Sunday, July 31, 2016
Pentecost 11, Year C, Proper 13, July 31, 2016
Sermon for The Eleventh
Sunday After Pentecost
Year C, Proper 13 ~ July
31, 2016
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Holy Trinity & St. Anskar
One's life does not consist in the abundance of
possessions.
+In the Name of God, the Holy and Undivided
Trinity
A discussion on Democracy Now last week got me thinking about ideology and
consciousness. One participant remarked:
... a neoliberal economic philosophy involves a kind of understanding
that the notion of the public good is kind of undermined by a basic market
logic that turns us all into entrepreneurs, where competition and rivalry
define who we are, where the state’s principle function…is to secure the
efficient functioning of the economy and the defense, and creating the market
conditions whereby you and I can pursue our own self-interest. … if we only
read [neo-liberalism] as an economic philosophy and [do] not understand it as a
kind of political rationale producing particular kinds of subjects, who are
selfish, who are self-interested, who are always in competition with one
another, then we lose sight of how neo-liberalism attacks the political
imagination.
HMM! An ideology attacks the imagination. How does that work?
How about this analogy: the brain is to consciousness as the computer is to the
operating system and our consciousness is to ideology as the operating system
is to the browser. Consciousness will be
affected to a certain extent by our ideology – more than we think,
probably. No big news – a no-brainer (I couldn’t
resist!).
So, neo-liberal ideology is like a
browser, determining what we can do with our consciousness. Neo-liberalism proposes
that the best way to advance the common good is by everyone competing with everyone
else in the marketplace to advance their individual self-interest
But it is not the only tool to
choose from. The many forms of Marxism are different tools, so are the variety
of anarchist or utopian socialist theories. In this sense, there is a kind of
ideology to be found in the Christian tradition also. It, too, might be analogous
to a browser, conditioning our consciousness. It has something to do with the
Holy Spirit and what we mean when we speak of living in the Name of Jesus. A certain shaping and conditioning of our consciousness
to conform to the Gospel, as understood under the guidance of the Holy Spirit,
Who reminds us and teaches us about Jesus. Perseverance in using this browser
makes permanent changes in the operating system.
Now I don’t mean to
suggest that Christianity is one more ideology among many. But, insofar as it
is a way to interpret the world, to decipher some of its meaning, and to guide
us through our own lives, it does what secular ideologies often also do. We would
say that none of them rises to the level of the revealed truth, which we believe
we have received, but some of them are more compatible with our way of thinking
than others. Some of the browsers out there just won’t work with our operating
system. Others will. Arnold Toynbee, for example, called Marxism the “fourth Judæo-Christian
religion” – Judaism, Christianity, Islam, and Marxism. Dated as that remark may be, there is some truth to it.
It is significant that Karl Barth and Paul
Tillich were both socialists. The two great Protestant theologians of the last
century may not have agreed on much, but they agreed with our own Archbishop William
Temple that “socialism is the economic realization of the Kingdom of God.” This
was also the view of later Archbishops of Canterbury, Lords Ramsey and Williams,
and many others, especially among the Catholic wing of Anglicanism. A hundred years ago, they used to say that the
Church of England was the Tory Party at prayer. Some wag responded with the observation
that the Church’s Catholic wing was the Labor Party at prayer! Which ideology an
Anglican finds more compatible with the Gospel – conservatism or socialism –
will partly determine which type of Anglicanism one goes in for.
Secularists sometimes
object that this turns religion into the mouthpiece of an ideology, but I
protest that Christian religion was around long before modern political-economic
ideologies, and if some of them happen to agree with Christianity so much the
better for them. In fact – as Toynbee suggested – it can be persuasively argued
that Christianity is one of the sources, maybe the chief source, of socialist
thinking, both Marxian and utopian. Be that as it may, today’s Gospel has
something to say to us about the neo-liberal ideology defined in that debate on
Democracy Now, the ideology that now
seems to rule the roost.
The problem for
Christians is that the notion that the
best way to advance the common good is by everyone competing with everyone else
in the marketplace to advance their individual self-interest contradits our
Lord’s teaching: neo-liberalism can hardly avoid the conclusion that one’s life
DOES consist in the abundance of possession.
The neo-liberal order encourages individuals to make all kinds of plans
to tear down barns and build new ones and fill them with the ever-growing,
surplus that competition supposedly produces. Ever more accumulation. That was
the man’s mistake in the parable – rather than sharing the surplus, he wanted
to keep it for himself, because it made him feel more substantial, more real,
more alive. Neo-liberal ideology encourages that. That was all he could imagine:
new barns to keep the surplus for himself. His consciousness was deformed; his operating
system corrupted by an infected browser.
Ideology can invade
consciousness and assault political imagination. The wrong browser can crash the
operating system. We can come to believe that what the browser lets us know
about reality is just “the way things are”: self-interest (in other words, avarice) is the Law of Nature and of
Nature’s God. St. Paul calls this, idolatry.
He tells the Colossians that greed, simply, IS idolatry. The Gospel says to
the man making provision for greed “you fool – tonight your life shall be required
of you.” Market idolatry may produce a
great deal of wealth, for some, but in the end the wealth is completely worthless
if it is stored up in ever-bigger barns by fewer and fewer people, while more
and more get poorer and poorer. That is what lay behind Toynbee’s remark.
Christianity – at least in its Catholic form – is not that friendly
toward free-market capitalism. We are much more interested in human solidarity
and the reality that we are all one Body. This notion is a whole lot older than
19th Century socialist theory. St. Basil the Great, one of the most influential
church leaders of the 4th Century, is entirely serious in declaring
that the extra pair of shoes in my closet is actually stolen from the man down
the street who has none. STOLEN. It is not that I have merely failed in generosity,
I have actually robbed the shoeless man! My extra pair rightfully belongs not
to me but to him – simply because he has none and I have more than I need.
Now, St. Basil is a Doctor of the
Church, as is his contemporary, St. Ambrose of Milan, who went so far as to
observe that the whole concept of private property is pretty much the same as
original sin; the illusion that anything is mine
as opposed to yours can arise only
out of a consciousness of separateness
– the illusion that you and I are separate individuals, and NOT one body. This
is a defect in the browser that damages the operating system, warps our consciousness.
Ambrose and Tillich might agree that
this illusion of separateness is sin itself, the sin that Christ has come to
wash away.
The faulty browser
must be replaced with a new one that will not fool our consciousness into
imagining ourselves as “particular kinds of subjects, who are selfish, who are
self-interested, who are always in competition with one another.” Neo-liberalism
will not do. It corrupts consciousness; it will crash the whole system. Even
though it may rule our culture, it is not
the Law of God, and any culture that operates as though it were, is like the greedy
old fool in our Lord’s parable, whose life will be required of him this very
night.
AMEN
MARANATHA
COME, LORD JESUS!
