As I drove back to the office from a luncheon featuring one of the candidates for Michigan’s governor this fall, my eye fell on a brightly colored bumper sticker made up to resemble a campaign sticker. The message was simply “Elect Jesus the King of Your Life.” While I might otherwise squirm a bit at such sentiments (see my post Trivial Jesus), I recognize that life is largely about how we each respond to the allure of various things, phenomena,–or perhaps even other people–that pull us into varying levels of loyalty. The Jesus of the Gospels seems to have given voice to that when he spoke of the impossibility of serving two masters. You can’t do it, he said. We possess the capacity for only so much devotion, and we must be careful how we assign it.
The Brief Statement of Faith of the Presbyterian Church (USA) speaks of our human tendency to “accept lies as truth” even as we blur the image of God in ourselves and the social order we create and maintain. Humans are continually searching for meaning, and perhaps many are lured into looking for affirmation in all the wrong places. Sometimes the error is obvious, but the dilatory effects of misplaced worship is often much more subtle.
We accept those lies perpetuated by our culture and commended to us by others as normative–not because we intentionally rebel against devotion to God–but because we so easily fall victim to the attraction of “all the vain things that charm me most” as the old hymn reminds us. The divisive and polarizing effect of postmodern American politics keeps us culpable, it seems. That tendency to easy identification of the demonized “other” is just so convenient. If we embrace the conviction that all of creation is essentially good, then we can see the fundamental error of casting those with whom we do not agree as somehow evil. I must be reminded of that often.
But that to which we assign loyalty is often much more subtle in its allure and insidious in the effect it has on our very souls. Some of that which draws us away from God is obvious: money, power, position, reputation, greed, etc. We may even convince ourselves that these things do not hold power over us and that we merely use them for a greater good. We may find, after some introspection, that we have duped ourselves. Often we just don’t get it.
In this season of stewardship campaigns, I have been thinking about the notion of loyalty to God that finds expression in the ways we set our priorities, especially the way we handle our money. The postmodern church seems to have fallen victim to the consumerist mindset that regards offerings as payment for services rendered. It follows that we render unto God only to the extent that we have received value-added returns from the church in the form of experiences that do not threaten our sense of self. That which challenges our comfort is more often met with a resistance to giving, rather than giving which is cheerful. The church has fallen into the business of selling something (entertainment?) that would not qualify even as cheap grace in the struggle to pay our bills.
Perhaps electing Jesus as the king of our lives is a conscious and deliberate selection we all need to make. How would that consciousness change our giving behavior? More to the point, how do we preachers get that message across?
Raising Basileia 