There is an episode of the 1980s sit com Yes Prime Minister that has the three main characters chatting about some dastardly leak that has taken place. After the Prime Minister has gone on about how terrible it is, Bernard, the more junior civil servant, retorts that this is one of those ministerial irregular verbs: “I give a confidential press briefing, you leak, he is prosecuted under the Official Secrets Act!” In a one-liner, the writers have managed to expose layers of hypocrisy and double standards, they have pointed to what has now become almost an epidemic.

Our newspapers and news reports are full of kiss and tell stories about celebrity private lives. In politics they give us well briefed supposition about what has gone on in the background. Anyone leaving a high profile office seems to reach for their diaries to dish the dirt. It is regarded as a pension scheme and is probably more reliable than most other pension schemes seem to be at the moment.

To many new depths were plumbed by a Daily Mirror reporter getting a job as a footman in Buckingham Palace. In the process he exposed astounding gaps in the security vetting of staff. For that his story was in the public interest, but pictures of private bedrooms and snippets of the Queen feeding the corgis pieces of toast under the breakfast table while the Duke of Edinburgh listens to the radio, may be of interest to the public, but they are an invasion of privacy.

The thought that struck me with all of this is that keeping confidences and holding confidentiality has been debased. I am left wondering if there is anyone that those in the media eye can actually trust to tell their inner most secrets and thoughts to. Anything said today could easily appear in print a few years, or days, down the line. Can anyone trust anyone any more?

We should be grateful that there are many clergy and lay people who are told things that would be highly marketable and yet keep silence. If the church were to lose its reputation for being able to hold confidences then it would lose so much more than any cheque could compensate for. In this, while we swim against the tide in one area, we also swim with it in another. I remember some years ago being at the middle of a high profile funeral with the inevitable media circus. With microphones stuffed under my nose I said I that I wasn’t going to talk about personal details and what surprised me was how quickly the journalists took it and backed off. It was as if my reply that confidences meant confidences was reassuring to them and it was as if there was a clearing in the fog of cynicism. As far as I am aware, the Vicar of Soham has said nothing publicly that anyone with two eyes couldn’t have worked out for themselves. He makes sensitive statements, but doesn't actually given any personal details away.

If our real god is money, then everything has a price and everyone’s confidences just become a commodity for sale. Integrity has no value. If we are desperate for the lime light then knowledge is power and attracts attention, and the currency is the opportunity to be the centre of attention for a while. It is the morality of a one night stand because the attention evaporates with the hangover as does the self respect! With this debasing comes a cynicism that has a corrosive effect on us.

Of course this does not mean that there is not a proper place for whistle blowing. Where we try to use keeping confidences as a smokescreen for a cover up and hiding corruption then we abuse the whole notion of keeping confidences. And we should remember the double standards of that irregular verb in Yes Prime Minister, where one gives an off the record briefing, another leaks and still another is prosecuted. Holding confidences applies all round and those who live by the media can die by it too!

Our readings this morning (Jeremiah 33:14-16; Luke 21:25-36) were about being expectant, about looking forward to the fulfilment of promise to come. The gospel reading set this in a context of the world about us falling apart and losing its way. Well, there can’t be many generations where that hasn’t seemed relevant. But the relevance here seems to be about the length of our vision and setting our parameters that much broader. Being expectant means having our vision set on the horizon and the dawning sunrise of hope and this makes a tremendous difference. The writers of these passages were not bogged down in cynicism and a culture of ‘grab what you can now while there is anything to grab because this is all there is’. Their expectation was rooted in being held by and in a bigger picture.

Advent is a time to renew this vision and hope in us. This is particularly important because it gets a battering from so much cynicism around us and values that are cynical in their shallow vision. There are two strands to this Advent hope. First, there is the looking forward to the celebration of Christ coming at Christmas; to the Old Testament themes and stories that feed our understanding of him. But there is another side to Advent and it moves us from clinging to the past to look expectantly to a future to come, at the fulfilment of promise. Christ who came 2,000 years ago will come again at the fulfilment of all things, at the end of time. There is something to look forward to and which therefore holds the present as well. The Christian faith is not about the past, it is about seeing the present in its bigger picture, a bigger picture that holds the past, the present and the future.

Our lives, the way we live our lives, are to be characterised by the graciousness and thanksgiving which this hope should engender. That can affect the way we hold confidences and also the degree to which we find it is right to blow the whistle. The deciding test for this is justice and a true concept of justice is rooted in something much bigger than the immediate and the transitory allure of being at the centre of attention.

There is a cynicism in our age that has its roots in a restricted vision and short-sightedness and it is corrosive. That needs the corrective lens of the Advent hope which holds our past, our present and our future. One aspect of this is the ability to look beyond the publicity and money we can get for selling our story to the hope that sets us in a bigger picture. Strangely many journalists expect this of us too. And in displaying these different assumptions we can set out a missionary challenge to the cynical.

© Ian Black 2003

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