When the Devil went down to Ephesus

first appeared on the conneXion Aug 21, 2012

I’ve been spending a fair bit of time in Acts these days, and feeling like it's a book I’ve read a dozen times but never seen before. One of the episodes I find particularly fascinating is the account of Paul’s visit to Ephesus.

If you recall: the Holy Spirit arrives in Ephesus and in its wake we see stuff happening that would make the best of Frank Peretti look like Casper the Friendly Ghost. The Seven Sons of Sceva are beat black and blue by a demon-possessed man (19:14); dabblers in the occult perform public burnings of their paraphernalia (19:19); the silversmiths of a pagan goddess incite the mobs to riot (19:28). I mean: the Gospel’s beating the bushes and the demons are scattering like so many startled sparrows.

But Frank Peretti aside—and this is a point that I’ve never seen Frank Peretti address, or Screwtape, or Dr. Faustus for that matter—whatever else they're about, the Ephesian exorcisms are about issuing God's challenge to the oppressive economic structures that promote systemic evil.

For instance: it’s an assumption on my part, but not an outrageous one, that the Seven Sons of Sceva have set themselves up as Exorcists for Hire, and this is why their interview with the devil goes so painfully wrong (the fact that Sceva is styling himself as a ‘chief priest’ in Ephesus is highly suspect). Bob Larson leaps to mind, here.

And this isn’t an assumption but just a plain reading of the text: the economic value of the books burned in Acts 19:19 works out to about 136 years wages (say 6 million dollars?). A lot of Ephesians have sunk a lot of money into occult junk over the years.

And most telling of all: the reason Demetrius and his colleagues start a riot is because they’ve seen the economic writing on the wall:  if people abandon Artemis for Jesus, they’ll no longer need the silver images that are their stock and trade. I don’t suppose a good racket has ever died without a fight, and this must have been a lucrative racket:  Ephesus, you understand, was home to the Temple of Artemis, one of the Seven Wonders of the ancient World.

I’m pointing this all out because if you want to take the Book of Acts seriously, you can’t escape the conclusion that confronting the demonic is on the Church’s to-do list. But if I were to write a “theology of exorcisms” based on the Book of Acts, one of the first chapters, I think, would deal with oppressive economic structures, the “powers and principalities” that manipulate and dehumanize people in ways that seem so normal to us—even necessary—but are best understood as “demonic.” And then I would try to draw lines between what’s happening in Acts 19 and the Church’s call to both name and provide alternatives to these ways of doing business. Economic systems are by nature spiritual, I’d say, and economic structures are demonic when they make money ultimate and people a means to an end.

And then I’d brace myself.

But I’d also point out that in Acts 16 we see the same thing happening. Paul performs an exorcism (16:18), freeing a girl from demonic possession. But it’s not just a demon that's being excised here.  It's also the economic exploitation this girl's been suffering at the hands of her pimps. Because when the men who made their living off her “prophetic utterances” find out that their “hope of profit is gone," Acts says, that’s when the metaphorical excrement hits the proverbial air-circulation device.

By Acts’ reckoning, it seems: helping the vulnerable escape economic exploitation—girls the sex trade, say—or women the porn industry—or children the sweatshop—or workers the tyranny of the bottom line—or shop-a-holics the clutches of Mastercard—by Acts reckoning, at least, these are all ministries of exorcism with the potential to raise hell.

A Bottle of Pop for Eddy Bearnaise

I can still remember that day standing in front of the pop cooler at the local Mac’s store when I realized I’d been had. I was around 14, and reaching for a bottle of 7-Up, when right in mid-reach it suddenly dawned on me that I hated the taste of 7-Up. I’d only started drinking it a couple of months ago, but in those last few months I’d bought 7-Up regularly and exclusively and I couldn’t for the life of me say how it had become my soft-drink of choice.

It was mystery enough to freeze me for a moment in front of the cooler, trying to figure it out. And in that brief moment of soul-searching, the sudden knowledge that I’d been duped hit me on the noggin like the rear-end of a south bound bumble-bee meeting a north-bound wind-shield at 100 clicks.

That summer, 7-Up had started a new advertising campaign, which those of you who were teens in the 80s may remember as well as I do. There were 4 or 5 different spots, but the storyline was always essentially the same. A young, free-spirited, and gorgeous (I can only assume from the way girls threw themselves at him) dude driving around in a green convertible finds himself in a spot of trouble, which resolves itself through some ironic twist or other that leaves him with a pretty girl on his arm and a can of celebratory 7-Up in his hand.

In one spot, for instance, he pulls up to a crossroads next to a guy and his girlfriend riding “two up” on a racing bike. The biker gestures ominously that he wants to race, and our hero gives his engine an aggressive roar or two to accept the challenge. The girl, a pretty read-head, we learn when she gets off the bike and removes her helmet, pulls a bandana from her back pocket to serve as a starting flag. Engines roar, the flag drops, and when the dust clears we discover: the green car sitting unmoved at the crossroads and the biker nowhere to be seen. Our hero grins rakishly at the girl, who smiles knowingly in return and sidles into the passenger seat. As they share a 7 up in the closing frame, the tag line is heard over a rocked-up 80s theme song: “Are you up for it?”

In case this isn’t jarring any memories, I did track down one of the spots on YouTube, which I offer here for posterity’s sake (and for the sake of the cringing it’s likely to induce):



The semiotic associations here are so blunt they barely merit the term “subliminal”: irresistible chick-magnets who are too-cool-for-words drink 7-Up; ergo, to become one yourself, make 7-Up your soft-drink of choice. To a 38 year-old, the message is laughably transparent, but to a 14 year-old boy—a relatively new and terribly self-conscious immigrant to that strange land called Pubescence—a fourteen year-old boy for whom the idea (let alone the possibility) of being an irresistible chick-magnet had only just appeared on the horizon of consciousness, for a fourteen year-old boy, like I say, the implications were almost mythopoeic. What separates you from stunning sexual success is simply a matter of the soft-drink you consume.

So drink 7-Up.

And I did, for about 4 months, even though I hated it and didn’t know why, until that day I caught myself in the act and understood: I was trying to buy the sexual self-assuredness that those ads had promised me in 7-Up. I didn’t use those words at 14, of course, but I realized that I was trying (vainly) to become the man in those commercials by drinking the soft-drink he was hawking.

Now, it’s not just because of the undertones in the commercial’s tag line (“Are you up for it?”) that I’m thinking about 7-Up and Freud today. I watched a documentary called “Century of the Self” a while ago, which was about the work of Sigmund Freud’s nephew back in the 1920s. Though Edward Bearnaise’s name is not nearly as household a word as his uncle’s, he was the first person to take uncle Sigmund’s psychological theories about our subconscious impulses and apply them in an intentional way to manipulate the masses. In particular, he was the guy who showed corporations that they could get people to want things they didn’t need by linking products to their unconscious desires. Those 7-Up spots are the direct heirs of Eddy Bearnaise’s legacy.

But here’s the really fascinating part of this story, and the reason for my little stroll down memory lane to the local Mac’s store. Besides the obvious benefit of making money, one of Bearnaise’s motives in bringing depth psychology to bear on marketing the way he did was to control the masses. He believed (and many politicians of the time believed along with him) that the mass of society was fundamentally irrational and volatile; and in 1924, they had, of course, the evidence of the First World War to prove it. According to Bearnaise, the best way to manage the “irrational force of the masses was to stimulate people’s inner desires through advertising and then sate them with consumer products.” This would keep them happy, docile and, consequently, cooperative. He called it “the engineering of consent.”

In layman’s terms: if subconsciously I believe a can of 7-Up will satisfy my “natural impulse” to be a rebellious, self-asserting rakehell, then I am far less likely actually to be rebellious, self-asserting or rakish. And as long as we all sublimate our impulses like this, society holds together and we all get along.

Not to put it too bluntly, but Bearnaise was one of the first people to propose the idea that we could save ourselves by buying stuff. Quite literally, in the Bearnaisian ideology, consumerism is salvation, products are saviour, and advertising the divine vision that mediates it to us.

Here’s the whole movie, if you’re interested (or skeptical):



Well: I don’t drink 7 Up anymore—too sharp for that old trick—but the other day I was in a local Christian mega-store, and I caught myself in mid-reach for the latest DVD Curriculum produced by some miraculously-huge mega church in the States, offering a “spiritual experience” that would “revolutionize my church’s ministry.”

At 38, of course, I wasn’t taken in by the promises, but the thing is, I don’t really have to be. I live in a world that has believed (sometimes quite explicitly and earnestly) for almost a century now that salvation—the saving of our society, our sex-lives or our churches—is simply a matter of buying the right product. And whether I like it or not, I am so steeped in this worldview that it’s become subliminal, in the Freudian sense: the solution is as simple as a purchase.

Of course, buying the latest book on prayer, or the next big purpose-driven media campaign, or the new small-group “experience guide,” or attending the next big worship event, or whatever it is won’t save anyone’s church, anymore than 7-Up made me an irresistible super-stud. And when we reach for these things thinking they will, whether we articulate the belief or not we are reaching for an idol.

Sometimes when preachers get going on the old epic struggle between Baalism and Yahwehism as it’s recorded in the Old Testament, they say a lot about materialism: the condo in Florida, the unnecessary mid-life- cruise, and so on. But I’ve almost never heard anyone draw a line between Baal and, say, the Prayer of Jabez (TM), the Passion of the Christ (TM), Courageous: The Movie (TM) or the next big what-have-you out of Willow Creek. Of course, ministry resources are often just a matter of practicality, I realize that, but I also realized, that day in the bloated Christian marketplace, that the idols of our day are far more comfortable in our churches than we want to admit.

Lord have mercy.

All is Bright: A Christmas Story

“And the light shone in the darkness, but the darkness did not receive it.”

How it could possibly have come down to this was still beyond Nathan’s ability to explain. He swore every year that things would be different. Swore that he’d do it right next year, start sooner, plan better.

He swore. Literally, he swore, as an on-coming car jerked in front of him and lurched into the parking spot that he’d been aiming for. As he rolled past the holiday motorist who’d just stolen that prime piece of real estate out from under his nose, he muttered ominously under his breath about decking somebody’s halls.

Looking in vain for a new place to park that was still within trekking distance to the Wal Mart entrance, he came to rest at last at the furthest corner of the parking lot. Flinging his scarf over his shoulder with all the bravado of a WW I pilot, he stepped out into the blinding blizzard.

It would have been lovely, really—haloes of coloured Christmas lights shimmering just barely through the thick white haze—lovely, if it weren’t December 24th.

It would have been breathtakingly beautiful—pure drifting sheets of silent snow—beautiful, if it weren’t 10:33 pm.

It would have been picturesque, even—if he wasn’t a last-minute Christmas shopper on his way to Wal-Mart, of all places on Christmas Eve; Wal-Mart, because they were now open until midnight on this Most Wonderful Night of the Year.

So he squinted into the blinding white wind, and swore: things would be different next year.

By the time he reached the doors, the blizzard had piled a good couple of centimetres on his shoulders—the dandruff of heaven, he might have mused, if his mission hadn’t cleared all whimsical sentiments from his heart and replaced them with one single clear purpose, burning like a Christmas candle in the window of his soul: must find the perfect gift. (At 10:42 pm, Christmas Eve).

He’d need some wrapping paper, too, he noted as he pushed his way through the bottle neck of beleaguered boyfriends, desperate Dads and harried husbands who, like himself, had left this one male shopping duty of the year to the last possible moment, and were now muttering ominously under their breath about showing them who’s naughty and who’s nice.

He stumbled past the happy-face badge on the chest of the sad-faced greeter at the door, and squinted at last in the florescent glare of the store. 10:51.

A robotic Santa Claus boomed a metallic “Ho. Ho. Ho.” at him, from a display of last minute Christmas decorations. The vaguely evil undertones of this animatronic belly laugh mingled with a vaguely threatening rendition of “Santa Claus is Coming to Town” that poured from invisible speakers somewhere overhead. For just a moment the Christmas Candle in his soul flickered, and allowed him the briefest of whimsical thoughts: he remembered sitting in church with his buddy Eddie, during a Christmas Eve service they were ignoring as kids, and Eddie had showed him how you could rearrange the letters in the name Santa to spell the name “Satan”; he even wrote it out on the back of the bulletin while they both giggled under their breath.

Nathan squinted suspiciously at the Robotic Santa. “Ho. Ho. Ho.”

But then his mission was burning in him with full flame again, and he pushed past Santa on his way towards the perfume-trinkets-watches-jewelery-sunglasses-make-up-and-other-things-generally-feminine section of the store. Surely if the perfect gift existed, it lay-to-rest under those gleaming posters of radiant young women in jewellery or makeup, photos hung like so many summoning angels over the respective products they announced.

Nathan shuffled his way towards them.

Before he reached the place over which these posters shone, however, a frantic looking dad had knocked him sideways, on his eleventh-hour mission to get the last Liv Doll in the store. A man with a dull gleam in his eye jostled him to the right, pushing past him on his way to the pet supplies because, Nathan could only assume, because little Fido had asked for a box of liver Puppie-Yums for Christmas and they’d accidentally bought chicken.

But by this time, the jewellery section itself was but a faint legend from the distant past, like stories about frankincense and myrrh washing up on the shores of Christmases gone by, and he found himself standing instead in the electronics section, of all places, trying to convince himself that nothing said Merry Christmas like a spool of re-writable CDs made in China.

In the distance he could hear Robo-Santa laughing at him. The florescent light battered him mercilessly.

“You’d better watch out”

Maybe if he threw in a gift card for i-tunes?

“Ho. Ho. Ho.”

The two centimetres of snow had soaked through his coat now and had begun to trickle, like cold regret down his spine.

“You’d better not pout, I’m telling you why.”

The WW I flying-ace scarf slipped from his shoulders as they drooped. He turned to go.

And then: if Nathan’s life had a sound track, the sound of a record needle scratching abruptly on vinyl would have blurted out suddenly, strangling the Wal-Mart muzak to silence. The Ho. Ho. Ho. would have dullened to a slow, echoy, pulse, like an anxious heart. And choral music—the angelic humming of children, maybe, or silvery seraph song—would have begun softly, swelling into a single, throbbing: “Ahhh!” that drowned out everything else.

Because there it was: the perfect gift. She’d asked for it every day of the last 364—in one way or another—she’d been asking for it—maybe all her life. Not with words, of course—never in any audible speech—but with every gesture: that slight turn of her head when she said, “You know what I wish?” That faint droop at the corner of her mouth when she said: “You know what I hate?” That soft sigh that escaped her when she flumped in front of the TV after too-long and too-hard a day at work. That sort of mist in her eyes that she got when the sap was running a bit too thick on a re-run of Little House on the Prairie.

All of it—everything—all of it had really been about this. This gift... this perfect present... The Candle in his Soul burned with white hot light as he reached for it.

And then the lights went out.

The store plunged into instant darkness. A miraculous darkness, he would find later, because the blizzard that had piling snow on the power lines all day, knocked out Wal-Mart’s backup generator, just at the exact moment the wind finally brought down the power poles, and, with a sudden flash at the fuse box that stank worse than a Radio Shack on fire, it plunged the whole world of Wal-Mart into pitch and utter night.

Nathan stood there, frozen in darkness, his hand still reaching for that now invisible, perfect gift.

And in the dark, whimsical thoughts rushed at last through his mind: he saw visions of Pompeii caught in the ash of Vesuvius, frozen forever in the everyday act of living, buying, selling, giving in marriage until the bitter end. In the black distance, Robo-Santa’s laugh ground down to silence, and he thought of air escaping a long-discarded accordion.

“Ho.... ho.... o...”

For a surprisingly long moment nothing happened. The dark was so thick. And more miracles: no one cried out, no one shouted, no one said anything at all, for just a moment. You could hear them all, that hot press of humanity, still and silent, but close, in the dark. And no one dared to move.

And then somehow, more whimsical thoughts rushed at Nathan in that dark pause: he remembered snippets of those stories that he and Eddie had giggled their way through—stories about a little child who broke into the brilliant chaos of this world with a light that no one could see—and about some who could see it, but could barely recognize it as light, because it hurt their eyes.

He remembered vaguely about an old man up at the front who’d said something about how this child had come to upset the status quo... to turn things on their heads... to name our darkness for what it is.

And give us real light.

And he remembered lighting a candle, quite vividly, this, while a chorus of bashful and rusty singing voices lunged for the top note in Silent Night.

Holy Night.

All is Calm.

All is bright.

And his hand fell with heavenly peace, in the darkness, to his side.

Of course, because it was Wal-Mart, of all places, on Christmas Eve, someone in a back room somewhere fired up the back up, back up generator. Florescent light blared out over the store once more and the cogs of the machine started to move again.

But Nathan was already on his way towards the door. As he stumbled outside, into the haloes of coloured Christmas lights, that shimmered just barely through the thick white haze, he checked his watch: it was nearly midnight.

The Documentarathon

And speaking of cultural exegesis, last week a visit to the local Rogers Video for some family movie-night fodder saw me leaving the store with a handful of documentaries (along with the afore-mentioned movie-night flicks). Over the last few days I've been working my way through them, and looking at the world with slightly different eyes as a result. These are some thoughts on what I watched last week:


Food Inc. This unflinching look at the industrial food industry leaves you with a creeping feeling in the pit of your gut and a lot of difficult questions about where our food comes from and how it arrives on our plate. Michael Pollan's In Defense of Food and Bill McKibben's Deep Economy had already briefed me on the argument that the modern food industry has created some pretty serious moral, environmental and health crises for us, but the film's aerial shots of huge feed lots and its footage of mass-production "chicken factories" were no less disturbing for all their being expected. What Food Inc. added to the discussion was its look at how the interests of big money pretty consistently trump the interests of human well-being in policy- and law- making when it comes to the American food supply.

In Debt We Trust. One of two films I watched about the credit crisis in the United States, In Debt We Trust puts a human face on the realities of predatory lending and deregulation in the American credit card industry. Produced in 2006, mere months before the "bubble" actually burst, it makes some ominous predictions about a coming economic collapse that have turned out to be hauntingly accurate. For all the gargantuan numbers it tosses around, at times In Debt We Trust seems to over simplify the issues, painting a black-and-white picture of a Darth-Vader-esque credit card industry swallowing its innocent victims whole, who, through no fault of their own, find themselves swimming in a sea of inexplicable and inescapable debt. I don't doubt that the credit card industry is just as brutal, greedy and callous as the film makes it out to be, nor do I deny that this represents a serious moral crisis with global implications. I wonder, however, if the existence of a 926 billion dollar credit card debt in America is actually just the symptom of a deeper cultural malaise--the rampant materialism, the spiritual vacuity, the creeping shadow of ennui, the ego-centric sense of entitlement, the impulse to bury our heads in the illusory sand of the entertainment culture-- stuff like that-- stuff that we're all culpable for and capable of, not just the evil credit card industry that's willing to loan us the money (at 30% interest, of course) so that we can pay for it. To its detriment as a documentary, In Debt We Trust never asks any serious questions about this cultural malaise, preferring instead to point a single self-righteous finger at the corrupt politicians and bloated bankers.


Maxed-Out. Maxed-Out repeats the same gargantuan numbers, interviews many of the same economic analysts, and even includes some of the same footage as In Debt We Trust. Its interview of two collection agency guys is down-right creepy (like when the one compares his work of harrasing helpless debtors to a competitive athlete who's found a way to make a game he loves to play pay the bills), and some of the stories are really heart-wrenching, stories of people with the tread-marks of an unregulated credit card industry on their necks and spirits. The palette with which Maxed Out paints the picture, however, is bit less black-and-white than In Debt; and to its credit, it doesn't attempt any of the failed lunges at tongue-in-cheek satire that make In Debt feel sort of silly at times.

In the cool-down time of my little week-long documentarathon, I've been thinking a lot about St. Paul's declaration in the book of Colossians that God has triumphed over the powers and authorities in the cross. Walter Wink argues that when the Bible talks about "the powers" like this, it's referring to the invisible structures of human society, the spiritual dimmensions of the political, economic and cultural institutions that we put in place to help us control and define our life together, and that inevitably turn around and start to control and define us instead. Wink suggests (very compellingly) that when Paul says this kind of thing about God "disarming" the powers, he means that through the Cross and the Spirit of Christ, humans can be set free from these "invisible structures" in a way that allows us to see them for what they really are, and redeem them with the wisdom and love of God. If Wink is right, then the cultural malaise, the political corruption and the corporate greed illustrated in movies like Maxed Out and Food Inc are concrete examples of "the spiritual powers" in our world; and if St. Paul is right, then the Word and Spirit of Christ offers us the best, and only real solution to the deep social crises that these films are attempting to disarm.

Prayer for the Offering (4)

These posts of liturgical "prayers for the offering" receive more traffic-- both in online hits and in off-line comments from other pastors-- than I would have ever expected. I never would have expected, either, that I'd find it so challenging and inspiring to write them, when once a week every week I'm forced again to think through the theological significance of those little chips of metal and slips of paper (and blips of light on the bank machine screen) that carry so much power in this world.


For the record here are a few more offeratory prayers we've done at the FreeWay:

Perfectly-Wise God,

We remember how the Book you inspired tells us so bluntly:

“Keep yourselves free from the love of money and be content with what you have, because God himself has said ‘I will never leave you nor forsake you.’”

You asked us there, God, to long for your faithful presence in our lives more than any material thing this world has to offer. And you asked us to let your faithful presence in our lives teach us to be content with the stuff we already have.

God, that goes so against the grain of this world we live in, where “discontent” seems to be the only measure of things and “more” the only thing worth desiring.

So we invite your Spirit to set us free from the love of money today, and ask you to give us deep contentedness. Make us fully satisfied in the promise of your unfailing love.

Cut against the grain in us we pray, so that we might give this offering today out of that contentedness; the peace of Christ which passes all understanding.

It’s in his name and for his sake we pray. Amen.

***


God, We think about the all-wise Law that you gave your ancient people long ago.

You told us: When we’re harvesting the land and we’ve missed some of the grain in the field, just leave it there. That way the homeless, the orphan and the widow will have something to gather too...

And when we’re picking the fruit off our trees or grapes off our vine, don’t go over the branches a second time. That way there’ll be something there for the homeless, the orphan, and the widow.

And God, in that all-wise Law, you taught your people to remember: The outcast. The powerless. The downtrodden. And to remember that we were once where they are now. Or we might have been. Or we might one day be.

And you reminded us that wringing every last drop out of life—just for ourselves—squeezing every last bit out of the land—just for ourselves—grabbing and hoarding and consuming– just for ourselves. That’s just not your way.

So God, as we make this offering of money today—in this world where so few of us actually gather grain or grapes anymore—God, can you make this offering of money today a reminder of those very same things?

And then, God, can you give us the wisdom we’ll need to use this money in your mission in the world: to include the outcast, to lift up the powerless, to defend the downtrodden. And to show the world that wringing out every last drop for ourselves alone... that not the way of Jesus.

It’s in his name, and for Your glory we pray. Amen.
***


God, In this act of offering today, can you show us where our hearts are at?

Because we remember how your Son Jesus told his followers: don’t store up treasure on earth, where things rot and fail and get stolen. Instead, he said, instead store up treasure in Heaven—imperishable, unfailing, unsteal-able treasure in Heaven— “Because where your treasure is, that’s where your heart will be, too.”

That’s what he said.

So God, can you show us where our hearts are, today, by showing us what our treasure really is? Let this moment here be about more than just putting some money in the plate as it passes by; let it be about discovering where our treasure really is—what we really trust in, and what we really hope for.

And God, if we’ve stored up earthly treasure, as a substitute for heavenly treasure, O God, as hard as it might be to see, can you show us that, too? Because we want hearts fixed on heavenly treasure today: the imperishable hope, the unfailing faithfulness, the unsteal-able love that you’ve offered us in Jesus Christ. It’s in his name, and for Your glory we pray, Amen.

***


God: you taught us that it is more blessed to give than to receive.

So we pray now that you would increase our blessings: give us many opportunities to give, deepen the wisdom we show as we give, and multiply the joy we discover when we give.

Teach us to distinguish between uses of money that enrich life, and uses of money that actually kill the life in us. And save us from making these gifts today a substitute fo the gift of ourselves. Instead, may they be outward signs of our inward commitment: an act of total self giving, for Jesus' sake, in whose name we pray, Amen.*

*based loosely on a prayer found in W. B. J. Martin. Acts of Worship. Nashville: Abingdon, 1960. p. 186.

Listen Local, Save the Planet?

Those of you who stop in at terra incognita on a somewhat regular basis may have noticed that September's CD of the month was this one: Wide World Crashing by tripmeter.

Never heard of tripmeter? CDBaby describes their sound as "up-tempo melodic rock with soaring vocals, rich guitars and creative rhythms. In short: well-conceived songs in captivating and clever arrangements."

Recommended, they say, if you like: Foo Fighters, Mute Math, Nine Inch Nails.

Well, I don't really know Foo Fighters, Mute Math, Nine Inch Nails (in the words of Grandpa Simpson: "I used to be with it, but now what's 'it' seems strange and scary to me... it'll happen to you...").

But I've really grown to love the energy and edginess of this album. From the tintinabular peals of "My Addiction's" opening riff, to the pedal-to-the-metal drag race of "Drive to the Sun," to the ominous-but-hopeful vision of "Somewhere" (Somewhere, you can find the heart to beat this... no one gets left behind without good reason...), there's a lot to feast on, aurally speaking.

But it's not just that.

The thing is: I know these guys. They were all students at Briercrest college during my days there. Took Greek exegesis with the drummer (the guy parsed irregular Greek verb forms with as much flare as he syncopates the down-beat). Was in a small group for a while with the lead guitarist. Even the guy on the cover-art was my next door neighbour (helped him when the waterlines of his trailer froze one 30 below morning on the prairie).

And it's this human difference that makes me love this CD. It's the same difference that makes me love home-made soup over Campbell's Chicken-by-Product Noodle: the difference between what's bagged and canned and mass-produced for anybody and nobody, and what comes to us as a gift from hands we know, have shook, have helped to jump-start their frozen car (another 30 below prairie morning with my neighbour).

It's why I love independent music. And I'm not talking about the kind of "independent" music that's really just a niche-market genre gimmick out of Nashville or L.A. or where ever it is that "indie rock" comes from. I'm talking about music that grows out of the lives and hearts and heads of the people next door, down the street, in our communities, in our neighbourhoods, in our lives.

In his book Deep Economy: The Wealth of Communities and the Durable Future, Bill McKibben develops a pretty cogent argument in favor of making economic choices that promote small, community-oriented, human-scale thinking over the more/massive/mass-market world that we've grown to expect and accept. He argues (again cogently) that the more/massive/mass-market world is pretty de-humanizing after all, and unsustainable anyways, and if we're really serious about building a durable future, we're going to have to start thinking locally.

You know: buy locally-grown food and locally-produced goods from the hands of real people that you can actually shake. McKibben doesn't stop there, though. He goes on to argue (still cogently) that part of building a durable future will include community-oriented, human-scale choices about our entertainment. If we can build community and a sense of place by supporting local entertainment (like our music, theatre, sports, and so on) we might discover a world where words like "more," "massive," and "mass-market" are no longer synonyms for "better."

And this world, he argues, is the kind of world we'll need if we want to build durable and sustainable economies in the coming years.

Well. I don't know if I'll really save the planet by listening to tripmeter, but it's nice to muse. And there's still this: whenever I hear Wide World Crashing, suddenly I'm strolling again along that back alley behind the Sparrow Gardens arena where so many Briercrest bands have had rehearsal space, savouring the muffled sound of rock-dreams thumping through the walls- and whenever I listen to my friend Dale Dirksen's These are the Days, I'm sitting with him again in his office, musing about music and minsitry and life together- and whenever I listen to that rough-around-the-edges worship CD we produced at my old church, I'm there again trading chords and words and laughs with people I love.

I'm grounded. I'm anchored. I'm home.

And the Musik Biz doesn't produce a can of alt-rock-indie-fusion-pop that you could open for this kind of aural experience.

Ah, Youth

A couple of months ago I borrowed Wal-Town from our public library. It's a National Film Board documentary about six activists from Montreal who embark on a cross-Canada campaign against that Walmart box-store juggernaut that you may have seen parked on the edge of a home-town near you.

This ten minute trailer pretty much sums up the whole movie.

Now, I wasn't ready to sign up for the cause by the end of the film, but I thought it raised some important issues about Walmart's response to organized labour, and about the impact of the box-store phenomenon on the common-weal of society. I've shared some tentative thoughts elsewhere about ways our Faith might inform where and why and how we shop for stuff. Wal-town seems to be asking some similar kinds of questions about whether or not the "bottom line" should be our only bottom line when it comes to making decisions about where we spend our money.

But these weren't the issues in particular that stuck with me.

What stuck with me is the poignant and compelling portrait of youth the film evokes. Here are six college-aged young people honestly trying to make a difference: taking on a larger-than-life multi-national corporation with nothing but a sling of optimism and five smooth pamphlets, because they can imagine a world where things are different.

And there's something beautiful there. And there's something beautiful in lines like: "I don't know how to react when people refuse to take information." ""We're gonna stay unless the police ask us to leave..and..uh..thank you." [Customer returning pamphlet to activist]: "You can hand this crap to someone else." [Activist]: "Okay."

I was part of a Youth Parliament when I was in university, where we got together and passed resolutions on issues like fair labour, free education, child exploitation-- where we tried to speak into existence the world we could imagine where things are different. This film helped me see that youthful, world-changing imagination as something beautiful.

It reminded me of the imaginative vision and determination that a real cause can ignite in youth.

And it reminded me of something I heard Tony Campolo say about the church. He was talking about how this generation of youth, more than perhaps any in recent memory, are hungry for a cause... longing for something they can commit to, that will put all their creativity and energy and optimism to the ultimate test. Then he said: if the church looses this generation, it won't be because they made Christianity too hard. It will be because they made it too easy.

As I mulled over the closing credits of Wal-town (six activists, 36 towns, 1 corporation), I started to think he might be right.

Deep Economy and the Economy of Jesus

Yesterday I needed a new stapler. Simple item, simple solution: I drove down to the local Stuff-Mart, found the stationary section and grabbed the cheapest one out of a selection of about ten. I turned it over in my hand and paused for a fatal moment. Imported by Wal-Mart Canada, it said. Made in China.

And I started thinking about how strange a world we live in, one where we can drive down the street and, for the price of about 10 minutes labour, satisfy our slightest need, buying some whimsical item that a faceless stranger snapped together in a place we’ve never seen, and more faceless strangers shipped thousands of miles to us from somewhere we have absolutely no connection to, to be set on a shelf next to ten others just like it. We take this arrangement for granted, but when you compare it to the overall history of human economy, this is one of the most bizarre and unnatural systems our kind has ever set up. (I stood there for a second, trying to imagine the actual hands working monotonously in some huge factory somewhere in China, assembling this particular stapler—and then imaging it actually sitting in a cargo crate on a ship somewhere in the middle of the Pacific coming to Moose Jaw—sort of gives you shivers).

It’s bizarre and unnatural. I just finished this book, Deep Economy, by Bill McKibben, who claims that it’s also unhealthy and unsustainable. McKibben critiques Western culture’s “economy of growth,” documenting the dehumanizing consumerism, the ever-growing pile of junk, and the environmental exploitation that goes along with it. He argues pretty lucidly that what we need most of all, for the health of our planet and our souls, are economic practices that intentionally build rich community, not an ever growing pile of stuff. And the whole time I read it, I kept thinking over and over about the Sermon on the Mount. Jesus might point us to Matthew 6:19-34 and say: “I told you so.”

McKibben’s call for economic practices that emphasize community and human-scale over the unsustainable myth of unlimited growth, is forcing me to imagine what a Christian economy might look like. The vision is still pretty hazy, but I’ll try out some concrete details here: simplicity—we’d live on less and stop buying stuff we don’t need; human scale—we’d share more, lend more, repair more, grow more and create more of the things in our lives; connectedness—we’d start buying local as much as we can, and develop meaningful relationships with the actual flesh-and-blood hands that supply us our food, furniture, clothing, entertainment and so on; community—we’d live in homes and neighbourhoods and market-places that made room for life together, not just cavernous spaces for our piles of stuff.

As the world tries desperately to stimulate a flaccid economy, maybe the Church has a vital opportunity to speak prophetically, by pointing people to the economy of Jesus. If only we could figure out how to live it ourselves.