so I’ve seen this vdo on three different blogs I read including my friend Dan’s. So I thought I’d join in the fun as well. It’s funny cause it’s true… brings back really bad repressed memories of toiling away in a cube farm in a certain chicago megachurch basement… enjoy (make sure you’ve gone to the bathroom recently):
is the prophet? This is a question that I’m giving much thought to this week. I find myself returning again and again to a book titled simply, the Prophets by Abraham Joshua Heschel. In it he writes:
The prophet is a man who feels fiercely. God has thrust a burden upon his soul, and he is bowed and stunned at man’s fierce greed. Frightful is the agony of man; no human voice can convey its full terror. Prophecy is the voice that God has lent to the silent agony, a voice to the plundered poor, to the profaned riches of the world. It is a form of living, a crossing point of God and man. God is raging in the prophet’s words.
The prophets lived in a perpetually state of disgust and indignation that would be impossible for us to sustain. But the question I struggle with and I want to ask you is: what can we sustain?
So what? This was the response that Chris gave me when I asked him to read my previous post. I asked him if I was too opinionated (it’s hard to imagine, I know, but I am sometimes). Nope, he said. I’ve got nothing against what you’ve written, it’s just that I don’t know what to do with it… I said, well that’s what this week’s message is about, I can’t spoil it.
He didn’t know that and neither do you, so perhaps I should say it: this week’s message is subtitled ’so what?’. If the empire is bad, so what? If an all-consuming consumer culture is fighting to control my imagination, so what? If the clothes I buy are made from environmentally unsustainable textile crops and by the equivalent of slave labor, so what? If we are called to be an alternate community of compassion, kindness, humility, meekness, patience, forgiveness, love and peace… so what!? If we enjoy the benefits of living in a culture of idolatrous greed and violence, so what? If I buy bananas for $0.69 a pound while the woman who picked them can’t afford to feed her family, so what? If I live in a warm comfortable house while the coal that is burned to give it energy is mined by blowing the tops of mountains, so what? If the safety and economic stability of my nation is ensured by the destruction of other nations and the death their citizens, so what?
So what if I can’t imagine life in any other way? So what if resistance seems futile? So what if instead of imaging my creator, I am branded by the pushers of the ‘American Dream’ and their products. What if, faced with the ‘American Dream’, we stood up and said, “we beg to differ! That’s not my dream. Not if it makes an idol of consumption and distorts my call to image my creator!“
So, I’m getting back to writing about the four marks of empire. This time I want to ask questions about how so called “developing nations” fit into the overall global economic system. Is it possible that the “poor” countries of the world function in a similar way as the conquered provinces of Rome? Is development aid and the social and economic terms that come with it just another way of ensuring that the wealth of these countries continues to flow primarily toward the wealthy nations of the world?
Let’s look at how it worked in the Roman Empire. In a book called ‘Pax Romana and the Peace of Jesus Christ‘, Klaus Wengst writes:
So what Rome needed in order to exploit a province economically was above all the provision of an infrastructure, though this was tailored to its own needs. If the term “development aid” had already been in existence it would have been just as much a euphemism for exploitation as it is today(Wengst, page 28)
You see, Rome came and built roads and irrigation systems and other infrastructure to help the provinces “develop”, but in the end it was to make them more profitable for the empire. The infrastructure was built to ease the flow of resources back to Rome.
I suggest that the policies and goals of the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund help the world’s “developing” countries develop in a way that makes them more profitable investments for the large corporations of the worlds wealthy nations. I suggest that the flow of wealth continues to flow unabated from the poor and powerless to the rich and powerful. Over consumption in one area of the globe means resources are over consumed in other areas. Despite what the high priests of capitalism say, this world is finite and cannot support a “developed standard of living” for all of the human beings on this planet. We cannot have it both ways. If we want to consume more than our share of the worlds resources, others will have to make due with less than their share. This is called an ‘economics of oppression’. It is only arrogance on our part to trust in our own ingenuity to solve the finitude of resources through technology and good will.
While the policies of global economic empire by and large ensure the flow of wealth from poor to rich, on occasion military control must be used to enforce the system. No regime is safe from the US and it allies if it attempts to buck the system. Play by the rules or you may find your country run by a new government that does. Can we really burry our heads to this “open secret”?
So, if the empire elevates economic greed and avarice into ‘civic virtues’, then what is the shape of a community that serves a ruler who brings reconciliation and peace by sacrificial death rather than military might?(Walsh and Keesmaat page 61) How do we live as followers of Jesus in an empire of all-consuming consumerism?
In last weeks message, I mentioned that certain authors become trusted friends over time. And I mentioned that Wendell Berry was one of those authors for me. I thought perhaps you’d like to read for yourself.
If you go here and read this, I think you’ll start to hear his voice and how it has influenced my own.
While I am particularly fond of his poetry, it is the essays like this one that truly make him a trusted friend. Why, oh why, do the voices of the apologists of violence make more sense to us than the words of Jesus (see the last paragraph of the essay)????
subvert the empire, read subversive poetry! or better yet, write some yourself!
Apple is mounting a direct assault on the empire!
Personally I think these sum up really nicely why I use macs…
subvert the empire, get a mac! snicker snicker
Just want to let you all know that I’m currently having a few problems with my podcasting setup. So in the meantime, I am posting the audio from messages in the current series, colossians[remixed], on the description page. I will continue to post the audio there every week until I get the kinks worked out with my other setup…
*UPDATE: I am abandoning our previous system that I was using due to some gliches and eventual space and bandwidth issues. BUT in the last couple of days I put together a totally new and improved site called theBranch messageCast. I am still waiting for it to be approved by iTunes so that I can include a link to subscribe via the iTunes music store. In the mean time go check it out. Yeah i know, the builtin player is a nice touch… a big thanks to those crazy folks who develop podpress and give it away for free!
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