The Idolatry of Security

This last weekend I was at North Park Seminary presenting at their symposium on “The Idolatry of Security.” I approached the issue by comparing the responses to fear in two biblical stories that frame the Christian story of redemption – the garden of Eden and the garden of Gethsemane.  In the first, Adam and Eve knew fear for the first time, and in response, they hid from each other (made clothes) and from God.  In response to God’s queries, they passed the buck and, essentially, passed off the punishment of death (God had said: “if you eat of this tree you will die”) onto someone else (Adam: “she made me do it”; Eve: “the serpent made me do it:”).  What I find remarkable is how well this story sums up for us all of our fears, for they all return in one way or another to the fear of death, the fear of the other, and our willingness to sacrifice the other to make ourselves safe.

In contrast, Jesus in the garden of Gethsemane feels fear for the first time (or at least the first time we read about it in the Bible), and instead of hiding and sacrificing the other for his own security, he subordinates his desire for safety – “let this cup pass from me” – to his desire to be faithful – “not my will but yours [God's] be done.”  In so doing, Jesus calls his followers to renounce the false security of violence and power and so to risk everything in order to gain everything – or, as he puts it, to lose life in order to find it.  Jesus  calls his followers to embrace an ethic of risk even as the culture of fear views risk-taking as morally questionable.  Jesus calls his followers to participate in God’s economy of gift in such a way that the blessings poured out upon them continue to circulate, not only across the differences of gender, race, tribe, and nation, but across chasms of fear and through walls of hate.

- Scott

David Foster Wallace – rest in peace

In a blogpost yesterday, my friend Craig Detweiler wrote about his response to hearing of the suicide of David Foster Wallace last Friday. In it, he quoted Wallace from a 2005 commencement speech at Kenyon College. Wallace said: 

Here’s something else that’s weird but true: in the day-to day trenches of adult life, there is actually no such thing as atheism. There is no such thing as not worshipping. Everybody worships. The only choice we get is what to worship. And the compelling reason for maybe choosing some sort of god or spiritual-type thing to worship — be it JC or Allah, be it YHWH or the Wiccan Mother Goddess, or the Four Noble Truths, or some inviolable set of ethical principles — is that pretty much anything else you worship will eat you alive. If you worship money and things, if they are where you tap real meaning in life, then you will never have enough, never feel you have enough. It’s the truth. Worship your body and beauty and sexual allure and you will always feel ugly. And when time and age start showing, you will die a million deaths before they finally grieve you. On one level, we all know this stuff already. It’s been codified as myths, proverbs, clichés, epigrams, parables; the skeleton of every great story. The whole trick is keeping the truth up front in daily consciousness.

Worship power, you will end up feeling weak and afraid, and you will need ever more power over others to numb you to your own fear. Worship your intellect, being seen as smart, you will end up feeling stupid, a fraud, always on the verge of being found out. But the insidious thing about these forms of worship is not that they’re evil or sinful, it’s that they’re unconscious. They are default settings.

They’re the kind of worship you just gradually slip into, day after day, getting more and more selective about what you see and how you measure value without ever being fully aware that that’s what you’re doing.

Wallace was an incisive critic of the blanket commercialization that threatens to capture the things that make us human (like love and health and wisdom and justice and beauty) and sell them back to us in the form of entertainment and novelty.  His voice will be missed.

- Scott

peacemeal turns out the lights

Peacemeal had our last Gathering in May 2009.  We’ve had three and a half great years of fellowship, friendship, worship, and mission.  Thanks to everyone who has participated in our life together and may God bless us as we move forward enriched by our time together.