“Now about spiritual gifts, brothers, I do not want you to be ignorant.2You know that when you were pagans, somehow or other you were influenced and led astray to mute idols. 3Therefore I tell you that no one who is speaking by the Spirit of God says, "Jesus be cursed," and no one can say, "Jesus is Lord," except by the Holy Spirit.
4There are different kinds of gifts, but the same Spirit. 5There are different kinds of service, but the same Lord. 6There are different kinds of working, but the same God works all of them in all men.
7Now to each one the manifestation of the Spirit is given for the common good. 8To one there is given through the Spirit the message of wisdom, to another the message of knowledge by means of the same Spirit, 9to another faith by the same Spirit, to another gifts of healing by that one Spirit, 10to another miraculous powers, to another prophecy, to another distinguishing between spirits, to another speaking in different kinds of tongues,[a] and to still another the interpretation of tongues.[b]11All these are the work of one and the same Spirit, and he gives them to each one, just as he determines.
12The body is a unit, though it is made up of many parts; and though all its parts are many, they form one body. So it is with Christ. 13For we were all baptized by[c] one Spirit into one body—whether Jews or Greeks, slave or free—and we were all given the one Spirit to drink.
14Now the body is not made up of one part but of many. 15If the foot should say, "Because I am not a hand, I do not belong to the body," it would not for that reason cease to be part of the body. 16And if the ear should say, "Because I am not an eye, I do not belong to the body," it would not for that reason cease to be part of the body. 17If the whole body were an eye, where would the sense of hearing be? If the whole body were an ear, where would the sense of smell be? 18But in fact God has arranged the parts in the body, every one of them, just as he wanted them to be. 19If they were all one part, where would the body be? 20As it is, there are many parts, but one body.
21The eye cannot say to the hand, "I don't need you!" And the head cannot say to the feet, "I don't need you!" 22On the contrary, those parts of the body that seem to be weaker are indispensable, 23and the parts that we think are less honorable we treat with special honor. And the parts that are unpresentable are treated with special modesty,24while our presentable parts need no special treatment. But God has combined the members of the body and has given greater honor to the parts that lacked it, 25so that there should be no division in the body, but that its parts should have equal concern for each other. 26If one part suffers, every part suffers with it; if one part is honored, every part rejoices with it.
27Now you are the body of Christ, and each one of you is a part of it. 28And in the church God has appointed first of all apostles, second prophets, third teachers, then workers of miracles, also those having gifts of healing, those able to help others, those with gifts of administration, and those speaking in different kinds of tongues. 29Are all apostles? Are all prophets? Are all teachers? Do all work miracles? 30Do all have gifts of healing? Do all speak in tongues[d]? Do all interpret? 31But eagerly desire[e] the greater gifts.” St. Paul, 1st Letter to the Corinthians, Chapter 12
I’ll only be brief, because Paul really unveils the nature of our togetherness so beautifully. All I can do is gesture to the salient features of the passage.
We have a culture where uniqueness and difference is only thought to emerge from individualism. Whatever benefits or security community may offer, the price must always be one’s special, particular identity. The group, the crowd (we assume) just swallows that up. Paul teaches us here that this way of thinking about togetherness and uni que-ness is, in short, total bullshit.
Rather, our uniqueness finds its fertile soil in the community indwelling with the Spirit. The individual identities of organs and appendages in the body have their identity by their relationship with each other in the whole complex system of the body. So it is for us as Christians. Our identities shrivel and die like severed limbs when we are cut off from the working of the whole body. Fleeing from our communities seems like the way to ensure our individual self, but in fact achieves the opposite effect. The grand mystery of human social life is that the deeper we dive into authentic community, the more our uniqueness finds articulation, finds its value.
So, what does this mean for our little experiment in Christian life? I think we can indicate a handful of anticipations along these lines as well.
For one, it means showing up bravely in the belief that togetherness is ultimately good for us. I’m sure that sounds, on the face of it like a step that could be assumed or left out. It is, instead, perhaps the hardest. To really be present, to really donate yourself in all the invisible ways to the community of others, to not hold out some private room at the back of your heart… well, it requires a super-natural courage. It requires the support of the Spirit.
After all, people are scary. And dangerous.
Secondly, I think it involves a further kind of self-confidence that has two sides. On one side, there is the self-confidence that allows me to be a hand or a foot or an eye or a nose with out worrying that, because I am not some other thing, I am therefore separate from the body. This is a confidence and a courage to be that weird, unique thing that God has made and promises to use for the good of all things. On the other hand, there is the self-confidence that allows OTHERS to be the appendage of the body that they are. We have to let folks have their convictions, their purposes, their gifts without demanding that their nose-ness become like our eye-ness. For, if all were the seeing, where would the smelling be? Rather, we ought to rejoice that God has given those passions, those gifts, those callings that are not our own, so that we may rest in the confidence that, together, the work of the Kingdom is being done in cooperation with our God
This “self-confidence,” of course is a confidence in the self that the Spirit offers to me, as opposed to some sort of epiphenomenal isolated self defined by consumerism or empty accomplishment, or alternately, the self of self-loathing and self-centered fear and obsession. As JD and I have said we often identify as the “piece of shit at the center of the universe.”
Rather, in academic speak, we can say that as Christians we have an authentic pluralism grounded in a shared identity that is not an individually determining identity. We can share an identity and not just tolerate, but rely upon and celebrate internal difference.
Now, forget all the stuff I just told you and go back and re-read Corinthians 12. Let the truth of it wash all that individualism/collectivism dichotomy-think out of your mind.
Wednesday, April 28, 2010
Wednesday, April 14, 2010
Getting Started
So, I read Blue Like Jazz along with everyone else and I just wasn't that impressed. The story about the Reed College confessional booths was pretty cool, but otherwise the "Wait, Christians can be Democrats!?" vibe turned me off. And he seemed like an anti-intellectual, which threatened me as a toddler-like intellectual. JD reads his blog and suggested I do the same. You might have noticed, I'm a big JD-fan, so I sucked up my prejudice and went for it. I still don't quite see what everyone gets so excited about, except that Don seems like a genuine, honest dude just trying to figure out what it means to live in Jesus' world on Jesus' terms. His blog post today about exercise does a WAY better job than I could ever do of illustrating our general anticipation of how to go about embracing radical Christian, abundant, Kingdom living.
It starts by relaxing into the grace into the fact that we're still just beginners, and God's grace means that, in a certain sense, as long as we show up everyday listening, everything else is extra.
But I'll let Don tell you what he means:
Dave (my personal trainer friend) explained to me, though, that if I showed up at the gym and got my heart rate up for twenty minutes, I’d worked out. He said I needed to do that every day, and if I did, I had nothing to feel guilty about. He then told me to come back the next day, and we’d do the same workout, only increase it a little bit. The next day we rode for twenty minutes and he congratulated me on working out two days in a row. Then he asked if I wanted to do anything extra. I did, of course, so we ended up doing a mildly difficult workout with weights. Within a month, Dave was working me out so hard I once had to stop him and ask if I could go out in the alley behind the gym to throw up. And no kidding, he moved the rest of the workout into the alley so I wouldn’t throw up on his floor. But he kept working me out, always reminding me that what we were doing was extra, that I’d already finished my workout.
Go check out Don Miller's blog here
It starts by relaxing into the grace into the fact that we're still just beginners, and God's grace means that, in a certain sense, as long as we show up everyday listening, everything else is extra.
But I'll let Don tell you what he means:
Dave (my personal trainer friend) explained to me, though, that if I showed up at the gym and got my heart rate up for twenty minutes, I’d worked out. He said I needed to do that every day, and if I did, I had nothing to feel guilty about. He then told me to come back the next day, and we’d do the same workout, only increase it a little bit. The next day we rode for twenty minutes and he congratulated me on working out two days in a row. Then he asked if I wanted to do anything extra. I did, of course, so we ended up doing a mildly difficult workout with weights. Within a month, Dave was working me out so hard I once had to stop him and ask if I could go out in the alley behind the gym to throw up. And no kidding, he moved the rest of the workout into the alley so I wouldn’t throw up on his floor. But he kept working me out, always reminding me that what we were doing was extra, that I’d already finished my workout.
Go check out Don Miller's blog here
Tuesday, April 13, 2010
Quantitively Less; Qualitatively More
This whole discussion has been about a conversion from one way of (imperial) life to another way of (kingdom) life. Though we have a story that gives us images of what that kingdom life has looked like in the past, the version specific to our moment in history doesn’t exist yet.
It has to be anticipated
Then, it has to be imagined.
And then enacted.
And then, after a little while, it has to be re-evaluated and re-imagined and re-enacted. It really is going to be a way of life. A full-time job, if you will.
Our First Anticipation?
Well it starts with an evaluation of the state of things: in certain ways, we are afflicted with affluence.
Accosted by our clutter.
Our freedom of choice has made it for us such that every desire is just as valuable as every other. This is nihilism. Everything has equal value, so nothing has any value. This is as true of our material possessions as it is of our responsibilities and commitments. We’ve got lots of stuff and we’ve got lots of stuff going on. The more we get, the less meaningful any particular thing is. We’ve got an abundance in quantity, but a poverty in quality.
So, we anticipate a way of life that has quantitatively less, but qualitatively more.
We’re pretty sure that in order to make it in the Wilderness and live this Kingdom lifestyle, we’ve got to do so with less. Less money. Fewer obligations. Less stuff. Fewer distractions. With what’s left, we’ll hope to give (and get) more. More time. More attention. More effort. More love. We want a simpler, but richer, life.
Quantitatively less, but qualitatively more.
In practice, this will be hard for people to understand. We will get less done. We’ll reach fewer people. We’ll make less ‘progress.’ You just can’t achieve very much this way.
However, we’ve been discovering, as we grow up more, that doing things well, doing things right, requires time and attention, patience and perseverance. I’ve learned this concretely in my stay-sane-in-graduate-school hobby of baking. If you rush, you’ll screw up your measurements. If you don’t set out enough time, you’re bread won’t rise correctly. If you skimp on the quality of your ingredients, things won’t taste right. If you don’t make the same recipe again and again, lovingly examining your results each time and being honest about the product, you’ll never get that really transcendent muffin. That remarkable chocolate chip cookie.
The Empire doesn’t reward this. It’s inefficient. The American Empire, after all, is the civilization that brought us the Twinky. Cheap. Mass produced. High volume. Flavorless. And really, really bad for you.
No, we don’t want fast, cheap, plentiful and busy. We want intentional, rich, selective and deliberate.
We want to do and have less, more richly.
In order to make “doing and having less, more richly” work, we’re going to have to do it together. In fact, if we have one beef with how John the Baptist did his thing, its that he went out there alone. Maybe he was just a more robust guy than the two of us, but we know that if we went out there alone, we wouldn’t last a second. We’d be slinking back through the gates of the city, a little embarrassed and with a couple of good stories, but we’d have left Abundant life out there in the woods. It’s just too much to do alone, especially when the Empire’s store rooms are full of sugary Twinkies and Tempur-pedic mattresses and cool cell phones.
This has practical concerns. We can divide costs. Those who are thriving can support those who are struggling. We can fill some of the gaps created by our retreat from a frantic complexity into a richer simplicity. There are spiritual concerns as well. God, for us weird-o Christians is a community: the unity of three persons. If we want to come to be more like God, it means we have to come together into loving communities. Paul understands this when he talks about the church as the Body of Christ, which shares the Spirit but is diverse in its gifts.
So, just to review: we’re seeking to live with less, more richly, together.
A note: What we’re talking about is not just asceticism. We’re not looking to sacrifice for sacrifice’s sake. Sure, some things will have to be sacrificed, but for an ulterior purpose, whether to make space for richer things or because they are incongruent with the story we’re trying to live. Yes, Jesus told the rich young ruler who was obedient in other respects to sell all he owned, give it to the poor and follow him. But that same Jesus praised the woman who “wasted” a bunch of really, incredibly expensive luxury perfume on his filthy, desert-walking feet. The same Jesus made really, really good wine for a bunch of wedding-party-ers already so drunk that they probably didn’t even notice.
When Jesus promises abundant life in the kingdom, he warns about its cost, but he also offers an easy yoke, a light burden and probably more than a couple really excellent all night dance parties.
Okay, I don’t know where he promises dance parties, but if they happen to break out after we eat some godly, eucharistic, sharing, communal meal, I think Jesus would be down.
Do us a favor? In the comments, day dream with us a little about what, if you tried to live with quantitatively less, but qualitatively more, what sort of stuff you’d sacrifice? And then, more importantly, what sort of thing(s) would you focus on, deliberately and abundantly?
Godspeed.
Next Time: What’s the structure of our “togetherness?”
It has to be anticipated
Then, it has to be imagined.
And then enacted.
And then, after a little while, it has to be re-evaluated and re-imagined and re-enacted. It really is going to be a way of life. A full-time job, if you will.
Our First Anticipation?
Well it starts with an evaluation of the state of things: in certain ways, we are afflicted with affluence.
Accosted by our clutter.
Our freedom of choice has made it for us such that every desire is just as valuable as every other. This is nihilism. Everything has equal value, so nothing has any value. This is as true of our material possessions as it is of our responsibilities and commitments. We’ve got lots of stuff and we’ve got lots of stuff going on. The more we get, the less meaningful any particular thing is. We’ve got an abundance in quantity, but a poverty in quality.
So, we anticipate a way of life that has quantitatively less, but qualitatively more.
We’re pretty sure that in order to make it in the Wilderness and live this Kingdom lifestyle, we’ve got to do so with less. Less money. Fewer obligations. Less stuff. Fewer distractions. With what’s left, we’ll hope to give (and get) more. More time. More attention. More effort. More love. We want a simpler, but richer, life.
Quantitatively less, but qualitatively more.
In practice, this will be hard for people to understand. We will get less done. We’ll reach fewer people. We’ll make less ‘progress.’ You just can’t achieve very much this way.
However, we’ve been discovering, as we grow up more, that doing things well, doing things right, requires time and attention, patience and perseverance. I’ve learned this concretely in my stay-sane-in-graduate-school hobby of baking. If you rush, you’ll screw up your measurements. If you don’t set out enough time, you’re bread won’t rise correctly. If you skimp on the quality of your ingredients, things won’t taste right. If you don’t make the same recipe again and again, lovingly examining your results each time and being honest about the product, you’ll never get that really transcendent muffin. That remarkable chocolate chip cookie.
The Empire doesn’t reward this. It’s inefficient. The American Empire, after all, is the civilization that brought us the Twinky. Cheap. Mass produced. High volume. Flavorless. And really, really bad for you.
No, we don’t want fast, cheap, plentiful and busy. We want intentional, rich, selective and deliberate.
We want to do and have less, more richly.
In order to make “doing and having less, more richly” work, we’re going to have to do it together. In fact, if we have one beef with how John the Baptist did his thing, its that he went out there alone. Maybe he was just a more robust guy than the two of us, but we know that if we went out there alone, we wouldn’t last a second. We’d be slinking back through the gates of the city, a little embarrassed and with a couple of good stories, but we’d have left Abundant life out there in the woods. It’s just too much to do alone, especially when the Empire’s store rooms are full of sugary Twinkies and Tempur-pedic mattresses and cool cell phones.
This has practical concerns. We can divide costs. Those who are thriving can support those who are struggling. We can fill some of the gaps created by our retreat from a frantic complexity into a richer simplicity. There are spiritual concerns as well. God, for us weird-o Christians is a community: the unity of three persons. If we want to come to be more like God, it means we have to come together into loving communities. Paul understands this when he talks about the church as the Body of Christ, which shares the Spirit but is diverse in its gifts.
So, just to review: we’re seeking to live with less, more richly, together.
A note: What we’re talking about is not just asceticism. We’re not looking to sacrifice for sacrifice’s sake. Sure, some things will have to be sacrificed, but for an ulterior purpose, whether to make space for richer things or because they are incongruent with the story we’re trying to live. Yes, Jesus told the rich young ruler who was obedient in other respects to sell all he owned, give it to the poor and follow him. But that same Jesus praised the woman who “wasted” a bunch of really, incredibly expensive luxury perfume on his filthy, desert-walking feet. The same Jesus made really, really good wine for a bunch of wedding-party-ers already so drunk that they probably didn’t even notice.
When Jesus promises abundant life in the kingdom, he warns about its cost, but he also offers an easy yoke, a light burden and probably more than a couple really excellent all night dance parties.
Okay, I don’t know where he promises dance parties, but if they happen to break out after we eat some godly, eucharistic, sharing, communal meal, I think Jesus would be down.
Do us a favor? In the comments, day dream with us a little about what, if you tried to live with quantitatively less, but qualitatively more, what sort of stuff you’d sacrifice? And then, more importantly, what sort of thing(s) would you focus on, deliberately and abundantly?
Godspeed.
Next Time: What’s the structure of our “togetherness?”
Thursday, April 8, 2010
A Church Seduced
Baboons don’t have empires.
Baboons don’t have empires because they can’t meet one of the fundamental requirements of empire-making; They can’t organize in groups larger than 44.
44 baboons just isn’t an empire. Though one wouldn’t want to meet 44 baboons in an alley, it’s not an organization of any note whatsoever.
Humans, on the other hand, have had many, many, many empires. Several at a time, in every generation, for all of human history. We are just terribly prone to empires in a way that baboons will never be.
Partly because we’re capable of symbolizing. Baboons don’t get into groups larger than 44, because bigger than that, Underling-Baboon can’t see Leader-Baboon and so can’t be included in group tasks. Incas sent messages by runners over their vast and complex web of high mountain roads. Rome put the face of their leaders on their currency and then distributed it all over their conquered lands. So does the U.S.
But beyond just being capable of empire building’s foundational activity (symbolic communication), we’ve also clearly developed, as a species, a real yen for empire building. We just keep doing it, over and over.
Why?
Because, in service of our personal and communal aspirations, Empire WORKS. Now. Powerfully.
Empire just gets phenomenal results. Pyramids. Coliseums. Cathedrals. Manhattan.
Empires can get this incredible momentum and unleash an unbelievable amount of power very quickly. We live short lives and we feel rather impotent for much of them. If we can hitch our wagon to a movement that gets monumental results relatively quickly, we think, “well, sign us up!” That power is often constructive (as in the above), sometimes destructive (Pogroms, the Holocaust) but usually both (slave trades, environmental disaster, atomic energy/bombs). The Empire is a sublime thing that humans can do. It is immense and awe-inspiring. Many people more intelligent, thoughtful than any of us have attached themselves to empire unquestioningly, starry-eyed at the magnitude of its possibility.
So, you’re a Christian and you have this really magnificently lovely thing that is the Christian story. You’d really like to see this magnificent, lovely thing do quite well for itself. You think it’d be good for people, for the nations. And after all, Jesus told us to make disciples of all nations. And Paul tells Israel this is for everybody, not just their community, their ethnic group. So, lets get this show on the road. Let’s hitch this wagon to some horse-power.
Let’s let the good gift of Christian life be carried on the back of the trusty steed of Empire.
And Empire is often cool with this, because empire is about power-through-force. It’s direct like that. That’s part of how empire is so effective. It doesn’t have qualms about petty things like individual dignity or transcendent beauty or rigorous theory. And yet people like to believe in dignity and beauty and truth. And religion lets the brutish empires wear elegant clothes replete with beauty and meaning and truth and honor.
And then these two horrible things happen:
All the beautiful, meaningful, true, and honorable things that are contained in our religious life are put to the service of justifying and/or obscuring the brutish, violent, selfish work of empires doing what empires do. War is justice. Greed is charity. Pride is piety.
And while parts of our religious life are being put to the service of empire, other parts are being sidelined and forgotten because, if we keep talking like that, we’re going to be undermining the fundamental work of empire. If we start saying that peace is justice and love is charity and humility is piety… well, then we are at odds with the way things are done around here.
So. the instrument of imperial violence becomes a gold necklace. The body and the blood become symbols of an abstract idea, not the material of martyrdom. An empty bottle of luxury perfume next to dirty feet becomes irresponsibility. Inefficiency.
And once our allegiance is to the Empire in the Church’s clothing, we spend our days gather straw to build bricks to expand the dominion of Empire and we feel despair. We feel wrong. We feel like nothing we’ve been promised every turns out to be what we thought it was going to be. All this stuff was supposed to be abundance. Instead, it’s turning out to be clutter, to be more shit to stash in a storage container.
And if this goes on long enough, we forget WHY we feel the way we feel.
We sing songs about a Kingdom we don’t remember, so we just try to make them about ourselves.
We recount stories of actions that, six 7ths of the week, we have no time or space or energy to re-enact. So we try to shrink them into our lives.
Well, fuck that.
I’m over that.
It’s killing me.
But you see, the problem is that I don’t know any other life. It shaped me and my desires and my hopes and my imagination. Luckily, I encountered this story of God’s work in history, culminating in Jesus and His Church. It gives me a counter-story. An upside-down Kingdom, like my dad is always calling it.
But we’ve got to figure out what it means now, in the face of THIS empire. And I don’t know exactly what that is yet.
But we’ve got some inklings. We’ve got a few anticipatory ideas that we think are a) true to The Story and b) a decent place to start.
But we’ll get to those next time.
Baboons don’t have empires because they can’t meet one of the fundamental requirements of empire-making; They can’t organize in groups larger than 44.
44 baboons just isn’t an empire. Though one wouldn’t want to meet 44 baboons in an alley, it’s not an organization of any note whatsoever.
Humans, on the other hand, have had many, many, many empires. Several at a time, in every generation, for all of human history. We are just terribly prone to empires in a way that baboons will never be.
Partly because we’re capable of symbolizing. Baboons don’t get into groups larger than 44, because bigger than that, Underling-Baboon can’t see Leader-Baboon and so can’t be included in group tasks. Incas sent messages by runners over their vast and complex web of high mountain roads. Rome put the face of their leaders on their currency and then distributed it all over their conquered lands. So does the U.S.
But beyond just being capable of empire building’s foundational activity (symbolic communication), we’ve also clearly developed, as a species, a real yen for empire building. We just keep doing it, over and over.
Why?
Because, in service of our personal and communal aspirations, Empire WORKS. Now. Powerfully.
Empire just gets phenomenal results. Pyramids. Coliseums. Cathedrals. Manhattan.
Empires can get this incredible momentum and unleash an unbelievable amount of power very quickly. We live short lives and we feel rather impotent for much of them. If we can hitch our wagon to a movement that gets monumental results relatively quickly, we think, “well, sign us up!” That power is often constructive (as in the above), sometimes destructive (Pogroms, the Holocaust) but usually both (slave trades, environmental disaster, atomic energy/bombs). The Empire is a sublime thing that humans can do. It is immense and awe-inspiring. Many people more intelligent, thoughtful than any of us have attached themselves to empire unquestioningly, starry-eyed at the magnitude of its possibility.
So, you’re a Christian and you have this really magnificently lovely thing that is the Christian story. You’d really like to see this magnificent, lovely thing do quite well for itself. You think it’d be good for people, for the nations. And after all, Jesus told us to make disciples of all nations. And Paul tells Israel this is for everybody, not just their community, their ethnic group. So, lets get this show on the road. Let’s hitch this wagon to some horse-power.
Let’s let the good gift of Christian life be carried on the back of the trusty steed of Empire.
And Empire is often cool with this, because empire is about power-through-force. It’s direct like that. That’s part of how empire is so effective. It doesn’t have qualms about petty things like individual dignity or transcendent beauty or rigorous theory. And yet people like to believe in dignity and beauty and truth. And religion lets the brutish empires wear elegant clothes replete with beauty and meaning and truth and honor.
And then these two horrible things happen:
All the beautiful, meaningful, true, and honorable things that are contained in our religious life are put to the service of justifying and/or obscuring the brutish, violent, selfish work of empires doing what empires do. War is justice. Greed is charity. Pride is piety.
And while parts of our religious life are being put to the service of empire, other parts are being sidelined and forgotten because, if we keep talking like that, we’re going to be undermining the fundamental work of empire. If we start saying that peace is justice and love is charity and humility is piety… well, then we are at odds with the way things are done around here.
So. the instrument of imperial violence becomes a gold necklace. The body and the blood become symbols of an abstract idea, not the material of martyrdom. An empty bottle of luxury perfume next to dirty feet becomes irresponsibility. Inefficiency.
And once our allegiance is to the Empire in the Church’s clothing, we spend our days gather straw to build bricks to expand the dominion of Empire and we feel despair. We feel wrong. We feel like nothing we’ve been promised every turns out to be what we thought it was going to be. All this stuff was supposed to be abundance. Instead, it’s turning out to be clutter, to be more shit to stash in a storage container.
And if this goes on long enough, we forget WHY we feel the way we feel.
We sing songs about a Kingdom we don’t remember, so we just try to make them about ourselves.
We recount stories of actions that, six 7ths of the week, we have no time or space or energy to re-enact. So we try to shrink them into our lives.
Well, fuck that.
I’m over that.
It’s killing me.
But you see, the problem is that I don’t know any other life. It shaped me and my desires and my hopes and my imagination. Luckily, I encountered this story of God’s work in history, culminating in Jesus and His Church. It gives me a counter-story. An upside-down Kingdom, like my dad is always calling it.
But we’ve got to figure out what it means now, in the face of THIS empire. And I don’t know exactly what that is yet.
But we’ve got some inklings. We’ve got a few anticipatory ideas that we think are a) true to The Story and b) a decent place to start.
But we’ll get to those next time.
Tuesday, April 6, 2010
The Faux-Abundance of Imperial Life
“The U.S. military budget is over 450 billion (dollars) per year, and it would take the combined budgets of the next 15 countries to equal that of the US.” Shane Claiborne, Jesus for President (2008, p. 178)
“Over 50 percent of the Roman budget went towards the Roman military.” Dominic Crossan, God and Empire
“We must keep shopping.” Former-President George W. Bush
I own a MyTouch 3G phone by HTC. It’s got the Google owned operating system, “Android.” I can check my e-mail, send texts, get maps and directions, and follow twitter and facebook and myspace. I can check the weather report and my bank account balance. Sometimes, I even use it to make phone calls.
I always have my smart-phone with me. I left it in the back of a cab a few weeks ago, but luckily a friend noticed and grabbed it. I didn’t get it back for about 24 hours. I spent those waking hours frustrated, not sure how to go about my daily tasks. Without my fancy-ass cell phone, my life was impoverished. My life was a little less alive.
I believe that my cell-phone offers me abundant life.
I mean, I don’t REALLY think that. Of course I know that it is just a luxury item and, though it has many useful functions, my life would probably go on just fine without it.
And yet, I behave as though my cell phone offers me abundant life.
I have been saying for some time that our normal, everyday Western way of life makes us complicit with all kinds of evil. Having a smart-phone is perfectly normal. It’s also become a kind of idolatry.
The normal and the evil, side by side.
We find many very creative ways of hiding the evil and injustice our lifestyle rests upon. We never see the factory farms where our chicken-nuggets come from. We import our cheap goods from far away places with factory conditions that our department of labor and our investigative journalists are unlikely to ever see. We cover our landfills in green, green grass. We pretend there’s no connection between the demand for more jobs and off-shore oil drilling. We work 60 hours a week and say that we’re doing it to provide for our families.
But our most creative way of hiding the evil and injustice our lifestyle rests upon is by living a story in which that kind of thing is just the normal, everyday way of doing things.
In an oft-noted curiosity of statistics, it seems that the more “developed” and wealthy our culture becomes, the less we perceive ourselves as happy. I’ve witnessed myself the hurt our children carry in their hearts from broken homes, despite parents who have worked so hard to provide so much for them. We’re doing our best in these normal, everyday lives and we’re still having hard a time of it. I’ve begun to worry that it’s not just the obvious vices that are tearing us apart. I’m worried that our “normal, everyday” way of living is making us complicit with all kinds of subtle, systemic sin. Our dissatisfaction perhaps comes from the inherent consequences of our sin, however blind to it we may have become.
What is that system of sin?
Well, we’ve taken to calling it “Imperial Life,” following the cue of some folks we rather respect. (See: Rob Bell’s Jesus Wants To Save Christians; Shane Claiborne’s Jesus for President)
In Imperial Life, we put our faith in the sprawling progress of the empire. The problem is, empires need slaves. Sometimes those slaves are people who live on less than $2 a day who have to work for the factories our companies build in their country because otherwise they starve. Or their children starve. Or worse. Other times, those slaves are people who are so addicted to the pleasures the empire has to offer that they sell their whole lives to keep a steady supply at hand. Slaves the way junkies are slaves.
And the empire feeds on both of these people. Many inexpensive hands are needed to shape inexpensive resources into inexpensive goods that can be purchased to keep us other folks working to create new ideas for new products for the inexpensive hands to make from inexpensive resources.
And so the corridors of Babylon go craning for the skies. So, the sun never sets on the American empire.
And in order for this sort of economy, this economy of quantity over quality, to flourish, there must be stability. There must be peace, no matter how many enemies our naïve greed (and let’s call a spade a spade, shall we?) makes for us around the world. So, there must be, along side the most prosperous, creative, productive, progressive nation the world has ever seen, the most sprawling, inimitable military the world has ever seen.
Our Empire needs the Pax Americana
And, if that military also makes jobs for every day people building jets and guns and predator drones, which makes money for those who own factories and makes careers for those who legislate the defense spending budgets? Well, then all the better.
And yet here we are, just normal, everyday people, trying to get by in the land of the Empire. Working our jobs. Raising our families. Going to church, singing about abundant life and then going to the mall to buy some.
And yet we feel ourselves sinking into a living death.
And every time we go to the Empire to ask for a remedy, they give us more of the same poison. Every time we ask them for bread, they hand us a stone.
And we go home, singing their praises.
And what we do in church makes less and less sense.
What exactly are we doing at church, anyway?
Coming up next: What does a Church capitulated to Empire look like?
“Over 50 percent of the Roman budget went towards the Roman military.” Dominic Crossan, God and Empire
“We must keep shopping.” Former-President George W. Bush
I own a MyTouch 3G phone by HTC. It’s got the Google owned operating system, “Android.” I can check my e-mail, send texts, get maps and directions, and follow twitter and facebook and myspace. I can check the weather report and my bank account balance. Sometimes, I even use it to make phone calls.
I always have my smart-phone with me. I left it in the back of a cab a few weeks ago, but luckily a friend noticed and grabbed it. I didn’t get it back for about 24 hours. I spent those waking hours frustrated, not sure how to go about my daily tasks. Without my fancy-ass cell phone, my life was impoverished. My life was a little less alive.
I believe that my cell-phone offers me abundant life.
I mean, I don’t REALLY think that. Of course I know that it is just a luxury item and, though it has many useful functions, my life would probably go on just fine without it.
And yet, I behave as though my cell phone offers me abundant life.
I have been saying for some time that our normal, everyday Western way of life makes us complicit with all kinds of evil. Having a smart-phone is perfectly normal. It’s also become a kind of idolatry.
The normal and the evil, side by side.
We find many very creative ways of hiding the evil and injustice our lifestyle rests upon. We never see the factory farms where our chicken-nuggets come from. We import our cheap goods from far away places with factory conditions that our department of labor and our investigative journalists are unlikely to ever see. We cover our landfills in green, green grass. We pretend there’s no connection between the demand for more jobs and off-shore oil drilling. We work 60 hours a week and say that we’re doing it to provide for our families.
But our most creative way of hiding the evil and injustice our lifestyle rests upon is by living a story in which that kind of thing is just the normal, everyday way of doing things.
In an oft-noted curiosity of statistics, it seems that the more “developed” and wealthy our culture becomes, the less we perceive ourselves as happy. I’ve witnessed myself the hurt our children carry in their hearts from broken homes, despite parents who have worked so hard to provide so much for them. We’re doing our best in these normal, everyday lives and we’re still having hard a time of it. I’ve begun to worry that it’s not just the obvious vices that are tearing us apart. I’m worried that our “normal, everyday” way of living is making us complicit with all kinds of subtle, systemic sin. Our dissatisfaction perhaps comes from the inherent consequences of our sin, however blind to it we may have become.
What is that system of sin?
Well, we’ve taken to calling it “Imperial Life,” following the cue of some folks we rather respect. (See: Rob Bell’s Jesus Wants To Save Christians; Shane Claiborne’s Jesus for President)
In Imperial Life, we put our faith in the sprawling progress of the empire. The problem is, empires need slaves. Sometimes those slaves are people who live on less than $2 a day who have to work for the factories our companies build in their country because otherwise they starve. Or their children starve. Or worse. Other times, those slaves are people who are so addicted to the pleasures the empire has to offer that they sell their whole lives to keep a steady supply at hand. Slaves the way junkies are slaves.
And the empire feeds on both of these people. Many inexpensive hands are needed to shape inexpensive resources into inexpensive goods that can be purchased to keep us other folks working to create new ideas for new products for the inexpensive hands to make from inexpensive resources.
And so the corridors of Babylon go craning for the skies. So, the sun never sets on the American empire.
And in order for this sort of economy, this economy of quantity over quality, to flourish, there must be stability. There must be peace, no matter how many enemies our naïve greed (and let’s call a spade a spade, shall we?) makes for us around the world. So, there must be, along side the most prosperous, creative, productive, progressive nation the world has ever seen, the most sprawling, inimitable military the world has ever seen.
Our Empire needs the Pax Americana
And, if that military also makes jobs for every day people building jets and guns and predator drones, which makes money for those who own factories and makes careers for those who legislate the defense spending budgets? Well, then all the better.
And yet here we are, just normal, everyday people, trying to get by in the land of the Empire. Working our jobs. Raising our families. Going to church, singing about abundant life and then going to the mall to buy some.
And yet we feel ourselves sinking into a living death.
And every time we go to the Empire to ask for a remedy, they give us more of the same poison. Every time we ask them for bread, they hand us a stone.
And we go home, singing their praises.
And what we do in church makes less and less sense.
What exactly are we doing at church, anyway?
Coming up next: What does a Church capitulated to Empire look like?
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