Ezekiel 7:18-20
18 They will put on sackcloth
and be clothed with terror.
Every face will be covered with shame,
and every head will be shaved.
19 “‘They will throw their silver into the streets,
and their gold will be treated as a thing unclean.
Their silver and gold
will not be able to deliver them
in the day of the LORD’s wrath.
It will not satisfy their hunger
or fill their stomachs,
for it has caused them to stumble into sin.
20 They took pride in their beautiful jewelry
and used it to make their detestable idols.
They made it into vile images;
therefore I will make it a thing unclean for them. (TNIV)
“The Advent Conspiracy: Spending Less, Giving More, Worshiping Fully, Loving All,” Week One
The heart of the capital city was a mixture of technology and heartbreak—high atop a hill stood the American embassy, with plentiful communication arrays along the roof, down the road was the Continental Hotel where all the Western expatriates stayed, but down in a valley off of the main traffic circle stood a rickety church filled to the brim with the poorest of the global poor. American missionaries, including myself, had come to visit them, and what clean water they had that day had been given to us, that we might be able to wash our hands before having lunch with them. There was no running water—a woman had a pitcher to pour water over our hands. It was incredibly moving. I still have pictures of it. But it also was not, it is not, right.
In 2006, I spent three weeks in Africa on a trip sponsored by Global Ministries, the overseas mission arm of the Disciples and the United Church of Christ. And in Luanda, the capital city of Angola—one of the absolute poorest countries in the world—I saw some of the most extreme poverty ever, and one of its most defining characteristics is a lack of safe drinking water, a circumstance that is one of the leading causes of death of children in the entire world. It would cost the world somewhere between $10 and 11 billion to provide clean drinking water to everyone who now does not have it. And, last year, in 2010, on Black Friday alone, we spent $10.7 billion. That one day of holiday shopping—it could have paid for clean water worldwide.
This Sunday begins a new sermon series for us, as well as a new church year for us. This is the first Sunday of Advent, the season the church traditionally dedicates to preparing the way for the birth of Jesus on Christmas Day. And…well, we do prepare for Christmas Day, but these days, it feels like it is more for the arrival of Santa Claus than the arrival of Jesus—the arrival of presents and stocking stuffers, rather than the arrival of our salvation. And so in response to this, three pastors across America started this project a few years ago called “The Advent Conspiracy: Can Christmas Still Change the World?” as a means to preach preparing for Christ’s coming by giving differently. This project which promotes clean drinking water revolves around four main themes—spending less, giving more, worshiping fully, and loving all Via the major prophets who preceded Christ—Isaiah, Jeremiah, and Ezekiel—plus Jesus’s mother, Mary, we’ll explore a different theme in each of the 4 Sundays of Advent, beginning with today’s theme, spending less.
An old parable told by preachers to this day is that there was this very old, extremely wealthy fellow who finally passed away after a long, long life. His many relatives, interested in how his estate would be divided up, went up to the pastor after the funeral and asked, “So…what did he leave behind?” To which the pastor simply replied, “Everything.”
It is the exact same lesson as that of Ezekiel 7 that we are reading today, though perhaps it goes down a little easier when the word is delivered by a kindly preacher in robes compared to a theatrical Old Testament prophet who would eat parchment scrolls for shock value. Wealth provides no protection from death. It can forestall it, yes—people who are wealthier tend to live longer lives. But, as my parents tried to teach me as a kid, he who dies with the most toys still dies. And, as Ezekiel says, if we are still so foolish to cling to our wealth when death is at our door, that wealth, that gold and silver that we have hoarded up, will have become so unclean that nobody will want it. The reality is, though, that greed means that we still do want it, no matter what the Bible tells us. It is why bankers and executives continue to give themselves raises even as the rest of the lower and middle classes suffer. What does it matter if my gold and silver will be distasteful to me in death? I like having them right now! And I have to tell you, it hurts me so much on a gut level to see that happen—to see the rich get richer—when I look around our community with its above-average unemployment, with its citizens who call us literally every single day asking the church, “Can you please help us before our power gets shut off?” The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness can never overcome it—until the power bill goes unpaid.
Spending less is a message we are never given by the church of our consumerism culture. Whenever we attend worship at the church of consumerism, be it at the altar of the television set, or a newspaper, or a computer, we are preached at, exhorted to, earlier and earlier in the year, to spend more at Christmastime. It is like a cartoon I saw the other day of the Thanksgiving turkey giving the old stage hook to Santa Claus to drag him offstage, while the turkey shouted, “Wait your turn, fat boy, November is MY month!” I saw my first Christmas commercial this year on November 8—a full 47 days before Christmas—and it was not for any charitable cause, like the clean water well-digging done by the Advent Conspiracy. It was for Wal-Mart, which, among many other successful corporations—Apple, Nike, Volkswagen, I could go on and on—have become successful at marketing their respective brands by actually studying how we, churches and other religious groups, even cults, have marketed our own denominations over time. You want to blame someone for why it feels like we worship at the Church of Apple, giving praise to the Holy Spirit of the departed Steve Jobs? They learned how to package their message from us!
But let’s say that in between all of the advertising noise calling us to spend more, you do decide to spend less…okay, spend less than what? What you spent last year? Spend less than your next-door neighbor? Spend less than the average person? What does spending less look like? The best answer the Advent Conspiracy gives is, is celebrating Christmas simpler for you this year? Are there fewer moving parts? Fewer stressful shopping trips to make? Fewer credit card bills to stress over? Because here’s the thing—I’m not asking you to give less to your loved ones, only to spend less. What you lose in quantity of moving parts this Christmas, we will plan on making up for in quality—in fact, that is exactly what we’ll be talking about next week.
C.S. Lewis wrote that one of the best ways to avoid falling into the trap of love of money—the root of evil, according to Scripture—was to give more than we can spare. As he says in his magnum opus, Mere Christianity, “If our expenditure on comfort, luxury, and amusement is up to the standard common among those with the same income as our own, we are probably giving away too little. If our charities do not at all pinch us, I should say that they are too small. There ought to be things we should like to do and cannot do because our charitable expenditures exclude them.” I mentioned a few weeks ago in a sermon about how CEOs and other suits will try to base their compensation on being paid “above average” in their field, even though mathematically, someone must be below average too! Here is the same conundrum, but turned on its head in a wonderful way—Lewis says we must be, as Christians, above average in our giving—and if we all give more, then we are required to give more still to remain above average in what we give away. And here’s the kicker—we need to be able to view what we spend on Christmas not as money we are giving away, but money that is still going to comfort and luxury—it is just not our own comfort, or our own luxury. Gold and silver, as Ezekiel refers to wealth, remains gold and silver, whether in my hands or yours. It is up to us to transform that gold and silver into gifts—not the thirty-dollar necktie that he wasn’t going to like anyways, or that twenty-dollar scented candle that she was just going to re-gift, for they are still, at their core, gold and silver—but into the soul-sized gifts that can change a person’s world. What we spend on Black Friday alone could give the entire world clean drinking water. Imagine what the kingdom will look like if we used that money for Biblical gift-giving this Christmas. May it be so. Amen.
Rev. Eric Atcheson
Longview, Washington
November 27, 2011
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