Posted by Helen on: 10.17.2007 /
Note: in addition to posting these lecture notes I posted my review of Brian’s book here
Last night I heard Brian McLaren lecture on Truth-Telling in “Christian” America: Globalization, Poverty and the Environment at Dominican University. These are my notes. This talk was based on Brian’s book Everything Must Change, except the particular emphasis on telling the truth (that was because of the lecture series this was part of).
This lecture is part of our series on Truth and Consequences. Truth is critical in the Christian tradition and it does have consequences. Truth is one of the first casualties of war.
If you’re wondering why we’re combining globalization, poverty and the environment it’s because they’re intimately related just as truth and consequences are.
Religion and Christianity have been misused and helped to obscure the truth but our faith tradition offers a critical base from which to tell the truth about - and the health of the planet.
We’re pleased to present Brian McLaren, an explorer and storyteller of the Christian tradition.
Is truth absolute or relative? To some extent there’s mine, yours, many truths. Many people are uncomfortable with ‘truth’ because it’s been used as a weapon by the powerful. It has a different flavor from people who are on the underside of things and speak truth.
What’s a distinctively Christian understanding of truth? What role do we have to play as truth-tellers?
If you saw the news today, it was probably not all truth; maybe some was. What truth-elling could happen among us tonight?
Tonight we want to create a truth in the world of our community which matches what’s actually out there. Maybe things could happen tonight which will change the truth of the future.
We don’t just speak the truth with no attention to consequences - we speak truth/untruth because we desire certain consequences.
Some truths about our world and US consumption
People need about about 4 ˝ acres of land each to meet their food needs, but Americans use over 23 acres. And we’re teaching others to be consumers like we are. I’ve been in slums where the roof leaks, but they have satellite dishes because watching American TV is more important than a non-leaky roof. These people watch on TV how Americans live so they can live that way too…we’d need 5 planets if they all did that. This is truth we seldom tell.
One person responded to Al Gore’s comments about global warming this way: “Al Gore is proposing that an energy-starved planet goes on an energy diet” He could have said ‘energy-obese”…but he didn’t. What he did say seems like a lie.
What if we started telling the truth to ourselves and others? What would that look like? More statistics: in the US, 10 calories of oil are used to get each calorie of food to our table.
Truth is hard to believe, admit and talk about in the US. Why is it hard for any nation? Why the US in particular? What are the consequences of evading the truth? What are the hard truths for each nation to tell? “We’re a nation born on genocide, raised on slavery and sustained by empire” - Jim Wallis. What truths are we not in the habit of telling about our past?
In school in Germany you don’t learn much about the 1940s. Here in America you learn a certain version of US history in which the story of Hiroshima is told with the same antiseptic distance as the holocaust is taught with in schools in Germany.
As committed Christians who have an obligation and devotion to truth because we believe in a God of reality and truth - what does it mean to be the people within our nation who are trying to own the truth before God? What would it mean for Christians in the US to take seriously the idea that God desires truth in the innermost being?
We are experts at how to not tell the truth - we have “weapons of mass duplicity”: denial, deception and distraction. We avoid the truth by lying, denial, partial truth and telling one truth to distract from another.
We have amazing ways of avoiding the truth. Especially with so many people talking! There are TV and radio waves passing through our bodies right now, whose content is people trying to tell truth or otherwise. And on the Internet, all those websites; so many people talking…
What are the top global problems? What does the message of Jesus say to those problems?
The word global is important because in the last century we’ve been linked as never before in one global system. Bombs and missiles link us together in completely unprecedented ways. We can vote and elect people who could destroy half the world and others could be plotting to drop something on us.
Chances are - in our meals today we had an international global plate. We need to understand our problems as having a global dimension. For example: orcas are getting rarer in Puget Sound, probably because of what falls into the sea that’s emitted from Japan companies; it kills plankton, the food source of orcas.
As a Christian, what does the message of Jesus - the good news of the gospel - have to say about global problems? Bono has spoken up about global problems: perhaps God is in heaven thinking “if the churches don’t speak up the rock stars will cry out!”
Rick Warren turned to addressing global crises after writing his successful book.
I took several lists of the top crises facing our world today and combined them. Four main crises emerged.
We’re all running a societal machine. A machine is a complex tool fashioned to achieve a desire. We’re trying to achieve prosperity - we want to be happy, healthy, entertained, productive; that is “prosperity”. But as soon as you have it someone wants to steal it so you have to protect it with a security system; police, locks, spies, etc.
Prosperity and Security is expensive so you have to spread the cost fairly, so you need an equity system.
Everything we do can be traced back to these desires - prosperity, security, equity systems.
And all of this is part of the ecosystem. (Although - joke - economists consider the environment as a subset of their system)
All that comes into our ecosystem is sunlight and all that goes out at night is heat…when working well the same goes in and out and it’s balanced. Our societal system takes in resources [matter and energy] and sends out waste [matter and energy]. There’s lots of margin if it’s small but not much if it’s big. That’s where we’re at.
The first global crisis: Our prosperity system - it can’t stop growing beyond environmental limits. We tell ourselves growth is necessary and good - but it isn’t always good. If a goldfish in a bowl grows too big there’s not opportunity for its oxygen to get replenished and its waste products to break down and so it poisons itself. We’re on the front edge of this. Americans are the most excellent consumers in history…we have the most power in this system…what truths do we need to tell ourselves in a time like this? We can lie [Brian puts back the "how not to tell the truth" slide] . In that quote responding to Al Gore “Energy-starved” was a lie. Energy ravenous or addicted - that would be the truth.
The prosperity system works extremely well for a minority of the world’s system. The richest people will keep getting richer and richer doing nothing or very little. Others do everything in their power and can’t get any more prosperity. A friend who has chosen to live with poor people pointed out to me that poverty isn’t just about money, it’s about [lack of] choices and opportunity. That’s the second crisis: the crisis of the equity system: the gap between rich and poor is growing. It’s a crisis of poverty. It’s not always true that the rich get richer and poor get poorer but it is true that the rich are getting richer very quickly and the poor are staying the same or only slowing getting less poor.
For the poor that results in suffering, resentment and fear. A baby born in Chicago: on his/her birth certificate gets 30-40 more years than if born in Zambia. “Where you live shouldn’t determine whether you live.” - Bono. Poor people get resentful when they have children who are sick and need something to live that costs 50 cents, but they die. 200 miles away they could have lived, but they die. Rich people: you’d better build your walls tall when the gap gets big enough.
The rome rivers froze one year and the poor Germanic tribes thought “we’ve had enough” and crossed over the ice and came as illegal refugees. Over a million people came into Rome that December.
There will be consequences if we admit the truth and consequences if we don’t.
Unless I address this, someone always comes up to me and says “didn’t Jesus say the poor you will have with you always?” This is an example of telling a partial truth. It’s really effective when you can do it by quoting the Bible! Jesus probably knew the Hebrew Scriptures well, so let’s look at the context for this quote. We can see the whole story in Deuteronomy 15. It’s about cancelling debt. In context the passage says: there should be no poor among you if you obey me (God). There will be enough for everyone if you do this. However, you won’t obey me, so, there will always be poor among you: don’t be hard-hearted but open-handed towards them. That’s the context of the passage. It’s not a fatalistic “there will always be poor people among us - oh well, I want another cheeseburger”.
Poor people will do predictable things as the gap grows - petty crime, then organized crime (they create their own prosperity system since the rich have shut them out of theirs) then immigration, refugees, then…war.
What if you’re so poor you can’t afford the weapons you need? A fifth choice is terrorism. It’s not new - it’s a time tested strategy. This is what happens when people are shut out.
What do the rich do? Do they say “We’re really sorry - how can we help you?” No - they say “look at these evil insane people!” The rich arm themselves, since they can afford to. Terrorism is a successful strategy: it does random violence that tricks the rich to spend huge amounts to keep it from happening again…eventually the terrorists bankrupt the rich this way. This strategy brought colonialism to an end after WWII.
The third crisis is the security crisis - when the rich and poor arm themselves with more and more weapons and fighting escalates. We don’t tell the truth about these much. We have lots of weapons of mass distraction.
The fourth crisis: the framing story at the center is the power source. This is the story that tells people who they are, where they’re from, where they are going, how to do it. Often these framing stories are inarticulate: a truth for us that we don’t even know that we know.
We aren’t honest about our stories. One is growth - the way to prosperity is to achieve more and make more waste.
Our framing stories usually come from religion. The greatest crisis is that the world’s religions are failing to provide a story which will help us have a better way of pursuing prosperity, equity and security. Our religious systems are failing in this regard and we’re in deep denial about it.
It’s not that God is a failure or our religions are untrue; nevertheless, they aren’t providing a framing story capable of inspiring people to resolve these problems.
About ten years ago Carl Sagan & other scientific leaders - mostly atheists - called for a summit between scientific and religious leaders. The scientists said - ok we’ve fought a lot in the past but here’s how it is now. We have data we’re destroying ourselves. We can measure our slow suicide or reach out to you - you’re in the business of motivating people and changing behavior - can we be friends? Most people never heard about this meeting because we went back to business as usual.
What are we preoccupied about in our churches? Have we looked out how our faith speaks to our situation? These are the main framing stories
Domination/Empire
Revolution/Redemptive war
Revenge/Scapegoating
Isolation/withdrawal
Religions baptize these: domination:”just let us be in charge and everything will go great”. It works for us - but for some reason the dominated people aren’t team players. They go for story number 2 - revolution/redemptive war narratives; that’s how they overthrow the dominating people.
Religions buy into the domination story when they say we’re “God’s chosen people and others are evil - God can’t be happy with them!”
People embracing the second framing story say God gives them victory against the oppressors: they praise God as they engage in acts of violence.
The third story says everything would be fine but for the traitors in the camp. We blame the gays or the democrats. If we could only get rid of them. This was the Nazi story and so they got rid of the scapegoats/traitors.
The isolation/withdrawal story says “it’s hopeless, let’s go pray in church until we’re beamed up” It’s all hopeless anyway.
These stories were all there in Jesus’ day. Domination/Empire: the Romans and the Sadduccees. Revolution/Redemptive war narratives: the Zealots; Revenge/Scapegoating - the Pharisees. Isolation/withdrawal - the Essenes (we know this from extra-Biblical texts - they aren’t actually in the Bible).
Jesus proclaimed a different story called the Good News of the Kingdom of God - a radically different framing story.
It’s too big for just the Baptists and the Catholics. It’s big enough for all of us.
Truth has enormous power. This is a great moment for people of faith to rediscover confidence in the simple power of the truth.
(Here are some of them: I didn’t write them all down.)
Question: How do we balance hands-on Mother Theresa kind of compassionate help with more structural systemic compassionate help?. Brian: it’s a both/and. Often people start hands-on then when there are enough of them on board they can build structures which help systemically.
Question: Religion can provide a framing story; how does the Christian story connect with other religions’ stories? Brian: the problem with metanarratives is that they tend to be domination stories used to squash people who don’t fit. Or they’re used to legitimize genocide. Metanarratives are the story of empire. Christians believe they have to see the gospel as a metanarrative, but I think it’s blasphemous. That was Pilate’s way, i.e. “If you don’t believe my story I’m nailing you to a cross”. Jesus way was “If you don’t believe my story you can nail me to a cross”. Jesus’ story is a serving/redeeming narrative but it’s been used as a dominating one. Christians need to tell the truth about that.
One solution to metanarrative has been to say there are only local stories. That’s a step up from domination, but a local narrative is powerless in front of someone else’s metanarrative. Americans think Europe has lost its metanarrative and only has local ones (which isn’t entirely fair) and Americans respond by saying the only way to meet Islam’s story is with ours, which becomes a fight to the death.
[these last two are my paraphrase because I didn't write this one down] Question: lots of people are coming to Jesus in these times and the world is getting worse and we’re getting close to the rapture; so is this stuff really important? Brian: many Christians believe in a dispensationalist view of the Bible; many believe the world is getting worse and worse; many believe history has already been ‘filmed’ and the film is just playing. I don’t believe that; I don’t believe the world has to get worse and worse or that the future is set. I think one of the ‘rapture’ passages has been misinterpreted because when it says some will be ‘taken’, Jesus’ comparison with the flood tells us it means they’ll be taken in judgment, not taken to heaven.
Question: does your book end with action steps? Brian: no, but this is an action step I could envisage. We could have an ethical buying campaign - we could add labels to clothing saying whether it’s ethically produced. Then consumers in the store could look at a shirt which is $12 and one that’s $25 and decide “I’ll buy the $25 one because if I buy the $12 one I’m ripping off some poor person who was underpaid to make it”. We’ve added nutrition labels in my lifetime. Why couldn’t we add ethical buying labels too?
Comment by: Jesus Creed » Everything Must Change 8
1 10/17/07 5:31 AM | Comment Link |[...] in in Brian McLaren’s Everything Must Change. [Brian is lecturing around the USA now and here is a set of notes by Helen from last night’s lecture here in the Chicago [...]
Comment by: Steve S.
2I just watched a video yesterday that was talking about the subversive ways Jesus and his followers used the symbols and language the Roman empire had created (gospel, church, cross, ‘the only name,’ etc.) and twisted the meaning; using it in radically different ways. Offering an alternative to Empire that was strikingly similar, and yet radically different, showing the Roman Empire in all it’s glory and might, to be an ugly parody of the real thing that was taking place in the very belly of the Empire.
Thank you for the notes, Helen, I appreciate it; our interaction here has been of immense value to me personally, I hope someday you get out this way for one of your conferences…
Comment by: Helen
3Thanks Steve. It’s been great having you participate here. I also hope we’ll meet in person sometime.
Comment by: Rachel
4Steve, I’ve been learning more about this aspect lately as well. It is really bringing the gospel alive in a new way, especially in my own context as an Empire dweller.
Comment by: glenn
5Helen- Great detailed summary of the lecture!
Comment by: Helen
6Thanks Glenn!
Rachel, I think it’s very enlightening to consider what constitutes an Empire, whether Jesus was for or against Empires and whether Christianity ever resembles an Empire.
Comment by: re-dreaming the dream
7 10/17/07 2:25 PM | Comment Link |[...] Helen’s excellent summary of the lecture Helen’s post about the evening Jason’s post about the evening [...]
Comment by: Steve S.
8No Helen! Don’t go there! Then I’ll have to change my theology!
;-)
Comment by: Greg Lins
9Excellent insights! World-wide poverty is a truth we cannot ignore, and we need to act on this.
Unfortunately, I don’t think it’s as simple as coming up with labeling about ethics of manufactured goods - whose ethics?
The answer lies in PROMISES, and the consumer will ultimately decide if they like the Promises or not.
For example, what if corporations PROMISED their customers that clothing would be made by people that need the income, in a humane environment, and provide living wages, or something even more specific? What if the SAME PROMISE was made to the employees? IF that resonates with the marketplace, such a company can exist, because it becomes a BRAND PROMISE to deliver these things.
Business is about a whole lot more than making money. Families depend on it. I for one, am sold on Business as Mission as a concept that can truly lift up the masses of impoverished people, and give them choices they do not have today because each day is spent surviving.
Again, great post. I’ll be back.
Comment by: Helen
10Steve, yes, you might just have to do that :-) But only if you think Jesus wants you to.
Greg, thanks for stopping by - welcome to Conversation at the Edge! I absolutely agree that labelling means nothing unless the company does what the label says - so it’s not as simple as adding labels.
I see that you’re in the Seattle area - did you notice we’re having our annual event Off The Map Live in Seattle in a couple of weeks? We’d love to see you there. I think it would be a great place to connect with other people who believe that following Jesus has everything to do with ethical business practices. Not everyone there will be local - but many people will be from the Seattle area since the reality is, it’s easiest for local people to attend. (Last year the event was at Overlake, by the way - I met Mike Howerton there; he seems like a great guy)
Comment by: Greg Lins
11Hi Helen,
I just stumbled upon your blog here yesterday, and didn’t know a thing about Off the Map or the Kirkland event. Well, now I do! Thanks!
Now that I know, I’m letting others know about it. I plan to attend.
Mike Howerton is definitely doing a great job at Overlake.
Take care and God Bless,
Greg
Comment by: Helen
12Greg that’s wonderful news! Please do bring your friends also.
Comment by: Eliza
13Helen, thanks for this summary of a very interesting lecture.
Just a few days ago I started reading Jim Wallis’ book God’s Politics (after having it gathering dust on my bookshelf for a year or two) - he also brings up “The poor you will always have with you” and how people (OK, Christians) misinterpret this as an “out” - an excuse. He wrote about the context in which this appears in Matthew but doesn’t go farther than that, so I was especially interested in seeing what you wrote from Brian McLaren’s talk above about the OT source & context (Deuteronomy 15). Most interesting, & useful.
Again, thanks for this post!
FYI, I have a conflicting conference in Seattle Nov 1-3, but hope to catch the bloggers’ dinner…
Comment by: Notes from Everything Must Change Lecture « j. blake huggins
14 10/18/07 10:29 PM | Comment Link |[...] an excellent set of notes from one of Brian’s lectures about the book. You can view the notes here. I don’t think it’s a complete digest of what Brian is actually talking about on the [...]
Comment by: Helen
15Thanks Eliza. That was the first time I’d heard anyone say “Let’s look at that quote about the poor in context” - I found that very interesting also. I hope we’ll see you at the dinner!
Comment by: //re:generate » Blog Archive » "Truthiness” in “Christian” America
16 11/8/07 12:02 PM | Comment Link |[...] McLaren’s lecture she did a great job of blogging a lot of his lecture, which you can findhere. My friends Jason and Glenn also attended with me and they also shared there experience and [...]