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Wealth - Exodus 20
Sermons from Commons Church. Intellectually honest. Spiritually passionate. Jesus at the centre. Since 2014.
The first step in getting our relationship to wealth under control is that we have to reframe our entire imagination of wealth. Away from just the ability to acquire whatever we want and toward an imagination of wealth as the freedom from fabricated want to begin with. Welcome to the commons cast. We're glad to have you here. We hope you find something meaningful in our teaching this week.
Speaker 1:Head to commons.church for more information. Welcome to commons tonight. If you and I haven't met in real life, my name is Jeremy, and I get the privilege of helping to lead our team here at Commons. But it is so great to be back after spending a few weeks focusing on teaching over at our Inglewood Parish. I was there the last three weeks.
Speaker 1:And, again, it's just really exciting to see the way that our Inglewood Parish continues to evolve and grow and find its own expression of community within this commons network. We're really excited about that. Remember, we are in the very early stages right now of imagining what a third commons parish could look like in the city. And so that is a lot of fun as well as we begin to dream together all over again. And I hope that you had a chance to listen to and enjoy Bobby's work on Ezra and Nehemiah the last three weeks.
Speaker 1:If you missed any of those sermons, then by all means, jump online. You can find them at commons.church. They really were excellent. I mentioned to Bobby this week that I had long thought about doing a series on Ezra and Nehemiah, but I always chickened out at the last minute. And so when she brought this concept to the table last year as we were planning, I thought this is great.
Speaker 1:We'll give it to her. And she really just knocked it out of the park and did an excellent job leading us and teaching us. So check that out. Today, however, we shift gears to wealth. And maybe this is a bit of a misnomer for this series because this is not really a conversation about your money.
Speaker 1:It's not primarily what I'm interested in talking about over the next three weeks. We'll talk about money because money is part of our shared experience of the world, so we need to address it. But actually, what I really want to suggest in this series is that reducing our imagination of wealth to our bank accounts is really a big part of our modern malaise. So tonight is no coveting. Next week is the relationship between generosity and justice.
Speaker 1:And then finally, we will talk about the pursuit of happiness. But first, a bit of a detour. One of the things you may have noticed about me is that for whatever reason, I have never been particularly fascinated by a lot of the more normative cultural expressions of wealth. Don't get me wrong. I have my issues and blind spots, and we'll get there in a minute.
Speaker 1:That's actually the point of this story. But when it comes to some of the more basic expressions of consumer culture, I just find them tedious. For example, some of you may have realized that I wear the exact same outfit every day of my life. It's not just Sundays. Sometimes I will meet people who have tracked with us online, and they'll meet me in person.
Speaker 1:They're like, oh, you actually do just wear that all the time. This is what I wear every day of my life. I have for about five years now. I own six gray shirts that I custom made to fit my strangely long and thin body. I own eight black T shirts because sometimes you need an extra tee, and I own four pairs of the same jeans in various states of wear and tear.
Speaker 1:And that just really works for me. I know where they came from. I know where the materials were sourced. I know where they were manufactured, and I know about the working conditions behind them. And, honestly, I have just never woken up anytime in the last five years and wished I had another choice.
Speaker 1:I just love getting out of bed and putting on my clothes for the day. However, at the same time, I do recognize that fashion is a very significant part of how other people express themselves. They dress for their day. They dress for their mood. They dress for the attitude that they want to carry with them into their engagements, and I get that.
Speaker 1:There's a certain beauty in that kind of self expression. And knowing that made me feel at least a little bit better when my son crushed my carefully crafted vigilant consumer fantasy a few weeks ago. We were sitting around the dinner table, and he said to me, dad, I want a phone, a real phone, not this toy that I already have. And I said to him, look, you're five years old. You don't even have anyone to call.
Speaker 1:And besides, you already have your own iPad, which in itself is crazy. He said, actually, dad, I want a new iPad and an iPhone and I want an Apple Watch. And I said, why on earth would you want any of those things? And he said, why on earth do you want any of those things? And I quietly got up and backed out of the room without saying anything.
Speaker 1:But this is the tricky thing as soon as we start to talk about wealth in Canada. Because it's very easy for us to want to shift the focus of the conversation to them. Those who have too much, those who have more than us, those who accumulate their wealth in obscene quantities. And, of course, the difficulty is that those are very real problems we need to address in society, Inequality and the inequitable access to opportunity is a real barrier to a just world. But if the extent of our response to these issues is about them and not us, then we will be forever chasing our tail in circles.
Speaker 1:Because here's the truth, all of the worst expressions of greed that we point to in our culture are products of the narrative that tell us to want what they have. And so today, I wanna talk about mimetic desire. I wanna talk about planned obsolescence. I wanna talk about the 10 commandments, and I wanna talk about a new way to imagine the ambition that the scriptures point us towards. But first, let's pray.
Speaker 1:Gracious God of good and generous gifts, help us as we begin to do the hard work of separating our imagination of ourselves from our resources. We are not our bank accounts. Our value is not defined by what we give. Our failings are not defined by what we don't. Yet, we want to learn what it means to live generously, to give freely and openly of ourselves and our resources, to carry our stories with a sense of community and care, to hold all that we have been given with an open hand, but to do that consciously and carefully so that we might be found worthy of the responsibility inherent in receiving so much.
Speaker 1:We trust that you are the source of all that is good in this world, And we believe that you are not finished with us or your story yet. Teach us what it is to play a part in that tale and to do it with a profound sense of joy. In the strong name of the risen Christ, we pray. Amen. K.
Speaker 1:Let's start with memetic desire. And that sounds fancy, but it's a term that comes from the work of a French sociologist slash theologian named Reni Girard. Now some of you know that I spend a lot of my spare time with the writings of Girard. I know that about three of you actually read my thesis on Girard. Thank you for that.
Speaker 1:I know it was long and painful and dry, so I appreciate it. But Girard is an incredibly fascinating thinker, and I happen to think he offers a lot to the Christian story. And so I wrote about a Girardian reading of violent imagery in apocalyptic literature. I'm also working on a series of YouTube videos right now that we're putting together to give a brief introduction to Girard and some of his ideas. A few of them are already available on YouTube.
Speaker 1:You can check them out if you're interested in what we talk about today. One of his ideas, in fact, the one that underpins all of his theories and works to bring his ideas into contact with the Christian story, is the idea of mimetic desire. And mimetic comes from the Greek word mimesis, which means imitation. Now, one of the things we know about the human race is that we essentially become human through imitation. Anyone who has a kid living in their home or who has ever spent a decent amount of time around a child knows they imitate everything.
Speaker 1:And it's funny as a parent when you start seeing your child pick up on your mannerisms, and you start seeing your mood swings and your habits reflected back at you. Sometimes it's cute. Sometimes it causes you to evaluate your choices and the number of Apple products that you have in your home. But as human beings, this is how we learn. It's how we learn to walk.
Speaker 1:It's how we learn to talk. In fact, studies show that actually very little of the uniquely human characteristics that we tend to know and love are innate. Instinct works well for birds, decidedly less so for the human experience. Truth is most of us have terrible instincts. And so it's our ability to imitate, to pass ideas and patterns and paradigms from one generation to the next that sets us apart.
Speaker 1:Language being a really great example of this. I mean, obviously, language is not instinctual to us. Humans all around the globe speak all kinds of wildly different languages. And they have to be imitated and learned and passed down every generation in order to enable all the innovations to be preserved and propagated throughout our species. So innovation is great, but it's actually imitation that's really powerful.
Speaker 1:Picasso once said, that good artists borrow, but great artists steal. And I think what he's getting at here is this idea that imitation is fundamentally at the heart of the human experience. Now, Gerard comes along, and he starts noticing that it's not just our actions and our patterns that are imitative. It's even our desires. In fact, what Gerard says, if the human beings don't really know how to desire things, in fact, all we do is copy the desire we see in each other.
Speaker 1:So, for example, I love coffee, and I make a coffee, and you see me with that coffee, and you see me loving that coffee, and now you want the coffee. And maybe you really do like coffee, but at least part of what's happening is that you see my desire. You see my experience, you see what looks enjoyable, and you triangulate that onto hot bean water. And you might actually enjoy hot bean water, but at least part of what's happening is that you desire the experience you perceive that I'm having. Gerard develops this in some truly fascinating ways.
Speaker 1:He recognizes how this mimetic desire inevitably leads us into conflict with each other, how that conflict limits our ability to work together, and how it's actually creating an enemy and a scapegoat that allows us to release our tension and cohere socially and overcome that through ritualized violence, and how ultimately it's the Christ that frees us from the need for a scapegoat. And if that's interesting for you, check our YouTube channel. I will talk about it in a lot more detail there. But for today, what becomes really important in our conversation of wealth is to recognize how all of our coveting in the biblical language is both imitative and triangulated. So example, you put two children in a room with a 100 different toys and you watch until the first child picks up one toy and starts to play with it.
Speaker 1:What does the second child immediately want? That toy. Right? But we see this all the time in our backyard with our son and our dog. We have literally 15,000 balls for them to play with, and inevitably, the only one that either of them want is the one the other one has.
Speaker 1:So it's imitative, but it's also triangulated onto an object. Because look at how anything is sold to us in our culture. Singer x or basket player y uses product z, so so should you. I mean, what is that even about? Why would I even care what toothpaste LeBron James uses?
Speaker 1:But I do. Because it's not really about the toothpaste. It's not really about the toy. It's about wanting to imitate the desire that I see in someone else. And I know that's a lot about the theory of desire, but if you think this is all just theoretical, then you have no idea of the sophistication that sits behind an advertising industry who understands all of these forces very intimately, who have used them to shape and reshape our imagination of wealth and desire in radical ways.
Speaker 1:See, back in the nineteen fifties, America was just emerging from the second world war. And that war had pulled The United States along with the rest of the world kicking and screaming out of the great depression of the nineteen thirties. Now the truth is things had gotten so bad that perhaps nothing short of a massive run up of military spending and borrowing necessary to fight a war could have turned the world economy around. But now with the war over and the good guys triumphant, they were still left with massive debts, damaged cities, and returning veterans all needing jobs. Except without the constant need for more tanks and planes and bombs and guns, combined with people, mainly women who had joined the workforce and now didn't want to leave it, and the society that gotten really used to being really frugal during a war, the economy was on the verge of slipping all the way back down into another depression.
Speaker 1:And so essentially, in the nineteen fifties, a new concept was created, was the concept of obsolescence. Now planned obsolescence was the idea that when stuff lasts too long, it's bad for the economy. So if you buy a phone and it works for a decade, that's not good. Because we need you buying new phones so that more people can have more jobs. So basically, every company went to work figuring out what the minimum acceptable use period was.
Speaker 1:Toasters were redesigned to last two years instead of ten years. Homes were built to last forty years instead of eighty years. Furniture was designed to last for a season or a style rather than a lifetime. Except the problem with that is, well, how do you get everyone to be okay with it? And that's what perceived obsolescence was about.
Speaker 1:Because along with the redesign of physical objects to reduce their longevity, marketing had to come along to make this a feature and not a bug. There's an ad a few years ago for Dodge trucks. And in this ad, a pickup truck drove through an exploding barn and then pulled a Hercules transport aircraft across a stretch of tarmac and then wound its way through a beautiful mountain pass before it gently tucked you into bed and sang you a lullaby. The last part wasn't actually in the ad, but it basically could have been. Right?
Speaker 1:Because who is that ad targeted at? Jack Bauer and MacGyver? No. Because it's not actually meant to demonstrate anything useful that that truck can do. It's meant to make you feel like your current truck or your 2006 Hyundai Accent, if that's what you happen to drive, is somehow inadequate or inferior or out of date and in desperate need of immediate replacement.
Speaker 1:Regardless of whether your vehicle actually does what you need a vehicle to do. Because ads aren't designed to point to need, they are meant to evoke an emotional imitative response in you. A mimetic desire for the story behind the truck, a connection to the kind of life that truck would buy you, an imitation of the person that you see yourself in on the screen. It's all about the perception of the fact that what's in front of you is now inadequate. And this is then what makes it okay when your purchase doesn't last as long because that creates an opportunity for you to keep buying the desire that you've been taught to imitate.
Speaker 1:If you have ever said something like this, I can't wait for my phone to die so I can just go get a new one, then you, my friend, like me, are a gold mine. So listen to what the economist Victor Labeau wrote in 1955. He said, our enormously productive economy demands that we make consumption our way of life. That we convert the buying and the use of goods into rituals, that we seek our spiritual satisfaction, our ego satisfaction in consumption. That the measure of social status, of social acceptance, of prestige be found in our consumptive patterns, that the very meaning and significance of our lives be expressed in consumptive terms.
Speaker 1:We need things consumed, burned up, worn out, and replaced at ever increasing pace. We need to eat, drink, dress, ride, live, and breathe with ever more complicated and expensive desires. And it's all because we don't actually know how to desire things for ourselves. And this is what is so strange and ironic and insidious about our covetiveness, that we are literally imitating each other into competition with each other. And this is part of why I find the 10 commandments such a fascinating window into human culture.
Speaker 1:Now, there's a couple ways to list out the 10 commandments or the 10 sayings as they're generally called by the Jewish peoples, but they appear in Exodus 20 and then again in Deuteronomy five. And the basic list goes like this. I am the Lord your God. You shall have no other gods before me. You shall not make yourself an idol nor bow down to worship it.
Speaker 1:You shall not misuse the name of God. You shall remember and keep the Sabbath day holy. And by the way, we're not gonna have time to talk about this in length tonight, but if you wanna talk about an antidote to a culture obsessed with newer and better and faster and wealthier, learn to rest intentionally. Because not only is Sabbath about learning to slow down and stop and catch your breath, Sabbath is about refusing to find your value exclusively in what you create. The Jews have just come out of slavery in Egypt at this point in the story.
Speaker 1:And what was their job there? It was to make bricks as fast and as efficiently as possible. That's in Exodus five if you wanna read that story. But what is the first thing that this God says to them after they exit that situation? It's don't you dare bring that slavery mentality that you are what you make into this new reality here.
Speaker 1:Every week, you stop and you do nothing. And you create nothing, and you contribute nothing, and you know yourself as worthy and loved while you don't do it. Rest is a much bigger category than we realize at times. But, Lillis continues, you will respect your father and mother. You must not commit murder.
Speaker 1:You must not commit adultery. You must not steal. You must not give false evidence against your neighbor. And then finally, you will not be envious of your neighbor's goods. You will not be envious of your neighbor's house, nor wife, nor anything that belongs to your neighbor.
Speaker 1:And over the years, it is that final saying that has drawn perhaps the most speculation. Because what many commentators and rabbis and teachers have noticed over the years is that while each of the first nine commandments are pretty clear, the last one is very nebulous. I mean, if I watched you intently enough and if I followed you around long enough and if I hired a private investigator, I could probably eventually determine your faithfulness to the first nine. But the last one, I mean, it's almost inherently ambiguous by design. No other gods, no false idols, no using God's name in vain, remembering Sabbath, honoring your parents, killing, committing adultery, stealing, lying, all of these are external actions.
Speaker 1:But coveting, wanting, imitating your neighbor's desires, isn't that kind of just beyond the realm of rules? Now, I could lie and try to conceal it. I could murder and try to get away with it. But what if I just wanted something? What if I learned to want what my neighbor had?
Speaker 1:Not because I was malicious, not because I ever had any intent of ever trying to steal it from them, but just because I wanted it. This is why everything in the bible needs to be read in a context. I think we can be honest about this. The 10 sayings are pretty dismal attempt to legislate morality. And the truth is the Jewish people knew that.
Speaker 1:That's why they went through and they counted up all of the real rules in the Hebrew scriptures, and they tallied up 613 mitzvot. So there are 613 rules because rules need to be precise and exacting and verifiable, but there are 10 sayings. And this is one of the fundamental differences in how the Hebrews read their scriptures from how we tend to in the West. We tend to imagine that we could take these 10 commandments and we could lift them out of Exodus, and we could put them on a plaque on a wall, and they would keep their meaning, but they don't. Because before the 10 commandments were set in stone, they were first set in a story.
Speaker 1:And that story was the story of the Exodus. The story about a God who hears the cries of the oppressed. Those slaves that are working away to build the wealth of another nation. And then that god slowly but surely reveals God's self to those people. First, it's a burning bush to Moses.
Speaker 1:Then it's a challenge of this god set against the gods of Egypt, and it's a showdown with Pharaoh and a daring escape through the waters of the Reed Sea. But at the end of that story, what we come to are the 10 sayings which begin, I am the Lord your God who brought you out of Egypt out of the land of your slavery. So I mean, right here at the start of the passage, God is reminding us that what follows flows from what has just happened in the life of the community. It's connected. And so for the Jewish people, the 10 sayings were never meant to be a model for a just world.
Speaker 1:The 10 sayings were an agreement based on the character of God who had revealed God's self in the story. And this is why a lot of rabbis over the years have read the 10 sayings, not as a set of rules to follow, but as the preamble to a promise from God. I am the Lord your God who loves you, who has always been on your side, who brought you out of slavery and wants the best for you. So trust me. Don't steal.
Speaker 1:Don't lie. Don't murder. Don't abandon me. Don't abandon each other. If you do, it will unleash all kinds of destructive forces that will drag you all the way back down into a kind of slavery that will be just as oppressive, just as destructive, just as crushing as the one that you just came out of.
Speaker 1:But if you can keep me at the center, if you can learn to honor rest, if you can respect community, if you can refrain from killing and cheating and lying and stealing, then what I promise in return is a completely new experience of neighborhood. I promise a life free from the kinds of unhealthy desires that are already driving you mad right now. See, the rabbis saw the 10 sayings, and what they saw was not a list of rules, but a bargain being offered to humanity that if you can follow this path, this way of God, then you will want nothing. You will no longer covet your neighbor's house. You will no longer covet your neighbor's wife nor his male or female servant, his ox or donkey or anything that belongs to your neighbor.
Speaker 1:See, it's at least possible that the 10 sayings are really nine rules and one promise of a new kind of life. As Walter Brueggemann writes, this final utterance of God in the awesome confrontation at Mount Sinai is this, you will no longer covet. And it is as though this fearsome God has saved the sharpest zinger for this final moment. Yet, this terse statement seems an appropriate pivot point to the core narrative of ancient Israel. This narrative that begins in the wondrous creation lyric of Genesis one and culminates in Sabbath rest.
Speaker 1:It sweeps through the ancestral narratives, the emancipation from Egypt, the brief narrative of wilderness sojourn, the defining confrontation at Sinai, and it travels to the edge of a land of promise. But if we trace the entire movement from Adam to Moses, we may suggest that at the core, the story is about coveting. This tenth saying refers to original attitude of desire, of being propelled in ways that we do not understand, to desire what is not our own. It's a recognition that desire itself becomes the powerful seductive force that skews one's life, and God offers us a way out. This is where we always have to start if we're ever going to really get our heads around wealth in a meaningful way.
Speaker 1:Because if we start with our money, then we have a problem. The recognition that we are embedded at the core of the human experience, we are formed by imitative desires that we don't fully understand. We are, you and I, by design social creatures. And we come to be who we are through imitation. We want what we want because we see someone else wanting it, and our entire cultural project is built on exploiting this fundamental flaw.
Speaker 1:But we are now offered a way out of memetic slavery. And this is why the 10 commandments really are far more ambitious than we often give them credit for. They are not simply here to rein us in with some healthy regulations. The ambition here is to help this new nation of Israel exit the pattern of being driven by unhealthy desire to begin with. That means that the first step in getting our relationship to wealth under control is that we have to reframe our entire imagination of wealth.
Speaker 1:Away from just the ability to acquire whatever we want and toward an imagination of wealth as the freedom from fabricated want to begin with. When that happens, and wealth becomes the freedom not to want, but the freedom from want, then wealth can become more than just the money in our bank accounts. And it becomes all of the resources at our disposal, the energy, the passion, the relationships that we have, the shoulder we can offer to someone to cry on, everything that we have at our disposal to create a more just, inclusive world for our neighbors instead of in competition with them. When that happens, then we can begin to have that far more important conversation about all of the wealth that God has actually given to us. That is what we're gonna talk about next week.
Speaker 1:So let's pray. Go on. As we begin this conversation of disentangling our sense of self from what we have, from our bank account and our wallet, to include everything that you have gifted to us, our passions, our energy, our ideas, our perspective, our empathy, and the relationships that we encounter. God, may we then begin to use our wealth not to foster competition with each other, but instead to lean into each other, to be for each other, to begin to build the the imagination of neighborhood and kingdom that you instill in us through your spirit. God, may our imagination of wealth continue to expand, And may we find the courage and the generosity to point all of that into your kingdom through our choices.
Speaker 1:May all of our relationships become built on the foundation of moving through this journey together, not against each other. In the strong name of the risen Christ, we pray. Amen.