burgers and flies

Look at the image of this child in Niger with all the flies on his nose and mouth as he waits for some sort of food. Look closely. Do you know what you are looking at? You are looking at Jesus. If we want to claim all the Scriptures about giving ten percent and being blessed by God, then we had better claim the one about “the least of these” being Christ.

I was back in my home state of Texas this weekend… the home of end-times theology, the prosperity gospel, and the current presidential administration. Combine all three of those and you get a dangerous combination that has nothing to do with the Kingdom of God. But that is for another blog on another day.

So I was sitting in church and the topic was the book of Revelation and the coming Tribulation, which is basically the time when most of humanity are thrown into a several year stretch of dark turmoil resulting in war, hunger, persecution and death for many, especially Christians. Christians in America love to lament the Tribulation and try to figure out if they will even be around for it, all the time hoping for terms like “pre-trib” (being ruptured before the Tribulation) or “mid-trib” (ruptured during the Tribulation) to be true. Of course, never mind the fact that whatever happens, God will take care of us. We like to have our backups for God on standby, in this case what we want to see happen.

But I will be honest: When Christians in America start talking about what kind of suffering we supposedly might endure in some fantastic fictional end-times scenario, well… it makes my ass twitch.

While I ate my second snack of the day, I looked at a New York Times report which showed almost $3.5 billion being spent in one year on ADVERTISING by companies selling breakfast cereal, candy & gum, beer, soft drinks, snacks and coffee. This just on telling us about their products so we can buy and consume them like pigs. In fact, the story spoke about how in our “affluent society” we have oh so many decisions about what to eat, and that those choices are getting bigger and bigger, with the side affect being that it “may induce people to eat more than they need to.”

We actually live in a country where we are eating more than we need to. And while over 3 million people this month alone are starving to death in the country of Niger (half of them children), we have the stomach to stand up in the church and preach fear about some kind of tribulation we might suffer.

How dare we speculate and whine about some event while so many of the people created in God’s image are suffering from tribulation right now. While we sit in our comfy multi-screen churches trying to decide in committee where the coffee and donuts should be set up, many fellow believers… our only real allies… are being arrested and killed for having underground church services in secret. And while we race the church down the street to Chili’s for lunch after another “bless us and look out for the liberals” sermon, those whom Christ called the very ones we were to feed and clothe are today again going hungry. Not just “I can’t find anything I like in my fridge hungry” but the worst kind of starving imagined (on a side note, I do think it speaks volumes to a nation that can be marked not only by the cars we drive or the houses we own, but by the fact that most of us keep at least one fridge in our garage to store all the extra stuff we can’t fit into the one in the kitchen).

To preach any sort of gospel that fears what will happen to us while we live in such a corporate driven, materialistic, gluttonous society… I believe this is idolatry. While all the while we commit the horrible sin of the greatest commandment... to love one another.

So how do we repent… and where do we go from here?

boob-tube

When I was a kid my grandfather called TV the “boob-tube,” which at the time I thought had something to do with women’s breasts. As I have grown older I am sure that was probably what he meant, but I have become more convinced that it means too much television can turn one into a boob.

This past weekend Jenn and I went to stay with my oldest friend Kelly and his wife in Nashville. That week I had been sick, and Jenn had become exhausted with school and traveling to California. I guess we needed the rest, because most of the weekend all four of us slept and watched hours and hours of movies and shows. By the time we got back to Wilmore the last thing we wanted to do was watch any more TV.

I remember years ago when Kelly first moved to Tennessee and I would go visit on my spring breaks. For a long time he didn’t even have a television, and so we would sit around at night and play music and talk about theology, girls, dreams for the future, old stories, bad jokes and other matters of life. This time around, with the help of Direct TV, we didn’t talk much at all.

I also remember years ago when I was in my youth group and when we would gather in our youth room you could find groups of kids gathered together talking and sharing. On our summer youth choir tours the bus would be filled with high school and college kids playing cards, reading, writing, talking. Now you go up to the youth room and you can find clumps of kids gathered around the multiple X-Box screens, their eyes fixated on someone else’s game. And when I was working as a youth pastor of sorts, planning the summer tours, one of the biggest concerns was which movies we would take along for the long bus rides (and the decks of cards we would bring never made it out of their boxes).

Television is everywhere, all the time. Not content with three channels when I was a kid, we moved to forty with cable, a hundred with digital cable, and five hundred with satellite (with plans for over a thousand soon). We have TVs built into cars so the kids don’t have to read or talk or observe the world out the window on long trips. Every room has a TV in it, so that we can drift off to the sounds of our favorite re-run when we have left the wall-size screen in the living room. If that is not enough, now we can watch streaming video on wireless laptops and even download news and video clips to our cell phones (weren’t those originally for phone calls?). Nothing is safe. Even my favorite band in the world – U2 – years ago gave up having just four guys on stage with some lights, and for several tours now have been surrounded by literally some of the biggest screens ever made.

The most telling sign has been at the mega-church I have been attending. No longer a sanctuary, the “worship center” has FIVE jumbo screens along the front: One on the center of the stage, two on the immediate sides, and the two largest on the far walls. Interestingly enough, the only cross in the entire building is off to stage right, hidden in the shadows. During the worship music, the screens are lit with images of the band playing, so that if you came in off the street you would think you were watching a music video, not worshiping God. I have noticed that the several thousand who are there don’t sing much, but sort of stare up to the right or the left and mumble the words. There is yet to be a “sermon” I have heard (or seen) that does not have some video clip at the beginning or end, even if it has little to do with the topic. I think the line was finally crossed when I walked into the bathroom and there, perched high in the corner to be seen by anyone standing at a urinal, was a very pricy flat screen plasma TV, streaming the live worship service. Pee, tap, pray.

I am not intending to say that that TV in and of itself is bad, or that a screen in a church service is a sacrilege. In fact, I think the use of projected images can be very creative, worshipful and even important. But I am trying to say that we have become slaves to the screen, allowing it to be our brain and think for us, instead of being able to use the holy gift of imagination from time to time. We have choked off the ability to relate and think critically. Instead, we let movie clips and talk-show hosts, who are craving ratings and advertising dollars, to shape what we think. Just look at the last election and the divide between “red” and “blue” states: Do we really believe what we think we do, or are we just believing what Bill O’Riely tells us to. (a small side note: I think it is ironic that the show “Desperate Housewives”, one of the more morally lacking shows on prime-time is most popular in the value-based, morally-strong “red” states)

In short, I think we’ve become… well… boobs.

“Oh greatest of mass media. Thank you for elevating emotion, reducing thought, and stifling imagination. Thank you for the artificiality of quick solutions and for the insidious manipulation of human desires for commercial purposes. This bowl of lukewarm tapioca represents my brain. I offer it in humble sacrifice. Bestow thy flickering light forever.”
Calvin speaking to the TV
Calvin and Hobbes