Kurt Nelson
Text: Psalm 42: 1-8
March 27, 2008, Rollins Chapel.
We’re venturing into difficult waters with our new topic,
Consuming Religion: Faith, Desire and the Economy.
To realms of cultural criticism concerning our consumptive culture.
And today I hope to set forth a basic problem,
that we can discuss for the rest of this term.
A question of the connection between our culture’s consumptive practices,
and our Christian faith.
Now it’s easy to think about question of the Christian Faith
and the consumptive practices of our American culture,
as a question of the accumulation of wealth.
A seemingly simple question of greed.
To think of,
on the one hand,
gated communities and luxury SUVs,
of corrupt CEOs and uncaring multi-national businesses.
And on the other hand,
Jesus proclaiming that it is harder for a rich man to enter heaven,
than for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle.
of the call to give up all that we have and follow Christ.
These, clearly, are two trains on the same track,
pushing in exactly opposite directions.
Perhaps bound for collision.
And if it were as simple as all of that,
then we would not need 8 weeks of reflection on the topic of faith and consumption.
We might talk for a few minutes about Joel Osteen
and the new prosperity Gospel movement.
Ask ourselves if God really wants to shower us with worldly riches,
and quickly answer,
“no, of course that’s not what faith is about”
ready to move on to the bigger, more important, and more fundamental questions
But I think, unfortunately,
it’s not all that simple.
Because for me it comes down to this basic question of desire.
What is the object of our desire.
And what is the form of our desiring.
No joke,
while watching network television this past week,
I saw an advertisement for a sandwich called the “baconator”
complete with 2 all beef patties,
6 slices of bacon, 2 slices of cheese and a cheese sauce.
For those keeping count
that’s 840 calories and 51 grams of fat.
This ad was followed immediately by an ad for the most recent “low carb diet”
and just minutes later by a commercial about how diets don’t work,
but weight watchers does.
And I must admit, during a usual TV watching evening,
normally wouldn’t bat an eye at this seeming incongruity.
Because we are used to it.
We are surrounded by it. TV, radio, print, internet.
And we are consumed by it.
And the biggest problem is,
It affects us,
but we often don’t notice it.
But since I was in the midst of sermon preparation on this topic of faith and consumption.
I paid attention,
and thought briefly to myself,
“I wonder if Wendy’s, South Beach and Weight Watcher’s
might be upset that the network ran their commercials back to back.”
But I got to thinking,
It is not our desire for the perfect beach body,
that motivates paying money for a program such as weight watchers?
and our desire for ease and expediency that motivates a quick fix diet?
and if there’s a greater cause for desire for an 840 calorie cheeseburger,
than weeks and months of eating “low carb”
I don’t know what it is.
And thus the cycle of desire begins again.
Without Wendy’s would we need Weight Watchers?
Without South Beach would Wendy’s be so successful?
A small illustration of a much larger consumptive system,
in which our passions and desires,
must be tied to products in order for economic success.
A newer Lexus ad campaign puts it more directly,
“can you engineer desire?”
Can you engineer desire.
No one needs a Lexus.
Frankly, no one needs a low carb diet
or a Baconator.
But our economy needs to manufacture this desire,
in order to succeed.
Like the question of greed,
It’s easy to get bogged down in consumptive guilt
over ‘one-time’ sort of guilty pleasure purchase.
Which we’ve all done,
and can be quite helpful from time to time.
Let us not forget that Jesus himself,
allowed Mary to anoint his feet with a full pound of perfume,
instead of selling it off and giving the money to the poor.
This again is far too simplistic a vision of the problem before us.
But this is rather this is a question of systemic,
engineered desire for products.
For stuff.
As a basic tenet of our economy.
And what has this to do with our Christian faith?
Thus writes the Pslamist:
“As a deer longs for flowing streams so my soul longs for you, oh God.”
or as Augustine once wrote:
“You have made us in your image and our hearts are restless until they find rest in Thee”
Gregory of Nyssa was even more explicit:
“Never to reach satiety of desiring is truly to see God”
Never to reach satisfaction…
What is the object of our infinite longing?
Is it, truly, that God that is beyond all knowing?
Or has it become the accumulation of stuff?
Vincent J Miller, who wrote the book Consuming Religion
which inspired this term’s topic of conversation,
claims that the basic problem,
is this particularly American,
manufactured, consumptive desire,
which has taken on the form,
the mantle
of this infinite longing for God.
This desire for the newest, biggest, best and fastest,
is indeed infinitively receding.
For we can be assured
that there will always be newer, bigger, better and faster.
Consumption, by definition,
is no means to an end.
But becomes synonymous, in some ways,
with desiring itself.
Never to reach satiety of desiring is truly to live in our contemporary consumer culture.
And this is, I suggest,
a serious problem for our faith.
For faith and consumption are not two trains on a course for collision.
Rather, it is as if our desire train,
has changed tracks.
At the demand of our economy.
And what’s more,
we are almost constantly influenced by ubiquitous advertizing campaigns,
on TV, Radio and Print for sure,
but also on signs, buses and billboards,
on nearly every website,
and occasionally even in church bulletins.
This is an immense and powerful system,
so visible at times, it becomes hidden.
so basic, we often do not notice it.
So basic, even, is this consumption,
this system of value of commodities.
That at times even criticism itself can become a commodity.
A quick Amazon search,
will reveal three separate 150th Anniversary printings
of Karl Marx communist manifesto.
History’s most significant critique of capitalist economy,
now sold for 16 dollars a copy,
by Penguin publishers amongst others.
And religion is not immune either.
From bobble Martin Luther,
to t-shirt Mary,
to dashboard Jesus.
Are they ironic?
Probably.
Have they become another commodity to exchange, none-the-less?
Certainly.
(By the way, if anyone’s looking for an end of term gift for me, I happen to love this stuff)
And it may run even deeper,
to the sort of smorgasbord spiritual culture,
where we can pick and choose attractive doctrines, disciplines and practices,
as if from some holy buffet.
This is all wrapped up for me in this question of consumption and religion.
Of Consuming religion.
Of faith and desire and the economy.
And it is a serious challenge indeed.
One which forces us to ask,
“where do we go from here?”
Is it enough to simply point out the problem
and become more aware of this immense cultural influence?
Have I done my job for today?
Or must we, like Karl Marx and many liberation theologians drawing faithfully from his work,
seek some alternative utopian economy,
not linked to the pitfalls of consumption?
Making our own clothes and products
and growing our own food.
Or does the answer lie somewhere in between?
Exploring alternative modes of value like…
Free trade? Fair Trade? Green friendly? Organic?
These are our questions for this term.
Questions of greed and environmentalism.
Questions of cultural critique and constructive theology.
But in all of this we are not alone.
for though the trains of our desire can be lured off track,
I ultimate believe that what we truly long for
is community and God..
Not for the stuff of consumption.
Deep calls to deep.
And our hope is in God.
Our help and our God.
Amen.
