Confessions of a Consumer Addict

admin March 28th, 2010

In church this Palm Sunday morning our pastor mentioned Marcus Borg and John Crossan’s book The Last Week which I had read a year or so ago. I suddenly saw a parallel between Jesus’ Rome and 21^st Century America.

Borg and Crossan paint a Palm Sunday picture of Caesar’s army coming into Jerusalem from the West at the same time Jesus’ procession was coming in from the East, and the authors contrast the goals and methods of these diametrically opposed ‘armies.’

We can see the contrast as “the powers” of the Roman government vs. the anarchy (non-power) of Jesus’ radical new approach to life.

Rome, and each of its successive emperors, believed that the only way to have security and peace was through the “Pax Romana” – peace and security through force, thus guaranteeing a long and cushy reign for the emperors and the reigning elites. Rome believed in taking what they wanted and in a world order that would keep things that way. That order was tightly managed everywhere in the empire to be sure that the pax would not be threatened. All of society’s institutions including the religious infrastructure were forced or seduced into dancing to Rome’s tune.

Jesus’ radical way, however, was not ‘against’ the power of Rome, but was rather for demonstrating a way of living that was loving, instead of warring; caring, rather than manipulating; acting compassionately, rather than accumulating wealth.

It was a way of living that did not use force, power politics, self-aggrandizement, or wealth-accumulation. Jesus did not believe in, or use Rome’s power tactics and zero-sum games in confronting them. He did what they did not expect and in a way that did not further inflame the world but pointed toward peace, freedom, and real security.

Today, “the powers” would have to also include our massive consumer culture and its globalized corporations, factories, and outlet malls, along with the governments, worldwide, that support and enable it.

Our empire’s government is founded on the same notion of security as Rome’s, we just try to be more subtle about it and at least make a big show of negotiating with others, but when that fails, as it often does, we very quickly bring out the military to settle the matter. Once in a while that even works – but mostly not, now days. Maybe, as some have proposed, our empire is already in eclipse.

One difference between us and Rome is that multinational corporations play the tune and western governments dance to it in order to keep their power and money flowing. Perhaps even worse, all the elements of the consumer system conspire to brainwash us into believing that the best life – nay, our very survival – is in consuming more and more. Our entire culture, our governments, business and industry, educational institutions, and (gasp!) churches participate in the structuring of every facet of our lives to support this brainwashing.

So today in our Jerusalem, we have military and business armies entering our lives on one side in order to control our ‘good’ behavior and keep the good times rolling, while on the other side Jesus is entering on his borrowed donkey with his motley crew of fishermen and mal-contents.

He wants us to look deep inside ourselves, our neighbors, and our enemies, and see the humanity in each – that they are us and we are them – and begin to treat each other with compassionate care, equality, and justice rather than wasting our time, money, and, indeed, our lives accumulating and throwing away useless junk that merely serves to keep our “empire of junk” running, but which also distracts us from our real reason for living.

So Palm Sunday is really what Christian Simple Living is all about, and we need to find ways of implementing Jesus’ message about what’s really important in ways that do not use our culture’s abusive, disingenuine, and controlling tactics.

We need to be Christian anarchists (not using the tactics of The Powers) while helping our world to see our better way.

• Uncategorized
• Comments(0)