In Horsley's book, he notes a passage in the Gospel of Mark where Jesus rebukes the religious leaders for telling people to donate their money to the church rather than care for their family members with financial need.
“You skillfully sidestep God’s law in order to hold on to your own tradition… But you say it is all right for people to say to their parents, ‘Sorry, I can’t help you. For I have vowed to give to God what I would have given to you.’ In this way, you let them disregard their needy parents. And so you cancel the word of God in order to hand down your own tradition.” (Mark 7, NLT. Emphasis added)
It strikes me that I never heard this preached in all my time in the church. Instead, we were taught to give to the church before all other needs. I'm not going to flat out suggest that this passage was actively ignored, but it isn't lost on me that for all the sermons on tithing I sat through, this never once came up.
Recently started a book I've been sitting on for a while, Richard Horsley's You Shall Not Bow Down and Serve Them: The Political Economic Projects of Jesus and Paul. I think about the relationship between faith and wealth quite a bit and I'm always interested in deepening my understanding of that topic.
Something I like that Horsley makes explicit right from the outset is that the various texts of scripture are primarily concerned with concrete socio-economic realities. It is our post enlightenment assumptions that have largely stripped our readings of scripture of that important context. Specifically, he notes that the socio-economic realities of the societies from which scripture emerged were divided between a "vast majority of people who lived at subsistence level and a tiny minority of rulers who gained their wealth and power by expropriating a portion of the people's produce." Scripture's economic concern is rooted in that tension between the majority poor and the few wealthy who oppress them.
This is where things get sticky, I think, for many modern readers in our current, Western context. One of the ways that capitalism has tried to ease the conflict and division between the poor and the wealthy is through the concept of a middle class. Capitalism depends on this myth that anyone can move from poor to rich as long as they work hard enough. It keeps people's faith in upholding the economic system even when it's not fully serving them. The middle class falls into this strange not-quite-poor-but-also-not-considered rich grey area, which makes it tricky when reading the critiques of wealth or the solidarity with the poor in scripture.
The middle class (which is shrinking, I know) is, by comparison to the majority poor across the world, very wealthy. That wealth is also, perhaps indirectly, built off the exploitation of others. Yet, in comparison to the super wealthy, the middle class is closer to poverty. Many live paycheck-to-paycheck, in a dependency that can feel like being poor. The middle class is trapped just like the poor, but are benefitting off the flow of wealth in a way that makes them beholden to the system that traps them.
So how then does scripture read our context today? Something I am hoping to dig into more as I work through Horsley.
What I'm Reading:
What I'm Listening To:
What' I'm Playing:
What I'm Watching:
The Penguin
Bad Sisters S2
Silo S2
One of my favourite newsletters shared this really interesting article this week. It's almost hard to define exactly what it's about, as it hits on many different fascinating ideas; but at its core it seems to be looking at our relationship to time and hurry. There's so many great things in this article that I would recommend taking some time to read it in full. But what I want to pause and reflect on here is when he talks about the way certain innovations in time saving or efficiency can move from being a good option to becoming a cultural obligation. He uses something like parking apps or self-checkout lanes as an example.
"We welcome the technology at first because it presents us with a choice. But then everybody else has to adopt the technology, and we suddenly realize we’re worse off than we were when we started...
And when behaviours become universal, they affect everybody."
I think this is a great point and I was particularly interested in how he took this idea and applied it to the behaviour of people using their phones to record concerts. I'm not sure if you've been to a concert lately, but this trend has become so big that it has become a normalized part of the experience. The author makes the observation that even if you don't want to participate in this shared behaviour, everyone else doing it can ruin the concert experience for you. He even notes that the people most affected are the performers themselves, who now have to perform for an online audience rather than just the people in attendance. It's no longer an option, it's an obligation.
"When one person does something, it’s an option. It’s something that somebody does. When these things become more widespread, they morph from being alternative options to being social norms, conventions from which you have no escape."
This is something I find myself reflecting on often as it relates to the public realm. Public space lives in this strange middle ground of belonging to no one and everyone simultaneously. As such, it is always vulnerable to the shifting norms and expectations of society. A lack of intentional reflection on those behaviours can result in our public spaces being hijacked by them in a way that actively destroys the value that public space should bring.
Perhaps one of the greatest sins of this modern era is the way we have let technology into our lives without intention or consideration of what we are giving up.
Settling back into my regular reading routine with Jonathan Haidt's 'The Anxious Generation.' If you haven't heard of this book, you should check it out (especially if you have or work with kids).
My reflection this morning is on a section where Haidt talks about the way our society has increasingly lost any meaningful age milestones for kids as they mature. Where many cultures around the world have historically had rites of passage that would mark a child's transition into adulthood, our modern secularized society has eschewed such practices. He then goes on to say how this has become even more pronounced in the internet age.
"On the internet, everyone is the same age, which is no particular age. This is a major reason why a phone-based adolescence is badly mismatched with the needs of adolescence."
Kids will always try and seek out experiences that are older than they are. Rites of passage and milestones helped keep that in check by providing something to work towards. Online, kids can essentially be any age they choose. They are given access to information and experiences that are beyond their maturity levels. Basic parental controls are not enough to mitigate this problem.
Haidt's suggestion is to reintroduce some form of rites of passage to help kids move at an appropriate pace towards more responsibility, freedom, and maturity. All of this should precede giving them access to online spaces; which he recommends being age 16 (at the earliest).