Wednesday, May 30, 2018

Rebuilding the Ruins of These Generations

         In his article The Strange Failure of the Educated Elite, David Brooks points out the great failure of the "Me" generation: it isn't about me.  Focused on individual achievement, individual reward, "winning", and measuring others by our own attainments, my generation and the generations after it have fed a cancerous individual rapacity for more that has made our common life together poisonous.
         Maybe it's because we Presbyterians are mostly part of the new meritocratic elite that our life together so easily presents a microcosm of our society's ills.  We are terrible at loving one another, and we see little if any problem with that.
         "Why would I love someone who is so obviously wrong about ____?  Why would I associate with someone whose viewpoint I don't respect?  Why would I want to care for somebody whose very way of looking at the world makes me uncomfortable?  Let them go away."
         We have distorted every institution into a factory which creates, enables, and protects such a mindset.  Where those institutions were once places where each individual learned their true scale-- you are not THAT big, you are not THAT important--, now they are used to magnify the individual or group of individuals who hold the most power within them.
        It is why being a "loyal opposition" in any institution or community in our country has become an oxymoron.  If you were loyal, you wouldn't be opposed; if you're opposed, you can't possibly be loyal, because loyalty is to an individual point of view/mindset, not to a large community of people, much less a God who inhabits a whole universe.  Institutions have been bent and twisted to the work of ego magnification, along with every other good that was left to us by the generations who knew what an "us" really is.
        We Protestants have never been really good at the "us" thing.  The old joke that if you have three Baptists eventually you'll have five churches holds true for all of us.  But in Christ, none of this behavior makes sense.  Jesus Christ did not die on the cross to prove He was right.  He didn't walk into a Samaritan village and begin to talk to a Samaritan woman because she was the smartest person there, the one most like Himself.
         Jesus gives his meritocratic, best-life-yet away.  He gives His life away because He lives in community-- how can we think that hanging on to one another is wrong when we worship a God Who is Community incarnate-- Father, Son, and Holy Spirit?  Jesus gives His life away because He recognizes that the only way to teach love-- hanging on to one another-- is to do it.  Jesus doesn't look for return on His investment: no where do we hear of Jesus exulting with God in prayer over thousands saved, healed, present and listening.  Jesus is trying to create a new "us": the Kingdom of God, the beloved community that Isaiah said would one day cover not just Israel, but the world.
          And now, we can't hang on to one another across our disagreements.  I find it interesting in the PC(USA) to hear more and more self-congratulatory "we are becoming more inclusive!" statements that coincide without irony with statements that still echo a former GA moderator: "those damn evangelicals!  I wish they would go away!"
       So I attend Presbytery meetings, and do my best to give my best to my community even as so many make it clear to me that they would rather I went away.  To the best of my ability, I will love.  Whether it makes a difference or not is irrelevant.  I give myself away, so You, Lord Jesus, can use me.