cuddly bears. The most edgy thing he’d ever said was ‘I’m more famous than Beyoncé.’ But that all changed three weeks ago, when in front of 90,000 fans in a stadium in New Jersey during his world tour, his support act Macklemore made a speech before his set describing the Israeli state’s actions in Gaza a genocide and calling for a Free Palestine. It soon became clear that the owners of multiple venues due to host the tour were not prepared to tolerate such remarks, so the promoters dropped Macklemore from the show. Ed Sheeran then issued a statement he wanted the tour to be non-political. Ed Sheeran’s other support acts promptly announced they couldn’t go against their consciences and immediately withdrew, making the tour unsustainable. Ed Sheeran had gone from global motherhood-and-apple-pie megastar to toxic brand in the course of a weekend. There followed a sequence where Macklemore, Sheeran and the best-known of the hostile stadium owners all announced seven-figure donations to regional humanitarian causes, in a performative lunge for the moral high ground. A week later, in a stadium in Philadelphia, with his reputation on the line and career teetering, Ed Sheeran read a carefully worded statement that October 7 ‘was horrific and compounded centuries of Jewish pain,’ but that ‘what is happening in Gaza is catastrophic and unjustifiable, and disproportionate.’ This has halted the haemorrhage of returned tickets for now and got his tour back on track. I want to think about how this story is a parable of how authority works in our society today. Before I do that, I want to tell a story that explains why authority is such a fraught issue in our world today. The story comes in six chapters, each of which has a date. The first date is 1440. In 1440 Johannes Gutenberg invented the printing press. The printing press meant you could have books, and soon pamphlets, and eventually newspapers. There could be authorities other than senior clergy and rulers. The second date is 1517. In 1517 Martin Luther said you shouldn’t trust the Catholic church, even though it had the authority of learning, political power and succession way back to St Peter; instead, you should trust the Bible, and, since the translation of the scripture into the vernacular, you should read the Bible for yourself. This was a transformation from paternalistic authority to individual authority. It was a slow-burn, because literacy and education were not yet widespread. But it was a revolution; and its effects are still felt today. The third date is 1776. In 1776 the American revolutionaries invented something called the People. They got the idea from Enlightenment thinkers, but they were the first to legislate the notion that authority lay with the majority of adults in any one country. Granted their notion of the People only included white male landed men. Nonetheless, what 1517 did to upset ideological authority, 1776 did to undermine political authority. The fourth date is 1989, when Tim Berners-Lee invented the World Wide Web. Since printing had been invented and publishing become possible, knowledge had nonetheless remained largely in the hands of gatekeepers who made decisions on what was worthy of publication, on intellectual, social or market grounds. The internet blew that cartel apart. Anybody could put anything on the web. The gates had been breached. No one got to say any opinion was untenable. The fifth date is 2005, when social media began in earnest. The difference now is that whereas all kinds of things were uploaded onto the internet, no one necessarily knew they were there. With social media there’s a new dynamic: you can be bombarded with information you haven’t gone looking for. It can be manipulated according to algorithms to target you by identifying your interests or history. Hence talk of foreign countries influencing elections and allegations of fake news as provocative stories are generated to attract clicks and outrage. The sixth date is 2022, when generative AI began to be widely used. The difference now is you can’t be sure if the person seeking out your support, custom or friendship is actually a person at all, or a robot. You don’t know if anything you’re being told really happened or if anyone you’ve never met really exists. The fact that three of these six key dates cluster in the last 40 years tells us that in recent decades the crisis of authority has gone from chronic to acute, and constitutes one of the key issues of our time. Now see how this six-chapter story bears on the Ed Sheeran farrago. The paternalists are divided: the United Nations says Gaza is a genocide; the United States insists it isn’t. So Macklemore takes Luther’s view and trusts his own conscience. Let the People decide. But who are the People? Those in the stadium seemed to give his remarks a positive reception. The venue owners and promoters, not so much: they suggested he was giving a one-sided view of a complex issue. The internet has all kinds of information on it, and the desire to control information in a democracy is a fool’s game. But when it comes to social media, a demand for artists whose expertise is musical performance to have clear and well-informed views on political questions can become irresistible, since solo singers are the most admired figures of our day. When you add in AI, the prevailing mood of cynicism and suspicion inhibits any sense of trust that those involved are acting from the simple pure motives they claim to express. Naïveté, market forces, virtue-signalling and manipulation are a heady cocktail, and justice is hard to find. See how this encounter in Matthew 21 crystallises all these questions of authority. By entering Jerusalem, Jesus comes onto the territory of the social, political, economic, cultural, and spiritual authorities of his day. Their domination is made up of force, status, birth, gender, wealth and connections. They recognise that Jesus has embarked on a programme of teaching, forgiving, and healing in Galilee, and, in just the last few days, of dramatic entry, acclaim by crowds, and overturning of the moneychangers’ tables. Understandably they take this as a threat to their domination. They say, ‘Who are you to do all this?’ Jesus asks them where John the Baptist got his authority. Interpreters generally take this to be a clever dodge, because Jesus knew they didn’t want to become unpopular by criticising John. But there’s more going on than just this. This was a media furore like the Macklemore controversy today; and Jesus’ response may be telling us about where true authority lies. Prophecy plays a big role in the Old Testament. It doesn’t indicate predicting the future. It refers to three things. The first is speaking the truth of God in a situation where the prevailing wisdom, whether from those in power, those with influence, or the people more broadly, is saying something different. The second is to harness one’s perception of that truth to one’s own existence and destiny. Many Old Testament prophets faced social ostracism, physical violence and even death for highlighting an inconvenient and unfashionable truth. The third is to make this a bigger story. A prophet must also seek to retell the story of a situation in ways that point to a restorative, life-giving and shared future. It’s not enough to denounce and expose; it needs to be in the context of a constructive vision in which everyone flourishes. By talking about John the Baptist, Jesus isn’t just wriggling out of a tricky press conference: he’s saying this is how prophets function; this is where authority lies. In his remarks in New Jersey, Macklemore praised the Columbia University students who jeopardised their diplomas, tuition, and scholarships to make a stand about Gaza. This points to the second kind of prophetic authority: the prophet is prepared to harness their existence and destiny to the message they’re conveying. Authority lies in what it costs you. There’s a difference between anonymous denouncing on social media and putting your financial status, professional future and physical well-being on the line. It also points to the first kind of prophetic authority: the willingness to go against the grain, in this case of their government and university leadership. But it’s harder in the Sheeran controversy to see the other kind of prophetic authority – the ability to cast a vision of future of shared flourishing and genuine hope. A bland call for peace and love, for all to be treated with dignity, respect and equality, isn’t quite enough to qualify as prophecy – or authority. All of which may not bring us closer to what a truly hopeful future for the Holy Land might look like. But it may help us identify where the authority of Jesus resides. Jesus didn’t cynically say authority lies with staying in with the socially and politically powerful; he didn’t say everyone should simply be their own arbiter of truth and falsehood; he didn’t naively believe some phenomenon called the People was always right; he didn’t subscribe to the power of what we now call social media but used to call mob rule. By contrast, he told a story that had the same characters as the prevailing story but put truth instead of lies, goodness in place of selfishness and beauty instead of cynicism. He put his own body in the trajectory of the story he told, making himself subject to hostility, betrayal, desertion and ultimately agonising death. And he cast a vision of a bigger story that included everyone, honoured those who believed they were his enemies, and offered an everlasting future. Why do we follow Jesus? Because he spoke the truth, lived the truth, and showed the truth. Because he told us the truth about the past, embodied the truth about the present, and inspired the truth about the future. It’s because of the way he lived that we trust the words he spoke. It’s because of the words he spoke that we understand the things he did. It’s because of the things he did that we can see that we believe in the Father to whom he pointed who we can not see. It’s because of the wonder of the life he portrayed that we can recognise the work of the Spirit who generates that life around us. Which is how we become people of authority and a community of authority today. We dare to tell a story that diverges from the prevailing assumptions of our society. We put our skin in the game, and tie our own wellbeing and destiny to the story we’re embodying. And we tell a bigger story that offers a vision not just for our friends but for the people who oppose and oppress us. That’s how Jesus did it. That’s how we’re called to do it. That’s how we become his body in his world.