Once Upon a Time

Some incomplete, unedited thoughts for you this morning...

It seems to me that a key issue with the Christian faith is this: For a long time--probably back to Constantine--we have been living in the wrong story. Furthermore, we've located ourselves in this wrong story for so long that we've forgotten that there is any other. It's difficult to find the place where you should be when you don't realize you're someplace else.

Let's consider where we are-this wrong story. For the most part the western church finds itself defending a Christianized version of what we'll call The American Dream. It goes something like this: Go to a good school, find your life's partner, get a good job, buy a nice house, and gradually work your way up the food chain to acquire more (and bigger) stuff. We then 'sanctify' this story by adding, "And, oh yes, be a Christian." (Of course we never stop to consider if this addendum to the story is compatible with the story itself.) Perhaps we then self-identify by placing a Jesus fish on the trunk of our car.

The People of God are to be something wholly different. An alternative community, as Walter Brueggemann would put it. However it goes without saying that we can't be an alternative to the status quo when we are the status quo. And let's face it, the status quo, by it's very definition, is not interested in hearing about alternatives to itself.

Ultimately this renders us completely ineffective, as far as our primary purpose is concerned. That purpose? To assist in God's grand plan to redeem all of creation. To redeem is to transform, which is to change. The Body of Christ is here to change the world, just as Jesus himself did when he walked the earth.

(I'll resist the urge to drone on and leave it here. Thoughts?)

Comments

[Morgan K Freeberg]

A good education and comfortable livelihood for yourself, tends to provide those same things for your kids along with a secure upbringing. And all these things contribute toward a secure survival for your family. This, in turn, is all a natural extension of eating...personal sustenance...and the earliest Christians ate.

No contradiction here. You over-thought it.

[Mike]

Morgan, I think you're reaching here. Or under-thinking it.

For the record I think it's fairly difficult to over-think "Sell all you have and give it to the poor" and, "whatever you do for the least of these you do to me."

[Morgan K Freeberg]

Mike, I've been accused of lots of things in my time. Underthinking something is a first.

Obviously, Christians are entitled (and perhaps required) to sustain themselves.

Clearly, if there is something sinful about fortifying your person and/or your dynasty, through sending your kids to a college that'll do 'em some good, buying them a computer they can use to learn the skills they'll be needing...or simply buying a nice dining room table at which the family can have a decent Christian meal. A line M-U-S-T be drawn somewhere. It is unavoidable.

So if it's sinful to sustain your household but not sinful to sustain your own stomach, where's the line drawn? Your move, Mike. Hope you don't go and duck it. Straight answer please, and skip all the rest.

[Mike]

Let's see Morgan...

"No one has greater love than this, to lay down one’s life for one’s friends." There's a line.

"Whatever you do for the least of these, you do to me." There's a line.

"Sell everything you have and give it to the poor." There's another line.

Obviously I'll spend the rest of my life trying to get even close to those lines, but nevertheless, there they are.

Howe about you? Where do you think the lines should be drawn?

[Morgan K Freeberg]

Mike,

We'll just have to file this as my response to all your...stuff.

Obviously, anything else I say will get deleted, just like my last post.

[robert]

I had a meeting with a client today who is an environmental studies professor at an Ontario university. We went over the portfolio and she winced as she read the list of her investments in any company with ties to the tar sands.
I proposed to her that we could work within whatever framework she instructed us to use but added: "this is hard enough to do without limitations so shrinking the universe of available companies will not make it any easier."
She smiled and said: "I realized long ago that you could drive yourself crazy trying to invest in a manner consistent with Green principles. Every bank has financed a project that is environmentally harmful."
There is such incongruity in many of our endeavours, I share your frustration at being the same I don't want to see in the world.