Culture Makers | Live More Musically

I just read yet another wonderful article by Andy Crouch, who was the one to help me understand postmodernism is all of its consumeristic glory. The article is: Culture Makers | Live More Musically.

In it he writes:

But the core doctrine of consumer culture, reinforced a thousand times a day, is the belief that we can satisfy our deepest longings with purchases instead. Want to live more musically? Buy a CD. Want to “live strong”? Nike has a pair of sneakers for you. Purchases are not only instantly satisfying, they also wear out quickly. So they generate an ongoing stream of revenue, supporting the advertising that draws us toward them in the first place.

The alternative to purchasing our happiness and significance is producing it through practice.

This is practice in two senses. Practice, on the one hand means, repeated attempts at something. This is surely part of it. But there is another sense where a practice is like a craft or an art, where we focus our bodies and minds and try to create something true or beautiful or good or just. In his article he uses the example of music, but another example might be a family meal. Rather than buying a value meal at the local drive-thru, cooking a meal is a skill that can be learned and deepened. One may start out by making omellettes and moving into making yeast rolls. This is my journey. Now, each Thanksgiving, Christmas and Easter, it is my role (no pun intended) to make this wonderful yeast rolls called Butterhorn roles (Email me and I will give you the recipe), which my mother made every holiday when my sisters and I were growing up. In my making the roles, I enter into a family tradition and carry it on. I share in the joint effort of making the holiday feast and I enrich that feast with the treasure from my family. This could never be achieved by buying a cardboard roll of Tollhouse cookies and whipping them out in 10 minutes. They may have the same nutritional value, but not the same relational value.

This is what a practice is all about, connection us to the past, to the communities of the present, and to the gifts of the earth. It is not easy, but it is worth it. And it may be the only real antidote to consumerism.

I survived Christmas

I survived Christmas. It still was not all that I wanted it to be. Yet there were moments of transcendence. As any parent my heart was warmed when my older daughter realized that she did get the "sucking baby" that she thought was so great. The gushing excitement was enough to warm the cynics heart.

But most significantly was the moment of surveying the congregation gathered on Christmas eve around the Lord's Table. It was at least one true moment of quiet contemplation on the true mystery of Christmas and the Incarnation--that the Son of God took up our human life in order that he might lay it down for us some 33 years later. I was surrounded by a great cloud of witnesses and I was encouraged and left that night a good bit less cynical. But my quest for a more meaningful Christmas will have to wait for next year.

Christmas is coming :(

I know that it is inevitable. I have seen the signs since before Halloween. Now that Thanksgiving has gone I have to face the fact that Christmas is coming.

It's not that I am against Christmas, but that I am against what Christmas has become. I sound like Cindy Lou Who from How The Grinch Stole Christmas. Like Cindy I know that Christmas has to be about more that presents. Presents just don't mean as much when people can simply buy the things they want all of the time. Christmas just becomes that time of the year when you get to make more progress on your shopping-for-me list.

It's easy to decry Christmas as overly materialistic. What has been more difficult for me is to admit the ways that I am overly materialistic. The attitude that 'those' people have is the very attitude that I have. Once I look beyond presents, I see that they really are the center of my Christmas commemoration. Of course, there is the Christmas eve services. But most of the activity and planning go into shopping and parties.

What I really want are ways to make Christmas celebrations significant in ways that focus on the Christ child and not on ways that simply further consumerisms hold on my life.

I need help. I know that there are a lot of creative ideas out there, but many of them seem shallow.

My Christmas quest this year is to find ways to make Christmas truly meaningful and not just a celebration of family ties.

Benidorm hotelsSo it's me and you, Cindy Lou...

Christ and Culture

In thinking about confessing Christ to people shapped by consumer culture, the question arises about how Christ is related to culture in general. Can culture serve Christ? Does it eclipse Christ? I found a fascinating viewpoint on this relationship from the 6th-century. It comes from Pope Gregory as he gives instruction to Augustine, who was commissioned as a missionary to bring the gospel to the Angles and Saxons in Briton. (This is not the Augustine who wrote the Confessions.)Gregory writes:

The idols are to be destroyed, but the temples themselves are to be aspersed with holy water, altars set up in them, and relics deposited there.... In this way, we hope that the people, seeing that their temples are not destroyed, may abandon their error and, flocking more readily to their accustomed resorts, may come to know and adore the true God. And since they have a custom of sacrificing many oxen to demons, let some other solemnity be substituted in its place, such as a day of Dedication or the Festivals of the holy martyrs whose relics are enshrined there.

It seems to me that the approach advocated here by Gregory could go under the heading of "Christ transforming culture." He urges Augustine to destroy the idols but to convert the holy spaces and to replace the pagan practices with respectable Christian ones. These instructions for one entering into a primative pagan culture make sense. But how would they play out in a culture that is awash in marketing, glittering images, television personalities, where everything is at risk of being reduced to a commodity? Everything is made to be sold, bought and consumed--all for personal pleasure or satisfaction.

Many churches have tried to pursue a path very near to that of Augustine. They have embraced marketing techniques and communication technologies. At the end of the day, it looks more as if they have become co-opted by the culture rather than co-opting it for gospel ends. Church-goers have been formed into consumers by the culture and this kind of approach allows them to approach the church as a consumer. They pay with their time and they expect nourishing and inspiring experiences and, if they fail to find them, they go (church) shopping. Thus, even Christianity can become commodified. Church becomes entertainment and the gospel is emptied of its power. The days when sprinkling water on a building or substituing a different celebration to convert a culture are over. Something more radical is called for.

Valkenburg accommodationTheologian Miroslav Volf wrote a concise, yet poignant, article called, Floating Along?, in which he writes:

For some time now I have been troubled by the seeming disappearance of any robust alternative to the pervasive culture of late capitalism, whether in the church or in the society at large. We are drowning in floods of consumer goods and are drenched in showers of media images. We live in a smorgasbord culture in which everything is interesting and nothing really matters. We have lost a vision of the good life, and our hopes for the future are emptied of moral content. Instead of purposefully walking to determinate places, we are aimlessly floating with random currents. Of course, we do get exercised by issues and engage in bitter feuds over them. But that makes us even less capable of resisting the pull of the larger culture, a resistance that would take shape in formulating and embodying a coherent alternative way of life.

What we need is an alternative way of life. Or, we could say that it is not culture that needs to be converted but ourselves. We need to find ways to divest ourselves of culture, to pull back, so that we could get attuned to the voice of our Shepherd who calls us to live life as Kingdom people, not consumer people. If we would become people who live life in such a unique and distinct way, a way that resists the power of consumerism, we would be able to be witnesses. We would exhibit a gospel than cannot be commodified. It cannot be rendered as all other commodities--available, easy, comfortable, and safe. It would be clear that follow Christ means walking the narrow road, the difficult road, the adventuresome road. But it would also be good news to those who live in a world without alternatives, for whom it is consumerism or consumerism. We would testify that there is an alternative set of practices, and therefore a set of beliefs, that are different and lead to life, full and abundant and truly human.

Dorothy Bass gave an address to youthworkers, sub-titled, The Consumer and the Practitioner, where she takes Volf's idea and extends it to youth culture. It is a wonderful contrast. It calls us to be who we need to be, not consumers of our faith but practicioners that use our gifts and talents to glorify God and meet the needs of the needy.

Now that is a real choice.

Costly Offerings

We are preaching a series on the life of David at our church. As I read through passages of David's life, I was perusing the story in 2 Samuel 24 where David conducted a census despite better counsel and had to pay for it. A plague swept through Israel and 70,000, Yahweh relented and David repented. David was instructed to build an altar on the threshing floor of Araunah the Jebusite. As David approached him, he fell on his face. Then, he offered David the use of the cow and the threshing equipment that he might use them to offer the sacrifice.

What struck me was David's response. He refused to offer Yahweh as sacrifice that did not cost him anything. How often do I do just that very thing. I am so bent on my own comfort, while David grasped the true nature of worship--sacrifice. I think of Romans 12:1: Therefore, by the mercies of God, present your bodies as a living sacrifice, holy and acceptable to God, which is your spiritual worship." NRSV

My preference for a cheap offering seems to correlate with the cheap grace that Dietrich Bonhoeffer wrote about:

Cheap grace is the grace we bestow on ourselves. Cheap grace is the preaching of forgiveness without requiring repentance, baptism without church discipline, communion without confession. Cheap grace is grace without discipleship, grace without the cross, grace without Jesus Christ, living and incarnate. Costly grace ... is the kingly rule of Christ, for whose sake a man will pluck out the eye which causes him to stumble, it is the call of Jesus Christ at which the disciple leaves his nets and follows him.

As a follower of Christ, I cannot go with the flow of our culture and choose a comfortable life. I must serve the Lord that died on the cross and who called me to take up my own cross. Then I would stand out as a true light in this culture bent on comfort.

Emerging Challenges

I am here at the Emergent Theological Conversation because I am hungry for conversation with those who have not found a home in either the conservative or liberal camps, in their beliefs and in their practices. It is a group of pilgrims who cannot find a camp and so they travel together for safety and companionship.

Tim Keel related how he had been on staff of a large, seeker-sensitive church. He increasingly felt the disjunction between his experience of Christian community in college and the practice of ministry in that church. He eventually left that church and found Jacob’s Well in Kansas City. The basis of that church is the idea of community that values 1. proximity, 2. stability, 3. hospitality, 4. Rest.

I was so taken by his tale, for it resonated with my experience. I serve a church that does not practice community in a way that I experienced in college. I have always chalked that up to the fact that college students have nothing but time and opportunity to practice community, as footloose and fancy free as most college students are. Once one gets out of college and takes on the responsibilities of family life, the locus of life moves outward. Yet his convinctions and visions offer me hope. And perhaps more than hope, they challenge me. They challenge me because they call into question the ways that I have capitulated and settled for a lack of community.

The question that I don’t want to ask because it will mean change and movement and possibly transformation is “what do I need do to move toward the integration of community and ministry?” I am in a comfortable but unsatisfying place. Do I need to move and go to a new and unsafe place? Or what do I need to do where I am? These are unsafe questions that have been pressed upon my heart.

Holy Days

It is easy to say, and so is often said, that we live in a consumer culture, yet, it is much more difficult to grasp the depth of the implications. My ears are slowly becoming attuned to hear those deeper tones. They have been helped out significantly by maestros who have near-perfect pitch. One whom I am only now discovering is Walter Brueggemann. He has long had great standing among Biblical scholars, but I have not read him (I skipped the assigned book in seminary. Too much other reading is my excuse). Then, this morning I read his reading of our cultural practice of the "Weekend". He notes its religious character first with this pithy remark:

About as close as we get to a secular blessing in our society is, "Have a nice weekend," a wish for a significant, self-focused in a routine world of work that is itself thought to be without significance.

This religious character would help to explain the incredible standing that the "weekend" has in the minds of the masses. Brueggemann continues his reading:

The weekend as a social institution and practice is enormously powerful and pervasive among us. In an acknowledgement of its power and importance, increasing numbers of businesses now permit "dressing down" on Friday, rather like "weekend eve," a time of preparation. I understand, as well, that what used to be the uncurbed practice of Friday night drinking on college campuses has largely moved to Thursday night, in order not to interrupt the sacred time of the weekend with its endless round of sports, entertainment, shopping, and homecoming, all formats of self-indulgence underwritten by consumer ideology. The weekend as social institution and practice is an occasion of privatistic escape, freedom of responsibilities (through allowing for Saturday "chores"), engaged as though there were no human issues before us, no large public questions of violence and deprivation, and no antidotes requiring a response of serious, engaged passion. ...the weekend is so authoritative and attractive that serious church believers, like everyone else, flee to the mountains or the shore or wherever as soon and as often as possible. It is apparently an article of consumer faith that the goal of life is to escape tribulations. (Ichabod Toward Home: The Journey of God's Glory, 121)

In planning church events we undoubtedly take into account the "sacred" nature of these days. We plan events around football Saturdays and playoff games. We try to have things in the morning or a night so as not overly to disrupt the rest of the Saturday. I realized that this feature is just as present during December, where it is "ok" to have special events but normal programming should be suspended so that there is time for all of the shopping and parties.

ERROR MSGBrueggemann, in his book, helpfully suggests that what we need is a counter-narrative, an alternate script than that of technological consumerism. That script needs to be read and re-enacted in our lives to allow us to live into the new world of God's Kingdom. I need to chew on this book a lot more.