A
seminary professor of mine once said, “The church tells us two things about
money: 1. Money is evil, and 2. Give us your money.” Which is why it’s tough to
talk about money from the pulpit. Honestly, I wrote a sermon this week and I
just kept writing and writing hoping I’d get around to the brilliant point that
would help make this easier and I just never got there (you’re welcome for not
preaching that sermon). It was over two thousand words and went mostly nowhere,
so last night I just tossed it in the proverbial trash (with computers that’s a
lot less dramatic—it looks more like copy/paste/delete—but you get my drift),
and I started over.
You see, this
story of Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego is about golden idols, sort of. It’s
about wealth and bowing to gods other than the true god, sort of. It’s about
faithful Jews in a faithless land, sort of. It’s about a king that comes
around, sort of. Basically that’s a lot of sort
ofs, and the temptation with all of those “sort ofs” is to make a big
elaborate point about them in the context of something we all experience,
like—I don’t know—Black Friday. So, that’s what I was trying to do. Black
Friday, golden idols, wealth, Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego—it was coming
together and, yet, it wasn’t. I mean, it’s like asking “Would Jesus shop on
Black Friday?” If you ask the question you are obviously looking for a certain
answer, and the entire sermon felt like a leading question. If I’m just up here
to mold the scripture to my ends, then I can do better, and you can do better
than me. Instead, I want to talk about money and purchases, but in a way that
doesn’t sell out the church as if it were some moral high ground on the issue,
and also in a way that honors the guilt we all have in talking about this
subject.
Everything
comes back to money, which means trouble because talking about money evokes all
sorts of emotions. See, if I talk about worshiping the golden idol of wealth
some of you will be on board with ripping into the wealthy and some of you will
feel convicted, perhaps angered, and most of you will probably feel a
combination of the two. The temperature rises whenever we talk about wealth,
because money convicts us. Every time we make a purchase, whether on Black
Friday or any other day, we give a little of our allegiance over to the thing
that we buy and all that it represents. And that really should make us uneasy, because
those things we buy do become idols. As much as we think we are using the
things that we purchase they are also using us. The best example I have for
this is brand name clothing—I’ve never really understood this. You want me to
buy your brand and advertise it on my clothes and you want to charge me for the
pleasure of doing so? What kind of logic is this?
When Shadrach,
Meshach, and Abednego refuse to worship the golden idol it is not because
worshiping that idol would change anything about who was the true god; God was
God and the idol was still just a made-up god. But the idol could certainly use them. There’s a secret
to the Ten Commandments, and it is that none of us ever get past the first one.
We all have other gods, which is again why we’re uneasy talking about them, and
it’s also why we like Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego, because they represent
something that we dream to become—those paragons of virtue who humbly stand before
the king and say that we will not worship the golden idol, whether God saves us
or not.
We
love Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego because they don’t make this personal;
they never bring up the people who choose to worship the golden idol and they
don’t mock the king who put it there. It is only about their choice and their
God. Rather than reflecting on the system that led to the golden idol’s
creation, or wishing they could change the political regime, the three men just
acted as they were compelled. There was no conspiracy, no plot to change the
state religion; it was just three guys acting out their faith. And that’s what
changed everything.
We
can reflect all day on the ethics of consumerism, but everything comes down to
the choices we make in our daily lives to be faithful in spite of a world that suggests dollar bills are your god. There’s a natural
order to our economy and that is to earn and spend; I heard a lady on the radio
yesterday talking with glee about shoppers at the Mall of America, saying they
are buying “aggressively” this year, not just looking, they’re stepping up to
the plate and buying! Since it was on the radio I can only imagine she was
standing on the balcony of the rotunda, throwing meat to hungry, animalistic
shoppers who were tearing one another apart. That’s the only impression I could
really draw from a description of the scene that sounded more like gladiatorial
games than Saturday shopping. You put up a sign that says 50% off electronics
and suddenly it’s the Hunger Games.
There’s another
option, and it’s not just being morally opposed to the ethics of consumerism. Instead,
the best way to show your unease with the system is to just give away with
abandon. You probably remember the otherwise faithful man who comes up to Jesus
in the gospels asking what more can he do, and Jesus gives him the hard answer:
he has to give away not a little, not 10%, but everything. That seems a little
rough on Jesus’ part; after all, it is followed by that famous line, “It is
easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to get
into heaven,” which is one of those things we try to shove under the rug when
non-Christian friends come knocking, but—like pretty much everything that Jesus
says—there’s a point that goes beyond a rich man and heaven; the story ends
with the all-important caveat: “but through God all things are possible.” And
that’s the point. Jesus is convicting the man in his wealth but not so that he
will spend the rest of his days glumly reflecting on how hard it is to give
everything away. Instead, Jesus is freeing him for absurd generosity, because
Jesus knows that every little act of generosity frees us from things to which
we have sworn allegiance that are not our God. This is a message we’ve heard a
thousand times, but it mostly goes over our heads, because the very fact that
we can’t actually give away everything pretty much turns us off to the concept
entirely. And because we mostly shrug off the idea of giving things away there’s
a part of it that we often fail to consider: giving away our stuff makes us
happy. Even watching other people giving away makes us happy. It kills some of
the cynicism we have built up having lived within systems that preach the
accumulation of wealth. Being generous won’t guarantee you a long life—it might
get you thrown in the furnace—but it is one the happiest (and freest) choices
you can make.
And that’s why it’s such a serious problem
that the church has said those two things about money—that money is evil and you
should give us your money; because we have emphasized only the side of money
that will bring despair. What we have failed to lift up is the side of money
that brings incredible joy, which is not money spent but money given—not given primarily
to those asking for it but to the one who never saw it coming. If we talk only
about money as something evil, we ignore that money can be a tool to show
exceptional grace. If we spend all our time asking for money, we don’t allow
that grace to ever show itself unexpectedly.
We
need more than Black Friday but not because Black Friday is inherently evil. We
need more than Black Friday because the shopping season robs us of unexpected
grace; the kind of grace that we can see in lines of people waiting not outside
a Best Buy for a flat screen TV but outside the Cornerstone Food Pantry for a Thanksgiving
meal.
Let me finish
today with a story that probably only makes this more convoluted, but I’m going
to tell it anyway, and I’d say I’m sorry but I’m really not. Some of you may be
aware that you won’t be seeing Coca-Cola advertisements this holiday season for
the first time in, well, ever, because the company has decided to use all the
money ear-marked for advertising between Thanksgiving and Christmas to donate
to relief for the victims of Typhoon Haiyan. No polar bears and Santa Claus
drinking coke—I know, your holidays are ruined. Predictably, the nay-sayers
have been out in full force, pointing out that this is simply an act of
publicity that will be more effective than any advertising campaign, and (proving
I am as cynical as anybody) I think they’re probably right. I’m sure this idea
was cooked up in a boardroom somewhere with public polling data in hand. This
is the side of consumerism that drives any idealist crazy. But the more I
thought about it the more I found myself enamored with the idea that what
really sells is compassion; that this is something about human beings that I
think is true: we worship attractive things in place of God, but we
have our moments, when confronted with actual goodness, where we cut through
the allegiances we have created and discover the gifts we have to offer. In
fact, in our better moments, we can be incredibly generous; we are capable of
defying the golden idols and staring the powers-that-be in the face and saying,
“Our God might deliver us, or maybe not, but either way we will stand up for
what is true.” It starts with little acts, with little people and with little
fanfare, with little men in a foreign land and with a little baby in the
manger. I guess that’s what Advent’s about.
No comments:
Post a Comment