I’m not an economist and I, like most of us in the occident, enjoy an historically unprecedented standard of living, yet, even from my lay perspective, I can smell a rat. The U.S. economy skyrocketed because of land stolen from native people and worked with slave labor. When you can start out seizing land and farm it with free labor, you’re bound to make quite a profit.
Later, with the discovery of fossil fuels, a global economy was built on limited and deadly resources. Drilling, fracking, and mining continue untrammeled even as the entire planet dies. Do we think that if we kill the environment we will somehow escape?
Today, the U.S. runs on a consumerist economy. To sustain prosperity, it must double every several decades, which means we have to keep buying stuff or the entire thing will collapse. Everything is built around, and dependent upon, we the populace never being satisfied and always wanting more. Therefore, everything around us pushes us to buy and buy and buy.
In my very average middle-class neighborhood, every family owns lawn mowers, lawn tractors, leaf blowers, snow blowers, hedge trimmers, and tools of all sorts. All the kids have electric cars, bikes, and scooters. Most homes have basketball nets, volleyball nets, soccer nets, and/or lacrosse nets in the yard. It’s not uncommon for any one household to have four or five cars. Some have RVs and boats. Could we not share things we only use occasionally?
I remember when we got our first television – a bulky black and white thing in a cabinet my dad built. My job was to get up and change the channels. There were three of them. Now, there’s a big flat screen in every room. A friend showed me into their class-A camper. It was the smallest of all the class-A’s but had five televisions in it. And don’t get me started on rec rooms, in-home bars, swimming pools, and Jacuzzis.
Every house is designed and built so that almost everything – decks, roofs, driveways, siding, appliances, bathrooms, kitchens, carpets – has to be replaced or renovated within ten years. “Builders’ Grade” is a euphuism for cheap and poorly made. People who stay in their homes wind up spending three times the original cost of the home to maintain it.
Women, men, and children all are convinced they need new clothes, the latest styles, at least yearly. Meanwhile, landfills are piled with textiles. After terrorists flew planes into the Twin Towers, President Bush told the country to go to the mall and spend money. If we stop spending, the whole global economy implodes.
I had a seminary professor who wrote “WIGIAT?” on the white board. WIGIAT: Where Is God In All This?
You cannot serve God and wealth, mammon, money. (Luke 16:13b). Yet we keep trying because we don’t really want to follow Jesus; we want our best life now.
Luke 18:22 When Jesus heard this, he said to him, “There is still one thing lacking. Sell all that you own and distribute the money to the poor, and you will have treasure in heaven; then come, follow me.” 23 But when he heard this, he became sad, for he was very rich. 24 Jesus looked at him and said, “How hard it is for those who have wealth to enter the kingdom of God! 25 Indeed, it is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for someone who is rich to enter the kingdom of God.”
Do we imagine that somehow, we are the exceptions?
James 5:1 Come now, you rich people, weep and wail for the miseries that are coming to you. 2 Your riches have rotted, and your clothes are moth-eaten.3 Your gold and silver have rusted, and their rust will be evidence against you, and it will eat your flesh like fire. You have laid up treasure during the last days. 4 Listen! The wages of the laborers who mowed your fields, which you kept back by fraud, cry out, and the cries of the harvesters have reached the ears of the Lord of hosts. 5 You have lived on the earth in luxury and in pleasure; you have nourished your hearts in a day of slaughter. 6 You have condemned and murdered the righteous one, who does not resist you.
And yet, we admire (and elect) billionaire oligarchs. We blindly charge ahead, buying more and more stuff, destroying nature, and ignoring the obvious fact that it cannot last.
At some point, the world economy will implode like an overly inflated balloon. And the wealthy will weep and howl.
This train is headed off the cliff. It’s time to get off the train. It’s time to live simply, minimally, sustainably. It’s time to use much of the wealth we produce to provide homes, healthcare, sanitation, job training and job placement, healthful food, and adequate clothing to the large percentage of the world’s population that lacks it.
It’s time to get serious about following Jesus.
Comments