This
past week we talked about wealth and materialism in Confirmation class with the
ninth graders. Of all the topics we cover in Confirmation it never ceases to
surprise me how this is one of the hardest. Nobody—and I mean nobody—wants the
things they have put into question. Nobody wants to deal with all the ways that
our economy differs from God’s economy. Everybody wants to gloss over this
stuff. It makes some people feel guilty or angry, and other people feel ashamed
We didn’t talk about today’s scripture reading on
Wednesday, though we certainly could have. When Jesus overthrows the
marketplace that has come into the temple he does so to demonstrate all the
ways that God’s economy is going to be different from ours. Jesus is not going
to be a capitalist, or a socialist, or a communist, or any other –ism. He is
going to be about God’s economy and God’s economy only. As he famously answers
the Pharisees that other time, “Give to Caesar what is Caesar’s and to God what
is God’s.”
In order to understand a little about God’s
economy we have to understand this word, “economy,” from the Greek “oikos,”
meaning “house,” and nomos, meaning “law.” God’s economy is the law of the
house—God’s house. At first that sounds like it’s about the church rules, and
Jesus starts there, but that’s only the beginning. As Jesus’ ministry takes him
from the temple and out into the world (and beyond) God’s economy takes on a
whole different meaning. It becomes a question of what matters to us and why. Then,
it is about all the ways that the laws of our houses distract from the good
news of the gospel.
Jesus knew the power that our
material things have over us. The Israelites made golden statues, but today we
have our idols readymade for us in the form of vehicles and vacation homes and
televisions and everything a person can find on Amazon. Worse still, because we
think we don’t worship golden idols we ignore the idols we do worship. Sometimes
we even elevate the marketplace—this idyllic idea that everybody can enhance
one another by trading new things, better things, more things—into the place of
a god. We have no shortage of things and ideologies begging to be our idols. The
things are all neutral, but our allegiances to them are not. Add to that the
outside pressure of knowing that other people around us have a lot of things,
too (and we need to keep up appearances!), and it becomes easy to lose track of
what really matters.
This is why Jesus overthrew the
temple. He had to get it through our thick skulls that this mattered. Jesus was
so dramatic because our orientation toward sin is dramatic. Sin leads us to
make our economy about us. Where God’s economy is about self-sacrifice ours is
about self-fulfillment. Where God’s economy justifies us apart from ourselves
we use our economy to point to how good we are. We’ll say we’ve earned it, we’ll
say that others do far worse than us and anyways we have to do it this way or
else somebody will take advantage of us; we’ll say that our wealth is about
safeguarding our families; we’ll say so many things that we’ll convince
ourselves we are unaffected by this other economy. Meanwhile, God’s economy is speaking
a whole other language: Joy through self-sacrifice.
Every time we talk about this in
Confirmation I ask the students to think about how God’s view of wealth and
materialism gels with the systems we create—capitalism and the like—and it
never fails to surprise me how devoted the kids are to the idea that the
systems we have established are the best possible systems; even when these
ideals are almost, by definition, set against God’s economy. It may very well
be that of all the bad economies available to us capitalism is the best, but
that only makes it slightly more tempting as a thing with which to ally
ourselves. It’s still nothing compared to God’s economy, and it is a dangerous
thing to be so devoted to this or that ism, because it is no less an act of
faith to be devoted to an economy than it is to be devoted to Jesus but it is
much easier, much more tempting, and, in the terms we often use (value, return
on investment, and wealth), easy to convince ourselves of the results. It’s
just that one of those things carries on through death and one of them stops.
But boy is it tempting to fall in
love with the market! The market is full of new things and new ideas. It tells
you that you need to have things, to buy things; to be defined by things. This
is why most of us watch the Super Bowl—to discover the new things we need. And
this year that will be the only reason you’ll want to watch the Super Bowl after
the Vikings suffer another heartbreaking loss today (hey, I’m going full on
revere jinx on this one).
Also unlike my attitude toward the
Vikings, God’s economy is built on hope. It is the only thing worth waiting on.
I don’t think Jesus was just a spoil sport trying to ruin the peoples’ good
time. Too often that is how we treat our faith—like the thing that stops us
from having too much fun. But, like the wedding at Cana that we read about last
week, Jesus is so intimidating precisely because he offers actual joy, which,
like love, is frightening as all hell because we dare not hope that it might be
true.
Yet, since we know that joy isn’t found in things,
and it isn’t found in prestige; and it isn’t found in social status; and it
isn’t found in security or comfort, but instead it is found in all the things
that are unvalued by this-world economies—things like the laughter of children,
the feeling you get when the person you love breaks into a smile, the
fulfillment of a dream—since fulfillment in life is apart from the things that
can be commoditized—therefore, we should be wary of the power of the market and
the allure of “isms” in our lives.
God’s presence is revealed to us in joy, which is
the currency of God’s economy. It’s not happiness either, which is a thing we
can convince ourselves might be something we can buy, but joy, which is
something we cannot create on our own. And we’re never going to find it if our
temples are so devoted to other things. This is why Jesus drives all the stuff
out of the temple. It’s why he drives it all out of your head and your heart
too if you let him, because God has no time for competing ideologies. There are
no isms—just the presence of God. That’s what God’s house is like, what God’s
economy is like. It trades on joy and, unlike our economies, there is always
enough.. It is simply everything that our economy is not.
And it’s the only thing we have.
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