Lust

On Contentment

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Now there is great gain in godliness with contentment, for we brought nothing into the world, and we cannot take anything out of the world. But if we have food and clothing, with these we will be content.
—1 Timothy 6:6-8

At a time of the year when we celebrate Christ coming in the flesh to dwell among us and rescue us from sin and death, why is it that so many people are sad?

Some people recall loved ones that didn’t live to see another Christmas. For them, I can understand how Christmas can feel gray. I went through that feeling in 2001. Didn’t feel all that great, but I moved on.

Some people will be alone again this Christmas. Can’t say that I ever experienced that reality, but not having anyone to share Christmas can be a tough time. I understand that one, too.

When you push aside those two very human and understandable reasons to be sad at Christmastime, not too many other good reasons exist.

I read v. 8 out of that 1st Timothy passage above and it knocks me out. Food and clothes. That’s it. Well, perhaps not all of it. Paul writes in many other places about the cheer that fellow believers gave him whenever he had a chance to fellowship with them, so he definitely saw how loneliness and the loss of dear ones chipped away at his resolve.

When you get to the meat of Paul’s words, though, it’s hard to escape the reality that beyond Jesus, all the Christian truly needs is food and clothing.

Wow.

I sit in my office now and type this on a six-year-old PC. My ten-year-old Mac’s gotten too slow to handle most Web sites anymore, what with the million Javascripts, cookies, Flash animations, AJAX, and whatever loads in your average Web site today.

But I’ve got two computers in my house. Two.

Here in my office, I sit in front of a phone and a Brother duplexing fax/scanner/laserprinter while a satellite dish pours out binary to the heavens. I’ve got a bookshelf full of books like To Kill a Mockingbird, The Complete Grimm Fairy Tales, Pilgrim at Tinker Creek, Winnie the Pooh, The Classic Collection of E.M. Bounds on Prayer, Revival by D. Martyn Lloyd-Jones, and I’m Just Here for the Food by Alton Brown.

I’ve got a couple of brandy snifters I don’t think I’ve ever used sitting in the glasses cabinet. Two desks. Two. Another bookshelf filled with the complete series of The Interpreter’s Bible. Three filing cabinets. Three.

But all I need is Jesus, food, and clothing to be content.

I read a book recently that said that contentment is complete satisfaction with the will of God. Can most of us say we’re content with the will of God for our lives? Don’t we sometimes look around and wonder how that guy over there got all the good stuff and I didn’t? Don’t we entertain fantasies of what we’d do differently in our lives if we had access to a genuine time machine?

I haven’t seen it in years, but the old Charlie Brown Halloween special has a scene where the kids compare the treats they receive at every house they visit, Chuck, learn to love the rock...and poor ol’ Charlie Brown is always forced to admit, “I got a rock.”

I don’t know about you, but I can’t bring myself to say, “I got a rock,” anymore. That’s a lie. No matter what life brings, none of us has the right to say, “I got a rock.” Jesus didn’t die so that you could have a rock—unless that rock’s what rolled away from the empty tomb. (That rock and what it means…well, that I’ll take.)

So for all those people sad at Christmas because the neighbor got a snow blower while you got a cheap shovel from Walgreens, I say two words: “Get real.”

Because I don’t see in my Bible that I need a snow blower to be content. In fact, Paul doesn’t even me mention a roof over his head as part of his contentment.

Think on that for a couple minutes. This post will wait….

So for all those folks out there with long faces at Christmastime, I offer no greater words of wisdom than to say, “Snap out of it!” Who are we to grouse about this thing or that? When Jesus asked Peter whether he and the rest of the twelve wanted to take off like some fairweather followers had, Peter replied, “Lord, to whom shall we go?” And by “Lord” he wasn’t talking about Lord & Taylor.

Who are we to moan at Christmastime—or any time? Do we have food? Do we have clothes? Most of all, do we have Jesus?

Sounds like contentment to me.

Too Much

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{If you’re not in the mood for a mid-week rant, then skip today’s post. I apologize in advance…}

No milk. Time to run to the grocery store. Time to wonder what weird rip in the space-time continuum brings me to this other, oddly parallel town.

Yes, the Kroger store transports me to some burg called Scooterville. Every row of the store has some person riding a battery-powered scooter up and down the aisles, that person grabbing the essential foodstuffs Man has feasted on since the dawn of time: Pop-Tarts, Twinkies, fried cheesecake, and countless other comestibles sure to give a pancreas a fit.

And from what I can tell, pancreases across this country are calling it quits. “No mas! No mas!”

In the last month, I’ve heard one guy after another tell me he’s wearing a CPAP mask at night and poking himself with syringes filled with insulin. Can’t breathe, can’t keep the blood sugar stable. It’s scary.

Now while it’s true that I turn 45 mere days from now, I don’t want to be staring that future in the face. So even though I’m healthy, I’m making some dietary changes.

This is not to say I’m obese like the drivers of the scooters that clog the aisles of my neighborhood Kroger. In fact, at 6′ 4″ and 217 pounds, I’m the lightest guy my height that I know. Most of the others are 235 and up.

I was pretty much a stick in high school and even then I wore pants with a 36 waist. I wear 38 today, but I highly suspect that a 38 today is not what it was twenty-five years ago. A tape measure around my waist says 41, but I’m still got plenty of room in the waist of my size 38 jeans, so something ain’t right.

I’ve got no gut to speak of, but the powers that be say you can’t have a waist larger than 40 inches or else you face a plethora of vascular and endocrine issues. Now the rule seems a bit off when you compare 6′ 4″ with a 40 waist with 5′ 9″ and 40, but we tall people are out of luck in plenty of other regards. (In other words, if your house was built before 1965, don’t ask me to come down into your basement.)

No matter how svelte I am compared with peers, I still don’t want to end up a diabetic having a machine breathe for me at night, so I’ve started a low-glycemic diet in the last week and have already seen good results.

Now I don’t want to seem judgmental here, but there’s no way to escape it: anymore, we’re a nation of fatties. When I have to walk around the end of an aisle to get past someone oozing over the sides of a scooter, something’s gone wrong. Fill every row with a massive rotundity piloting a 3-wheeler, and we’ve moved beyond wrongness into outright tragedy.

I think about this national corpulence at the same time I read that a Senate panel is investigating the bank accounts of a half dozen Pentecostal/charismatic televangelists. Just as some people’s bodies swell up like Violet Beauregard on a tour of Wonka’s, so too do these evangelists swell their own personal larders at the expense of the gullible and poor.

That the government sees fit to investigate when the governing bodies of those evangelists’ denominations sit like three chimps masking various sensory organs…well, I know a few folks who should be ashamed of themselves. And for once, it’s not government folks.

We talk about a lot of blind spots in the American Church here at this blog, but I’m not sure we’ve ever fully discussed our love of excess. Some of us love our preachers loud and larger than life. Some of us like a good 3-ring circus on Sundays. And if people can barely squeeze down the aisle to get to the altar to confess every sin known to man SAVE for rapacious gluttony, then that’s okay, too.

Only it’s not okay.

I’m not sure why we give this one a pass. Why do we tolerate excess in our churches? The only excess we should be seeking is an overflow of the Spirit of God, yet some of us donate money hoping to get more—and still more on top of that—because some Dior-wearing televangelist’s wife caked under fifty pounds of Mary Kay says so (because, as she’ll tell you, winter’s coming and nothing stops the frosties better than a Russian sable coat).The perfect metaphor We’re turning into sweaty-faced lard-buckets hollering about those damned liberals and their abortions, or those red-diaper babies selling America down the commode, yet we can’t pull ourselves away from the “Stuff Yourself till You Explode” brunch bar at the local Big Boy.

No, it’s not just the charlatan televangelist promising 21st century indulgences. It’s not just the human amoeba scrunched down in his scooter trying to use a grab stick to procure a family-sized bag of Famous Amos cookies from the top shelf. No, it’s those of us who think Jesus died to ensure us a good credit score so we can buy more crap than the guy next door.

So again, I ask, “Why do we tolerate excess in our churches?” Why do we tolerate pews filled with one Mr. Creosote after another? Why can’t we wise up to con-artists televangelists who take and take and take, all the while sporting their Patek Philippes for the slack-jawed to ogle? Why do we measure spiritual success in terms of how big congregants’ houses are rather than how large their hearts might be? Again, show me a church, when selecting a new elder, that’ll pick the humble guy who works in a convenience store over the preening captain of industry, and I’ll show you a church Smyrna would embrace.

Too much. Too stinkin’ much.

If we want to make a difference in this world, then we better live so we can say without irony, “Jesus alone is my satisfaction.”

Deep Economy, Part 2

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A look at Bill McKibben’s book Deep Economy: The Wealth of Communities and the Durable Future…

I’ll start with two words that may end all your interest in Deep Economy:

Global warming.

McKibben’s an activist for fixing the issue. As for me, I’m not convinced that global warming is, indeed, a man-made phenomena. I’m not even convinced that we’re experiencing a warming at all. Many blogosphere pundits who jeer at the whole idea of global warming got a hoot this last week when NASA corrected some temperature readings from the last decade and it showed that we were slightly cooler than previously reported.

Stay with me, though.

Deep Economy begins with energy. McKibben argues, quite forcefully, that energy makes the modern world possible. And the main sources of energy that created our world as we know it are coal, oil, and natural gas: fossil fuels. The amount of power we glean from just a gallon of gasoline shames the power found in some Old World farmer’s entire menagerie of beasts of burden. Hydrocarbon-based fuels replaced muscle power by an order of magnitude. They, in turn, led to the burst of invention that gave us new forms of transportation, the miracle of electricity, long distance communication, and thousands of other modern conveniences we take for granted.

Before fossil fuels, the idea of fantastic economic growth escaped us. But with their dynamic ability to reduce labor, those fuels made consumerism and unbridled growth possible.

But, as McKibben rightly notes, growth may come with an enormous price tag in terms of ecological fallout. We in the United States were forced to deal with our growth’s deleterious effects back in the 1970s. Those of us born before that time can remember the waters around Cleveland catching on fire. You don’t need a chemistry degree to know that fire and water don’t mix unless something is very, very wrong.

I live by one of the small tributaries of the Little Miami River. Thirty years ago, that river was one of ten most polluted waterways in the United States. McKibben would argue that growth had much to do with the downfall of that river system, and I totally agree.

Today, though, we’ve restored the Little Miami, if not to its Edenic glory, at least to a level higher than “cesspool.”

Yet while we can claim that success, our unlimited desire for more is only shifting environmental disaster elsewhere. The fall of the Iron Curtain shocked many Westerners when they discovered the toll keeping up with the West’s growth had taken on the Communist nations. One hellhole after another sprouted up out of the countryside in places like Romania and Russia. Entire cities succumbed to chemical production plants, metal smelting plants, and more. Iridescent rivers filled with mercury, cadmium, and arsenic ran through towns. Hello, China, goodbye, sun.Diseased residents, like something out of a post-apocalyptic nightmare, stumbled around in sunless wastelands wreathed in smog.

And lest we think those days are a thing of the past, India and China stand ready to re-enact them.

We live in the richest nation on Earth, and the gospel of growth requires we export it elsewhere. Shareholders must be satisfied, cheap goods must be had, and growth must continue.

But what will be the impact of 2.5 billion people acquiring cars? With 300 million in population, the United States (according to 2004 DOT estimates) contains 243,023,485 registered vehicles. We live and die by our cars here. Worse, we export that same desire to the rest of the world. Car ownership in China increases exponentially and shows unlimited growth potential. What would happen if the 2.5 billion people in China and India buy into the “need” for a car? What does it mean for the health of our world if keeping up with the Joneses becomes keeping up with the Wus and Patels?

Consider the amount of energy needed to simply build a car. Estimates vary, but a healthy figure would be roughly 35 barrels of oil (or 1,470 gallons) per car. With an average lifespan of about 15 years, that car will consume an additional 19,500 gallons of gas.

Now ask where what will happen if India and China demand cars at the rate we Americans do.

Oil experts in the West can’t get the Saudis to fess up to the state of their oil fields. Some believe their Ghawar bed is fast declining. When even the pro-growth The Wall Street Journal writes about “peak oil” and the sucking dry of oil beds around the globe, people need to wise up.

And folks, this is before India and China demand cars.

Our lust for more growth requires energy. It also screams for raw materials. Many of the the carelessly purchased signs of the Good Life™ we buy without thinking come from plastics, and, therefore, oil. We trucked those trinkets from far away, burning energy in shipping them. As McKibben so wisely notes, what is the point of air freighting Danish-made sugar cookies to the United States while simultaneously shipping American-made sugar cookies to Denmark?

Due to complex chemical binding processes, one gallon of burned gasoline (at 6.25 pounds) puts nearly 20 pounds of carbon dioxide into the air. I read recently that we now have 200 more parts per million of carbon dioxide in the air today than we did in the 1950s. And the results? It’s hard to know them all, though thousands surely exist. One comes to mind right away. Beyond the disputed global warming process, no scientist disputes that poison ivy’s more potent today than in yesteryear. Scientists found out why, too: the more carbon dioxide the ivy absorbs from the air, the more potent the toxic oil in its leaves. At last count, 75 percent more toxic than when I was a kid.

What else will we be forced to learn too late? Will it be worse than super-poison ivy?

Now no matter what you think of my opening comments about global warming, even if you forget environmental issues, profligacy sits rotting at the core of growth at all costs. When it takes seven times the caloric value of a box of cereal to ship it than can be derived from eating it, aren’t we profligate with how we use energy? When our houses are twice the size they were thirty years ago, but with smaller families, aren’t we profligate? When it’s all about the individual and what we can consume, haven’t we lost our souls?

Eugene Peterson says this:

The cultivation of consumer spirituality is the antithesis of a sacrificial, “deny yourself” congregation. A consumer church is an antichrist church.

So apart from the environmental impact of growth, something truly awful happens to us on the inside as we participate in a consumeristic culture obsessed with more.

McKibben begins Deep Economy with a story of a young Chinese girl experiencing the reality of two economic truths: More and Better. He’s not against improving people’s lives by providing the poorest of the poor with some of the blessings of modern technology. Sometimes More and Better go hand in hand. (Obviously, technology gave us improved medical care and less drudgery.) McKibben tells of the Chinese girl’s backbreaking life in the rural countryside and notes the opportunities afforded her by small blessings brought by growth.

But More and Better fail when a society reaches Better and can’t add to it. At that point, More grows insidious. More becomes the be-all and end-all of life.

In the next installment of my look at Deep Economy, we’ll examine the toll on communities and individuals wrought by More.