People Consumed by Stuff

One day Jesus was walking down Main Street on his way out of town, and a rich and influential young lawyer came up to him and asked him: "Good Teacher, what must I do to inherit eternal life?"

And Jesus replied, "Give what you can to the synagogue. Ten percent is a good rule of thumb, but whatever you do, don't be a legalist about it. And make sure you have enough left over to contribute to the economy. You know, 'Give to Caesar ...'"

And the man went away very happy, because that was exactly what he was already doing.

* * *

There are over one hundred brands of deodorant at my grocery store. I counted.

I have ADD—attention deficit disorder. One person recently described the disorder as hearing five different television sets going off in your head, all at once. And, with each American viewing over thirty thousand different media messages a day, myself included, those five TVs in my head are all blaring, "Buy something."

My main goal in seeking out deodorant at the grocery store was simply to not smell bad. I didn't really want to smell like anything—I just didn't want to smell. But the deodorant aisle was an attention-deficit nightmare. I found seventeen different choices of unscented deodorant alone: different colors, different names, different claims to keep me from sweating, or block odor, or to last long. Lord, have mercy.

And I really mean that—Lord, have mercy. I was never really allowed to use phrases like that growing up. I guess it sounded too much like blasphemy. But that little prayer has become part of my inner dialogue. It is a great shorthand call for the divine in places where things seem to have gone amok. Like the deodorant aisle at my grocery store.

Lord, have mercy. In Latin it is Kyrie Eleison. This is the start of a prayer the Christian church has uttered for most of her life. And we need God's mercy in this time. How have we come as a culture to need more than one hundred choices of deodorant? And deodorant is hardly the least of our problems.

We seem to have made a mess of things. As I write this, our economy is hung over from an orgy of spending brought about by cheap money financed by rising home prices and government spending. Gasoline for our cars is approaching four dollars a gallon. Costco has a limit on the number of bags of rice shoppers can buy per day because of a global shortage. Thousands of children will die around the globe tonight from what Jeffrey Sachs calls "stupid" hunger—something easily preventable. Lord, have mercy.

Is there enough for everyone? This is an important economic question, and in our discussion here I am certainly going to try to address the question from an economic perspective. But it is not just an economic question, is it? In fact, the question of whether there are sufficient resources in this world may be one of the most important theological questions of our time. How we answer it reveals much regarding our belief about the character of God: who we think God is, how we think God provides for the creation, and what role humans play in that work—this all relates directly to our understanding of God.

In this book I hope to narrate two distinct visions. The first is a vision of people and communities whose lives are out of whack and who are consumed by stuff. Our view of God and our understanding of the way we participate in God's work in the world have become distorted, and we have transformed ourselves into unthinking consumers of products, ideas, and cultural narratives about what will bring us happiness.

The second is a view of people and communities who are guided, and even made more whole, by a vision of God and God's work in the world by which they are consumed. Our decisions regarding what resources and how many of those resources we use are not rooted in oversimplified categories of "more or less," but instead are nourished by a story of a God who is sufficient, active in the world, and forming a community of co-laborers to manage the created order.

The differences between these two views—consumed by stuff and a community consumed by a holistic vision of God's sufficiency—are not simply practical distinctions. I will not, here in these pages, advocate a life lived in balance, or a vision of people and communities consumed by God because it helps proselytize for Christianity. And I am not advocating a life lived in balance because it lowers our electric bills. These differences have an impact on the very story we tell—the story about God, the work of Christ, and what it means to be a follower of Jesus.

I am also not talking about two different stories that can be neatly separated. We do not choose one over the other. Instead, we live somewhere between these two understandings. My prayer in writing these words is that you would become more and more consumed by the vision of a God who is enough, and that you would move more and more toward communities shaped by this vision.

But at some point in a book about consumption, we need to talk about stuff. Stuff is a word I am going to employ often through these pages. I use it as a kind of shorthand for the things that gunk up our lives, things that make our lives more complicated without making us more whole. Stuff is also used as a kind of shorthand for a perspective of people and communities who are more characterized by consuming than by being consumed by God. This allows us to speak of the concept without having to reference big, long explanations each...