August 9, 2009 Des Moines
Ephesians
4:25-5:2
Straight Talk
I have been spending way too much time in airports of
late. I say this more out of weariness
and contrition than pride, but since the first of the year I have passed
through Boston Logan, Detroit Wayne County, Las Vegas McCarran, Denver, Chicago
O’Hare, St. Louis Lambert, Nashville BNA, Indianapolis, Tyler TX, and
Dallas-Fort Worth at least 8 times.
Whatever else I have learned along the way about arriving early,
shrinking my liquids and gels, schlepping my own bags and bracing for the sheer
hassle of it all, I have learned that while aircrafts may function well on
“auto-pilot,” passengers are wise to stay awake.
Landing last week, for example,
for a layover in Chicago on my way to the General Assembly in Indianapolis, I
turned my cell phone back on to find 8 different messages from American
Airlines informing me of gate and departure time changes – all received during
the course of the 45 minutes or so since I had left Des Moines. I have learned that if you actually want to
reach your desired destination, you had better stay alert, keep agile, pay
attention, and adapt to the necessary changes.
Despite their monotonous appearance, not every gate is the same. Sure, you can get on this plane – assuming
you can slip past the boarding agent – and once aboard there may even be a vacant
seat. But if you aren’t careful you
could wind up in Los Angeles instead of Las Vegas, St. Paul instead of St.
Louis, Fort Wayne instead of Fort Worth.
The gates keep changing, and if you care where you are headed, you had
better be ready to make some changes as well, and willing to run.
But change isn’t only required
for air-travelers. I attended a workshop
at the General Assembly led by Matthew Sleeth, who has become a persistent and
articulate spokesman for “greening” the way we live. Five years ago, Matthew and his family lived
in a big house on the coast filled with all the standard accessories and
amenities, plus two luxury cars in the garage. As chief of the medical
staff at a large hospital, Sleeth was living the American dream—until he
realized that something was terribly wrong. As he saw patient after patient
suffering from cancer, asthma, and other chronic diseases that had been
comparatively rare a generation ago, he began to understand that something
systemic was happening, and that the earth and its inhabitants were in trouble.
He began to study the science that had shaped him. And he began to ask larger and more probing questions.
Never before religious in any sense of the word, Sleeth
and his wife began to study the sacred texts of various religions, ultimately
discovering how the Scriptural lessons of personal responsibility, simplicity,
and stewardship could be applied to modern life. Ultimately this formerly
agnostic and his formerly Jewish wife became professing Christians – active,
and also activist. In his presentation
to our workshop, the soft-spoken, self-effacing Dr. Sleeth mentioned that since
their personal “great awakening,” his family has sold their big home and given
away more than half of what they once owned; dispensed with many of the
energy-consuming appliances they had once depended on – like their clothes
dryer – and planted a large garden that now provides much of what they eat. He quit his job and now spends all his time
traveling around the country speaking to whoever will listen. “Oh,”
he wryly paused and asked, “did I mention that all this involves making
changes?”
I thought of all that again as I re-read this instruction
written to the Christians in Ephesus.
“Thieves,” the writer insists, “must give up stealing.”
“Really?” I thought.
“That seems awfully narrow-minded!
You mean some things simply aren’t compatible with Jesus’ way of
living? You mean following Jesus will
mean I have to change? Come on – get
real!”
Well, as it turns out, this is what’s real: that not everything is congruent with the
Christian faith. What the writer to the
Ephesians is describing is the fundamentally transforming change that represents
the Christian life. Nothing short of
becoming a new person, conversion is all about leaving the old self behind and
taking up a new direction. It isn’t
merely about how we spend our Sunday mornings, nor do the changes all take
place inside the airy confines of one’s head.
Following Jesus is more than a shift in thought. Some outside patterns need to change as
well – thievery, as the passage indicates, but also violence of any sort, like
slander and malice, and anything that tears down instead of builds up.
But of all those habits redlined by this counselor,
dishonesty may be the most difficult to give up. “Put away falsehood,” the writer implores. “Let all of us speak the truth to our
neighbors, for we are members of one another.”
To each other, yes, but also to ourselves, because we are addicted
to deception. Oh, I’m not talking
about the various little white lies that squeak us through awkward moments –
the “no, I don’t think you look like you’ve gained weight”; the “oh, no, I really
like my meat this black,” kinds of hedges around the truth. While I doubt such short-term duplicities are
the kinds of things we ought to be encouraging, I don’t really think they are
likely to bring about the demise of civilization as we know it, or delay the
coming of God’s Kingdom.
No, the dishonesty I think the writer means is the larger,
more systemic blindness -- the cultivated naiveté – that could, indeed,
eventually scuttle us.
I’ve been reading this summer a lot about food – what it
is, for example, and more to the point, what it isn’t; where it comes from and
how it is being genetically manipulated – not as a part of some evil plot, but
in order to satisfy public cravings we delude ourselves into believing are
harmless. But as a bumper sticker that
Ben Allaway recently reported seeing succinctly cautions, “Don’t believe
everything you think.”
In his bestselling book, In Defense of Food, Michael Pollan makes this practical suggestion: “don’t eat anything your great-grandmother
wouldn’t recognize as food.” That would
likely eliminate about half the stock on grocery store shelves. But even that rule isn’t finally adequate,
Pollan acknowledges, because some things would fool her – looking familiar, but
really aren’t. Take, for example, the
bread found on most grocery store shelves.
It looks like bread, and the label says it’s bread, but if you read the
ingredients you will find that soft, spongy loaf to be something else
altogether – and altogether unidentifiable.
Instead of the flour, yeast, water and salt your great-grandmother would
expect to find, you discover high fructose corn syrup, cellulose, calcium
sulfate, mono- and diglycerides, ethoxylated mono- and diglycerides, ascorbic
acid, azodicarbonamide, guar gum, calcium propionate, distilled vinegar,
monocalcium phosphate, ammonium sulfate, artificial colorings, and soy
lecithin. Among other things. Most of those ingredients are engineered to
make the loaf last on the shelf practically forever. But as countless writers point out, real food
spoils. If not even the decaying
bacteria are interested in a food product, we probably shouldn’t be
either.
We are, in other words, deceiving ourselves when it comes
to food. “Lying” if I can use that
strong of a term. I don’t care how many
vitamins and minerals Hostess shoehorns into its cakelike wrapping or its
creamlike filling, a Twinkie is never going to be healthy, regardless of what
we try to tell ourselves. We can
convince ourselves that those individually wrapped slices of American Cheese product
are really cheese, but I predict that any rat would effortlessly know the
difference. And we can reassure
ourselves that those Argentinean tomatoes stacked in the grocery store produce
shelves in December have something faintly resembling a “tomatoey” taste, but
come August’s locally vine-ripened varieties and we can no longer sustain the
fraud.
“Tell the truth,” this writer implores the Ephesians. Any more than there are watermelons in
January, there is no Christian way to steal.
Don’t keep deceiving yourself.
Some things will have to change.
Over the last few decades stockholders have increasingly demanded
constant growth in their investments, and measured progress by quarterly
returns. But as the economic calamities
of the past year have revealed, our own greed begat business practices and
financial instruments that were ever thinner, ever riskier, ever more removed
from the actual making and buying and selling of anything real – and still
further away from policing oversight. It
didn’t finally take much of a chilling breeze to blow apart the entire house of
cards we had constructed on the enduring delusion that it’s possible to spin
straw into gold. We need to start
telling ourselves the truth.
How long will we keep deluding ourselves into believing
that our patterns of consumption are sustainable – that we can simply keep sucking
oil out of the ground forever, cutting down rain forests with impunity,
belching smoke into the air without calamity, and cramming more cars onto roads
increasingly paving over the land we depend upon to feed us? How long will we continue to convince
ourselves that nothing we are doing has any negative effect; that some
behaviors tear down instead of build up; diminish instead of enlarge? When will we recognize that just because a
Christian does it, doesn’t make it Christian?
When will we start talking a little straighter, telling
ourselves and each other the truth, and recognize that not only thieves will
need to change?
“Imitate God,”
advises this letter to the Ephesians, “as
beloved children.”
Or, as someone has paraphrased it,
Watch what God does, and then you
do it, like children who learn proper behavior from their parents. Mostly what
God does is love you. Keep company with God and learn a life of love. Observe
how Christ loved us -- not cautiously but extravagantly. He didn't love in
order to get something from us but to give everything of himself to us. Love
like that. [1]
Indeed.