Poolesville Presbyterian Church
02.28.16; Rev. Dr. David Williams
Scripture Lesson: Isaiah 55:1-9
I’m a gamer. It’s a strange new world, a peculiar new art and form of storytelling, one that’s remarkably complex and ever evolving.
Eve:Online, if you're not aware of it, is a science fiction game. Players construct spacecraft, which then explore, mine and trade...and battle over territory. It's wildly complex, with a steep learning curve and a deep level of sophistication. I've been tempted, on and off over the years, to get into it...but it feels like the sort of thing that would disappear me from the real world.
Over 500,000 people play it on a regular basis, and the coupling of in-game currency and real world dollars means that Eve has now become a complex economy in and of itself.
This ain’t Candy Crush or Call of Duty, folks.
Eve: Online is dominated by a tyrant. Not a made up tyrant, either. A real dictator. Meaning, there is a single human being, a gamer who has risen to a position of political and economic control of a virtual empire whose holdings are worth millions of real-world dollars. His in game avatar name is The Mittani (an apparent reference to an obscure ancient Near Eastern empire), and as the leader of the Goonswarm, he is the single most powerful person in a virtual community of half a million souls.
Meaning he gives orders, and tens of thousands of actual human beings do what he says. He has a complex communications and administrative apparatus in place to maintain control. More significantly, he developed a sophisticated intelligence operation, spies and informers and moles in other coalitions, which he uses to dominate and intimidate. And by the thousands upon thousands, his subjects maintain his empire. He is a despotic warlord, by every measure of the term.
Some might giggle at this, because, well, shoot, it's a game.
But what the Mittani does is no more or less real than what the CEO of any midsized internet business does. He maintains control, directs activities, and can mobilize millions of dollars worth of resources towards a particular end.
That and motivate close to to twenty thousand people to follow him.
These are real people, choosing to play as the obedient subjects of a mildly sociopathic overlord. Choosing it. Uncoerced, they fight for him, create resources for him, create propaganda for the Goonswarm, spy for him, you name it.
That in and of itself is fascinating, and seems to speak directly to our current political funhouse. It would seem the kind of thing worthy of study by anthropologists and sociologists. But having recently gotten a doctorate in leadership dynamics, there was a spin on this tale that I found remarkable:
The Mittani does not actually play the game himself.
Meaning, the real human being who created this character never logs into the game's servers. He has an account, sure. But he does not use it.
He can't be directly impacted by actions in Eve: Online. His systems of command and control exist entirely outside of the game, on websites and forums where he coordinates his rule. It's metagaming, I suppose, playing the game above the game.
In corporate leadership literature, there is much talk of "being on the balcony," or being able to rise above your organization in order to effectively observe, direct and transform it. Leaders of this type influence a system, but they are not themselves a part of the system they control.
And what higher balcony could there be than not actually inhabiting the world you control?
The Mittani’s ways are not the ways of everyone else in Eve Online, which has a bizarre echo in today’s reading from the book of Isaiah.
Today’s section comes from what is known as Second Isaiah, which was written and preached over five hundred years before Christ by a prophet who followed the tradition of Isaiah. Its visions and proclamations do not describe a Hebrew people comfortably ensconced in Jerusalem and the temple, as do the first thirty-nine chapters. They assume that the Jewish people are shattered in the Babylonian exile, that they are slaves, that they are surrounded by the proud power of the world’s greatest empire.
What those enslaved people saw, around them, were some of the most impressive structures that humankind had ever built. They saw towers and gardens, wonders of the world. They saw great golden statues to strange and alien gods. They saw the force of arms of a mighty empire that dwarfed even the greatest aspirations of their people. In the hands of those who had enslaved them, all the power of the world seemed to reside.
There just seemed no way out of it.
It was hard. It seemed hopeless. People began to despair.
But the word from God that Isaiah proclaimed defied their hopelessness. It was a word of intense and shattering hope, a word that comes directly from the prophet’s sense of being anointed with the Spirit of the Living God. It’s a word of intense confidence in the power of God to bring about restoration.
For the oppressed and the brokenhearted and the captives, the prophet affirmed the devastation that they were experiencing. Yet in the face of their suffering...and in some way because of their suffering...the prophet declares that God’s love is infinitely greater than the powers of darkness that seemed so mighty all around them.
In this passage, he goes back to ancient promises to their ancestors, promises that were fulfilled. He acknowledges that they’re in a wasteland, and doesn’t mock their experience of suffering.
What he does do is put into the context of the Creator of the Universe. Look at everything you, Isaiah says. Look at it. The heavens? They are no more substantial than smoke before a strong wind. Those powerful people? Their lives are as short as the lives of tiny flies. And the seemingly tight knit power of the world? That comes apart like a Kmart tube sock on the foot of a teenage boy.
It’s a word that they needed to hear, and a word without which their hearts would have been too broken to continue. It’s also a word that many of us need to hear in the darker places of our lives, as many of us look fearfully out at the seemingly insurmountable power of the broken world around us.
{And here, I go off the cuff, because, well, it's good practice}
Let that be so, for you and for me, AMEN.
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