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I can’t say I have a lot of my own thoughts on this subject, so this is mostly words and ideas from others embedded in my own narrative.
In the geography department we like to talk about all of the awful things the United States has done and is doing around the world. A popular critique is the use of American foreign aid money as conditional manipulation—the use of American Foreign Aid to promote another agenda. This could be as simple as keeping the US on another country’s good side or stabilizing a country to promote peace around the world—all for our benefit. The USAID policy manual states that “we will seek to use bilateral foreign assistance to build toward a safer and more secure, democratic, and prosperous world to enhance our own national security.” I certainly don’t want to imply that this is a bad policy on the United States’ part—if our goal is national security, then certainly providing aid seems like a better plan than many of our other policies. The point is that this kind of aid program is really about the United States, not about other countries. I think this problem—the selfish use of “kindness” or “love” to get what we want—extends far beyond the scope of foreign policy. We see it every day at Dartmouth, both among students and faculty. We trade in currencies of popularity, grades, recommendations, and future connections.
What can this person do for me? How will being connected to this person set me up socially, financially, academically? Unfortunately I think many relationships at Dartmouth are based on the answers to these questions.
Donald Miller writes that
We value people...We invest in people…Relationships can be bankrupt…People are priceless… All economic metaphor. We think of love as a commodity. This was the thing that had smelled so rotten all these years. I used love like money. The church used love like money. With love, we withheld affirmation from the people who did not agree with us, but we lavishly financed the ones who did. I used love like money, but love doesn’t work like money. It is not a commodity. When we barter with it, we all lose.
There’s good reason for this at Dartmouth. Each person in each class is selected because of what he or she is going to contribute to the Dartmouth Community. Acceptance is competitive, and we work hard to sell ourselves. If anything unites the Dartmouth student body, it’s the ability to market ourselves. We start by marketing ourselves to Dartmouth, and then to our trippees, our freshman floor, our classmates, our professors, the cute kid studying across the table, the Greek system (think about rush…), and eventually our future employers. We make friends not based on how we can love and care for them, but on how they can “love” us. We love people because they agree with us. We love people because they like us. We love people because they let us borrow their notes. We love professors so they will give us good grades. We throw parties so other people will think we’re cool.
This is what James is talking about in the passage we just read. It’s middle school all over again. We worry about what others are going to think about us if we get caught sitting with the weird kid at the lunch table. We care first about advancing our social life, our bank account, and even our religion, and use others as a means to that end.
This is not always true. I have some amazing, amazing friends that will love me no matter what and I feel extremely blessed to have found those relationships, but they are rare. They are rare everywhere, but especially rare in an environment that pushes us to succeed at any cost. I’m not just talking about financial success. Plenty of us have renounced the path of financial comfort, but we still compete. My friend Alex and I decided that most of Dartmouth could be divided into two groups: the Bankers (those who want to make a lot of money) and the Savers (those who want to save the world). It can be trendy among the Savers to judge the Bankers for using relationships as a means to future success, but I think the Savers are often equally guilty. While not earning cash, we trade love to earn the approval of others, to convince them that we are right, or at the very least, to earn the right to judge the Bankers. This is the same problem: we are still using love as a means instead of an end. Our love has an agenda, and as Rob Bell writes, “when there is an agenda, it isn’t really love. It’s something else. We have to discover love, period. Love that loves because it is what Jesus teaches us to do. We have to surrender our agendas.”
This isn’t exactly easy. It seems we live in a capitalist kind of world. While it’s in vogue to criticize the market economy, I find the same mindset of ‘making a profit’ when I consider my relationships and the relationships around me, even among those who are most quick to criticize the way we use money. I think we have forgotten God’s grace. Brennan Manning says
Something is radically wrong. The bending of the mind by the powers of this world has twisted the gospel of grace into religious bondage and distorted the image of God into an eternal, small-minded bookkeeper. The Christian community resembles a Wall Street exchange of works wherein the elite are honored and the ordinary ignored. Love is stifled, freedom shackles, and self-righteousness fastened. The institutional church has become a wounder of the healers rather than a healer of the wounded. Put bluntly: the American Church today accepts grace in theory but denies it in practice. We say we believe that the fundamental structure of reality is grace, not works—but our live refute our faith. By and large, the gospel of grace is neither proclaimed, understood, nor lived. Too many Christians are living in the house of fear and not in the house of love. Our culture has made the word grace impossible to understand. We resonate to slogan such as: “There’s no free lunch.” “You get what you deserve.” “You want money? Work for it.” “You want love? Earn it”
How do we overcome this economic mindset? How do we have genuine relationships not based on self-interest? I think it’s hard as highly accomplished, Ivy League Students, faculty, and staff to recognize that maybe we don’t deserve quite as much as we thought we did. In fact, we may not deserve anything at all. “We live,” according to Miroslav Volf, “on a given breath. We work, we create, we give, but the very ability and willingness to work, along with life itself, are gifts from God.”
I have done nothing to deserve my life and I have no explanation for why I am where I am other than that I am loved by God. We are all very accomplished people, but as Brennan Manning reminds, “all that is good is ours not by right but by the sheer bounty of a gracious God. While there is much we may have earned…all this is possible only because we have been given so much: life itself, eyes to see and hands to touch, a mind to shape ideas, and a heart to beat with love. We have been given God in our souls and Christ in our flesh.”
When we see that our redeemed lives are gifts from God, it becomes much more difficult to make demands in an economy of any kind. It makes no sense to demand repayment for our “love” because all that we have is already more than we deserve. When we realize that life is a gift, we lose the sense of entitlement that makes us fight for every dollar or every affirmation. We have no right to it anyway. I certainly don’t want to imply that because we deserve nothing we can allow injustice or discrimination to persist—just the opposite in fact. The source of injustice and discrimination is another’s fear of losing in the relationship economy. We need a more perfect love to drive out this fear.
As we see that we do not need to defend ourselves, we are free to defend others. As we hold our lives with an open hand, our lives are more secure than ever. As we love others just because they are, we recognize that no one can lose value. Dietrich Bonhoeffer writes that
The rights of a university education and social standing mean nothing to those who have become messengers of Jesus. “Freely ye have received.” Or was there something else in addition to the call of Jesus which drew us into his service without any merit of our own? “Freely give,” he says, moreover: “Show men that you have plenty of riches to give away, but desire nothing yourselves, neither possessions, nor admiration nor regard, and least of all their gratitude.” Whence could you have any claim on it? Any honours that come our way are only stolen from him to whom alone they really belong, the Lord who sent us. The poverty of Christ’s messengers is the proof of their freedom.
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