BLOG 11.26.12: Y’KNOW WHAT? WE COULD CHANGE THAT!

I trust that my readers of this Blog will not consider me a total Scrooge, or some kind of a dour old wet-blanket, but I really do want to register my own protest to the consumerist-materialist orgy we have made out of the Christmas event. Here we are in the aftermath of “Black Friday,” and everything in me rebels. I really feel no responsibility to assure the solvency of the large department store chains which depend on the sales of such, nor to indulge the greed of so many. I hope you’ll forgive me.

But we (the larger Christian community) could change all of that if we had the heart and mind to. Not only so, but we could create something wonderfully creative and beautiful if we had the intention. (Some Christian communities are already into this. Cheers!).

When I say this, there comes to mind a Bible and theology conference that I was partly responsible for planning a number of years ago. We invited two gifted theologians as speakers. One was the Argentinian, Rene Padilla, who is a New Testament scholar, and a key member of the Latin American Theological Fraternity (or some such name). The other speaker was Walter Brueggemann, one of the giant Old Testament scholars of the last century. They had never met, but one would think they had planned this together. What they taught that week resonates with my reason for this Blog.

Dr. Padilla was fresh off the plane. He took as his working text: I Peter 2:11. “Beloved, I       urge you as sojourners and exiles to abstain from the passions of the flesh, which war against your soul.” In unpacking this, he interpreted the Greek word translated as “flesh” in its corporate, cultural sense, i.e., the dominant social order in which they lived. In an almost off-handed way, he observed that as a Latin American, his opinion of the United States was that its dominant religion was consumerism. He noted that even in Christian journals, for a price you could buy a program to give you a successful church! He then spent the next three days making this even more graphic. Sound familiar?

Dr. Brueggemann took a text from somewhere in the Pentateuch (I can’t find it now) in which Israel was about to go into the promised land, and were told that each year they should go back to the boundary and remember from whence they had come, and that they were a pilgrim people who belonged to Yahweh/God and were to live under his covenant, and not be like the nations around them. He made exactly the same point as Dr. Padilla did. We, Christian folk, are a counter-cultural people and so need to create a community that incarnates our values, even when it is totally counter to the popular tides.

Now I know that the Christian church, as it spread into pagan Europe and Britain, co-opted the pagan festival of the winter solstice (Yuletide) as the occasion to celebrate the incarnation. But there was still some integrity as they focused liturgically on the Advent, the birth of Jesus, and then followed it immediately in the liturgical year with the Feast of St. Stephen the Martyr, and a couple days later with the remembrance of the Massacre of the Innocents. This all gave the community a sobering and celebrative sense of its roots and the cost of being a disciple.

I hold out a vision of a church that refuses to engage in this current orgy of consumerism, and rather creates a celebration, which incarnates the wonder of what happened when the Lord of the universe took on flesh and blood, and inaugurated a new creation.

That could be exciting.

Now, … I’ve gotten if off of my chest. Thanks for bearing with me. Peace!