The Progressive Prophet Without Honor

Throwing Jesus Off a Cliff

This week’s lectionary reading is a strange little story detailing the auspicious start of Jesus’ ministry. Driven by the spirit, He returns home to Nazareth to preach in the synagogue. His family, childhood friends, and old neighbors anxiously await the return of the native, whose fame was spreading throughout the region. It seems this local boy finally made good on his promise to become a rabbi. 

Jesus enters the synagogue, opens the scroll of the prophet Isaiah, finds his place, and begins to read.

“The Spirit of the Lord is upon me, because he has anointed me to bring good news to the poor. He has sent me to proclaim release to the captives and recovery of sight to the blind, to let the oppressed go free, to proclaim the year of the Lord’s favor.”

So far, so good. Jesus adopts Isaiah 61 as his mission statement, proclaiming that He, acting as God’s servant, will bring freedom and restoration to the marginalized. Interestingly enough, Jesus omits reading verse two which references “the day of vengeance of our God”, figuratively taking scissors to the Bible, signifying a dramatic distinction between his merciful announcement of the Kingdom and that of his predecessor John the Baptist. No doubt, his listeners would have noticed his refusal to include the verse in his messianic announcement. Finished with the reading, Jesus sits down as “The eyes of all in the synagogue were fixed on him.” Then, He offers this famous, one sentence sermon:

“Today, this scripture has been fulfilled in your hearing.”

The lectionary does us little favors by dividing this story into two parts, because it’s what Jesus says next that causes everything to go wrong. Jesus tells two stories about two of Israel’s favorite prophets, Elijah and Elisha. The problem is that of all the accounts he could have chosen to tell, Jesus picks two scandalous tales of prophetic ministry done on behalf of and for Gentiles, honoring the dirty, sinful people this hometown crowd despises. Jesus reminds them, 

“There were many widows in Israel in the days of Elijah, when the heaven was shut up three years and six months, when there came a great famine over all the land; and unto none of them was Elijah sent, but only to Zarephath, in the land of Sidon, unto a woman that was a widow. And there were many lepers in Israel in the time of Elisha the prophet; and none of them was cleansed, but only Naaman the Syrian.”

Oh snap he didn’t. 

To the horror of everyone gathered, Jesus does the unthinkable, he tweaks the message and the meaning of Isaiah’s prophecy by announcing God’s “jubilee of liberation, amnesty, and pardon” to everybody, including Israel’s enemies. Reminding us all in the process that the text is always subordinate to the infallible word made flesh. Filled with self-righteous indignation at his progressive use of Scripture, the crowd turns on Jesus and tries to murder him on the spot! A prophet has no honor with hometown crowds.

And, as much as we’d like to distance ourselves from Jesus’ friends and neighbors, we aren’t so different. Like them, we believe that our righteousness, proper sexual ethic, doctrine, skin color, and privilege constitute our place as God’s chosen people. We believe that Isaiah’s words are our words, written for our deliverance, and our deliverance alone. Israel in fact would have first heard this prophetic song during their Babylonian captivity, and now they hear it afresh as subalterns living under the jack boot of Rome. For centuries, they had waited on the fulfillment of these promises, and today in their very midst Jesus declares that the wait is over, that the Kingdom of God is being fulfilled in their midst. But that kingdom includes the very people that are socially, economically, and politically oppressing them. They were so hell bent on defending God revealed in the text, that they failed to experience the God in flesh standing in their midst. Our modern equivalent would be Jesus preaching at Liberty University, announcing that homosexuals, Muslims, democrats, and communists are entering the kingdom ahead of us. You can understand why they wanted him dead. 

Yet, in referencing these stories, Jesus resists the most dangerous idea of all, that God's love is for some people, and not for all people. Think for a minute about his ministry. He's always dragging his innocent disciples into regions where the people are spiritually oppressed: he goes to "the other side” to heal Legion, he talks openly with a Samaritan women, he restores the Syrophoenician’s daughter because of her faith, he eats with sinners and tax collectors who have defiled hands, he’s soft on whores, he drinks with drunks, he touches the unclean, and even has the audacity to make women disciples. The entirety of Jesus’ ministry can be read as unadulterated resistance to the conventional religious wisdom that God’s love is only for those who deserve it. 

2,000 years later, things aren’t much different. In fact, the church today fears this resistance against rigid orthodoxy almost as much as they are afraid of their own irrelevance.  In every religious community there exists those who believe that their mission statement is to protect God from the very people he came to save. When challenged to consider a wider view of God, their orthodoxy becomes even more uncompromising. This inflexible faith causes them to live in fear of ‘the other’, and they see it as their duty to protect God and doctrine, because it is clear that they are no longer capable of protecting themselves. Such fundamentalism “occurs wherever, in the face of the immorality of the present age, the gospel of creative love for the abandoned is replaced by the law of what is supposed to be Christian morality.” As I write this, Franklin Graham just proclaimed on Christian radio that “We have allowed the Enemy to come into our churches. I was talking to some Christians and they were talking about how they invited these gay children to come into their home and to come into the church…We have to be so careful who we let into the churches.” While Graham consistently makes himself an easy target due to his hate speech toward homosexuals and Muslims, he represents a vast majority of American evangelicals who champion the religion of fear. 

So, as the Anglican Communion threatens schism over homosexuality, as Wheaton College browbeats a tenured professor, and as conservative evangelicals continue the culture war against progressive Christians and their ‘liberal, secular agenda’, let us be reminded that Jesus himself was rejected by the religious in-crowd for standing in solidarity with outsiders, because only “someone who finds the courage to be different from others can ultimately exist for ‘others’”. 

Authentic Christianity requires our own identification with the crucified Christ, to the extent that we understand that in him “God has identified himself with the godless and those abandoned by God”. The more we identify with Christ, the more we are able to identify with others. "Scripture is filled with one person recognizing, welcoming, embracing, and releasing the strength of unfamiliar other." Therefore our commitment to be a community of inclusion is not based on cultural capitulation or social pressures, but on the “belief that the outstretched arms of Jesus on the cross are a sign of the very love of God reaching out to us all.”

It seems God’s people are always learning the hard way that the thrust toward unity must find a way to include the very people we wish to exclude. Much to our discomfort, God really does work on both sides of the street. And as his followers, we can either be a people that stands with clinched fists in open opposition to those we believe are unworthy, or we can join the Jesus movement, a movement bringing good news to the poor, and release for the captives. As Bishop Michael Curry reminds us, “It may be part of our vocation to help many others to grow in a direction where we can realize and live the love that God has for all of us. And we can one day be a church where all of God’s children are fully welcomed…And so we must claim that high calling…We are part of the Jesus movement, and the cause of God’s love in this world will never stop, and will never be defeated.” Amen, and Amen. 

Cultivating a Christian Aesthetic: Why Beauty Matters

'The Hay Wain', by John Constable

I work at an organization that helps parents start faith-forming conversations with their teens. Our mission is to bring families together through the art of culture translation, which means that much of our time and energy is spent becoming experts on pop music, movies, television, and technology. It’s both a blessing and a curse. While it’s important to have the knowledge of, and ability to exegete culture, to merely live at the crossroads of mass entertainment can feel pretty shallow, at least to this 44 year old. Whenever we reference Iggy Azalea, Drake, or Kendrick Lamar I often think, will anyone even remember these artists names in 50 years? There is no doubt that pop artists are creative, but are they taking responsibility for what they are creating? And, more important, is their art expressing and manifesting beauty to the world?

The ancient Roman writer Seneca said, “Life is short, but art is long.” So, what makes a poem, song, movie, or painting last through the ebb and flow of cultural trends and tastes? Why has Augustine and Austen, Byron and Bronte, Michelangelo and Monet remained revered when Beyonce and Bieber will be forgotten in our lifetimes?  Lasting art, real creativity reveals whatever is good, whatever is true, and whatever is beautiful. Creating beauty is living into our vocation as image-bearers. Everyone is called to nurture beauty, to cultivate their own garden by offering in their own way whatever is good, whatever is true, and whatever is lovely. Living into our role as co-creators means creating beautiful worlds of peace and harmony in the midst of the fallen and the broken. There is an incredible mystery in human nature, where beauty exists, peace is real. It is rare to find cultures who value beauty but who live violently. Goethe said, “One ought, every day at least, to hear a little song, read a good poem, see a fine picture, and, if it were possible, to speak a few reasonable words.” This is what it means to be fully human, to nurture beauty outside of the garden, where thorns and weeds cover the earth. Being fully human means taking our vocation as co-creators seriously, by nurturing the good and the beautiful in the midst of a fallen world. 

But how do we cultivate beauty in the midst of banality? Beauty is attained by setting our own interests aside and letting something particular dawn on us, to allow something specific to elevate us into a state of wonder. Beauty asks us to look on it directly and precisely, to see it not in the abstract, but in concrete singularity: this tree, this flower, this sonnet, this song. It takes one thing to pull you into the depth of anything. And when you get to the depth of anything, for some wonderful reason, you have the power to get to the depth of everything. And God is found at the depth of anything. In this way, lasting, transformative art points us toward the divine. To understand great things, you have to experience them in small ways. When we start with something specific, we have a doorway to the universal. Beauty allows us to experience the eternal in the ordinary. There is an old Celtic saying that heaven and earth are only three feet apart, but in the ‘thin places’ that distance is even smaller. Beauty reveals these ‘thin places’, where the veil between heaven and earth is lifted if only for a brief moment, when both the seen and unseen world come together as the door between this world and the next is cracked open for just a moment and we glimpse the glory of the eternal. Such experiences elevate us from the cliche to reverence. As Thomas Merton said, “Art allows us to find ourselves and lose ourselves at the same time.”

Practically speaking, how do we foster communities, churches, and families that appreciate and create beauty in the midst of brokenness? First, do hard things. Instead of reading a that self-help book you bought at LifeWay, pick up a piece of literature by George Elliott, Thomas Hardy, or James Joyce. It will be a struggle at first, but persevere, your brain will thank you. In this way, you will re-train your senses to recognize and enjoy beauty instead of twaddle. Second, surround yourself with classic artistic expressions as an alternative to the mass produced entertainment most of us currently consume. Because in very real ways, we grow accustomed to, and appreciate the things that surround us. Our sense of what is beautiful, and our ability to appreciate beauty is cultivated by what we take in. If we are surrounded by synthetic pop songs, touched-up photos of anorexic models, and block-buster blow em up movies, this is what we will assume is beautiful. We begin to prefer these things simply because they are familiar. As a substitute, listen to a concerto by Rachmaninoff, go to an art museum, or attend a play in the park.  Maybe this is what the Apostle Paul meant when he wrote, “Brothers and sisters, whatever is true, whatever is noble, whatever is right, whatever is pure, whatever is lovely, whatever is admirable--if anything is excellent or praiseworthy--think about such things.” And finally, turn off the television, shut down your Mac and go outside. Take a walk in the woods, climb a mountain, look up at the stars, feel the breeze on your face, take in the full revelation of the glory of God in and through his good creation. After all, the heavens do declare the beauty of God.

As Western Christians, we’ve spent a large portion of our time offering the world the good and the true. Libraries are filled with treatises on Christian ethics, morality, and apologetics. But, what we haven’t done is offer the world, through our life and posture, a Christian aesthetic of beauty. It isn’t enough to ask if our posture toward the world is good and true, we must also ask, is it beautiful? It could be that our greatest calling as God’s image-bearers in the world is to cultivate and nurture whatever is just, true, good, and most importantly, beautiful. To open up little thin places all around the world where everyone can come face to face with the magnificence and redemptive power of real beauty.  Because in the end, beauty just might save the world. 

Advent And Redeeming The Time

Every culture dating back to the prehistoric man has had a way of telling time. Calendars reinforce reality by offering rhythm, order, and meaning to existence. They mark the things we believe to be true about ourselves and the world around us. How we tell time is in itself a formative liturgy, rooting us in a particular narrative. The ‘holy days’ or holidays that make up our calendar reinforce reality through celebrations, festivals, parades, and tributes. Think for just a moment about our American calendar.  What we choose to observe says a lot about what we value: President’s Day, Veterans Day, 4th of July, Black Friday. In and of themselves these holy days may seem innocuous, but together they reinforce a specific narrative. 

Most of us learned how to organize time around wars, the rise and fall of empires, and the reign of kings or presidents. Think Pax Romana, the Dark Ages, or the Age of Imperialism. But in Jesus, we reorder time itself. Our understanding of how we think about the past, present, and future are reinterpreted through his birth, life, ministry, death, resurrection, and promised return.  As followers of Christ, we live in a different time zone. 

Since her inception, the church has been telling time radically different than the world. The liturgical calendar grounds us in God’s story and it is the lens through which we read and interpret the history of the world. For starters, the new year doesn’t begin on January 1, but with Advent. It then moves to the twelve days of Christmas, followed by Epiphany, commemorating the civil disobedience of the Magi who refused Herod’s orders by obeying a different king. December 28 is the Feast of the Holy Innocents, when the church remembers Herod’s genocide, and the eternal struggle of the powers that be with the coming reign of Christ.  The calendar then moves we into ordinary time, Lent, Holy Week, Easter and Pentecost. Ultimately, the liturgical year is the temporal structure within which the Church celebrates the holy mysteries of Christ: "From the Incarnation and the Nativity to the Ascension, to Pentecost and to waiting with joyful expectation for the Lord's return”.

As Christians who also happen to be Americans, it is essential to distinguish between the American ‘we’ and the Christian ‘we’, realizing that we the church are subjects in a Kingdom that is often times at odds with the kingdoms of this world. In fact, almost everything in God’s economy is upside down—the last are first, the poor are blessed, the meek inherit the earth, and the hungry are filled. 

The liturgical calendar reminds us that we live in the world, but we are most definitely not of it. It shapes our lives around an alternative narrative with contrasting formative practices and liturgies. In so doing, we remember that we are citizens in God’s pluralistic kingdom, a kingdom that transcends time, race, color, creed, and language.

In particular, this new way of telling time begins with Advent, a period of longing, anticipation, and hope. Advent is the seasonal recollection that “God has made us a people of promise in a world of impatience.” It is the recovery of how to live in a world of impatience as a patient people. Advent reminds us that things are not as they are supposed to be: that war, violence, poverty, and injustice are passing, but not quite yet. It calls to mind that the world itself is experiencing birth pains, that the present order is dying and a new creation is being born. It is the faithful practice of living in the ‘here but not yet’ Kingdom as patient people who know how to hope in the midst of despair.  “Our task in Advent is to journey in hope and expectation of the God who breaks open the heavens and descends in power and glory so that we fallen creatures might know healing and salvation.”

The Return of The Native

A Lectionary Reflection on Mark 6:1-13

Mark’s Gospel reads like minimalist street-theatre, with abrupt scene changes and plot twists compelling the reader to feel the urgency of the drama. Written primarily to help imperial subjects come to terms with themselves and their colonial world, Mark stands alone in antiquity as a narrative for and about common people. At center stage is Jesus, the itinerant rabbi roaming Galilee healing the sick, raising the dead and feeding the hungry. And, for at least the first five chapters of Mark’s tragedy, he is the popular protagonist known for his revolutionary teaching and civil disobedience. 

This week’s lectionary reading finds Jesus returning home, to the people and place of his past. And due to his growing fame throughout the region, the reader expects him to receive a warm reception. But instead, his neighbors and kin meet him with anger, fear, and contempt. “Is not this the Carpenter, the son of Mary?” Which functions not so much as a question as a mocking conclusion about Jesus’ illegitimacy. In his own town, among his own relatives, Jesus is rejected because he exceeds their meager expectations. There is probably nothing more spiritually suppressive than old time religion in a one-horse town that continues to rely on “how things have always been”.

Why is it that a stranger can see from a distance what a neighbor cannot see close? Things can become too familiar, too absolute. His eyes, hands, voice, and clothes are now plain, predictable, and probably a bit tattered. After all, this is just Mary’s boy, everyone is sure of that. But facts alone don’t lead to faith. When belief is reduced to what is known, certainty becomes the purest of spiritual virtues. Therefore you have a Galilean village, and now an entire religious culture striving for intellectual proof to convince themselves that what they believe is actually true, leaving precious room for the beauty of mystery and the stretching nature of doubt.¹ Maybe there are times when God is just willfully ambiguous...

Jesus’ return home reminds us just how blind we can be to something we think we know so well.

Why was it so hard to see Jesus for who he really is? Why is it so hard to see him now through our best attempts at systematic theology and dogmatic apologetics?

Mark’s drama is the story of the God who is like Jesus. He still confounds, still confuses, and still refuses to fit our preconceived expectations. If anything is certain, it’s that the last two thousand years has proven that those of us who think we know him most may well be the ones who know him least.

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1 Boyd, Greg. TheWorkOfThePeople.com, "The Idolatry of Certainty."

Learning To Tell Time

On Sunday, churches celebrated Pentecost, commemorating the outpouring of the Holy Spirit and the birth of the church universal. At our small parish gathering, Father McMullen wore a red cope over his traditional white robe to memorialize the coming of the Holy Spirit through tongues of fire. In America, the Monday after Pentecost is Memorial Day, a holiday where patriots wear red, white, and blue to memorialize men and women killed in military service. This holiday weekend places in juxtaposition “American Time” and “Church Time”, two competing ways of offering rhythm, order, and meaning to life. My fear is that most evangelical churches spent for more time this Sunday talking about Memorial Day than Pentecost.

As followers of Christ, who also happen to be Americans, it is requisite of us to distinguish between the American ‘we’ and the Christian ‘we’, realizing that calibrating our lives around the biblical narrative and her way of telling time, instead of the empire, centers our life in Christ. 

For instance, Pentecost celebrates unity in the midst of diversity. The Holy Spirit weds believers worldwide to share in the one, living Body of Christ. Memorial Day on the other hand is a holy day within America’s civic religion consecrating men and women sacrificed on the alter of empire. It is fitting that we, Christian Americans, choose which holiday to observe. The first emphasizes our communal humanity as God “poured out His spirit on all people”, the second indoctrinates us to live in a story where war and violence are venerated, dividing the world into ‘us vs. them.’ Pentecost brings together a world replete with diversity, Memorial Day reminds us of the importance of defending our racial, linguistic, religious, and national distinctions.

The way we tell time, the rituals we keep, and the holidays we commemorate reinforce reality. The American calendar tells Caesar's story, and is filled with holy days remembering presidents, wars, military conquest, and nationalism. They act as sign posts, guiding us to what the empire believes really matters. The Christian calendar tells time radically different, and points to an alternative reality. First, the new year begins with Advent, not January 1. It then moves into the twelve days of Christmas, followed by Lent, Easter and ultimately culminates at Pentecost. These high holy days form the Christian community living in the midst of empire around a different set of values: community, dependence, sacrifice, repentance, and enemy love.

The marriage of church and state that discharged Christendom made this way of telling time difficult, especially in America where the Gospel has gotten all tangled up in the story of Western, white entitlement. Reorienting ourselves around God’s story, and His way of telling time frees us from the temptation to lump America’s story into God’s larger kingdom story.

As Christians, we are subjects in a Kingdom often at odds with the kingdoms of this world. By shaping life, and the way we tell time, around a different narrative, we experience a new world. A world not ruled by our manifest destiny, but by the patient hand of God that continues to slowly bring His kingdom to bear on earth as it now is in heaven. And as He quietly brings his reign to bear on the streets, in the courthouses, in the slums and nations of this world, we remember that we are citizens in a pluralistic, yet united kingdom transcending time, race, color, creed, and language.

#Selfish: A Kardashian Theology of The Body

We should have listened to Andy Warhol. In the 1940’s he predicted “In the future, everyone will be world-famous for 15 minutes.” If only this were true for Kim Kardashian, who’s 15 minutes have turned into 15 years of being famous simply for being famous. Kardashian became an American icon primarily for her role trailblazing the ‘Selfie Movement’.  In fact, her 30 million followers on Instagram will be excited to hear that Kim is releasing a new book titled ‘Selfish, containing over 300 pages of intimate self portraits taken by Kardashian in various stages of dress and undress. “They are only a small fraction of the thousands of selfies we considered for publication.” Thousands? I figured there would be millions.

Kardashian’s narcissism is a snapshot into a global social phenomenon. Just open your Instagram account and bask in the incessant duck face photos. Social media is a virtual museum warehousing thousands of personal pictures from everyone eight to eighty standing in front of a bathroom mirror trying to get the perfect shot from the perfect angle to project their perfect self. SnapChat alone processes 350 million photos a day, most of which are selfie’s. In fact, the phenomenon, like cancer, metastasized the world in 2013 forcing Oxford Dictionary to name ‘Selfie’ the word of the year. Posturing in front of a mirror with an iPhone seems the perfect preoccupation for our narcissistic selves. But what is this exposing about our culture, and our personal pursuit for significance?

For starters, every culture throughout history has had its own icons, that individual or set of individuals who embody all we desire to be. In America, it is the celebrity, and more importantly, our unending desire to become one. Technology and social media provide the channels to achieve notoriety, as we project ourselves to as many people as possible. But is this really what it means to be human; spending our lives in desperate pursuit of significance? Is celebrity status really the end goal of human existence, or is there something far more fulfilling? 

As Christians, we understand that Jesus came into the world not simply to reveal the nature of God, but to show us what it means to be fully human. It seems God isn’t really into Selfie's, He is into us. So much so that he became one of us by taking on the same shriveled vulnerability we all share.  His skin, his flesh was identical to ours in every way.  Over the last few centuries the church has unwittingly projected onto Jesus a human perfectibility that is incompatible with the human condition.  Jesus was not an ‘uberman’, or a fleshy version of some angelic being. He was fully human and fully divine.  And because we do not accept our own concrete humanity with all our flaws, we are less capable of appreciating the fully human Jesus.  The writer of Hebrews reminds us, “He had to be made like them, fully human in every way”. So much so that “He didn’t look like anything or anyone of consequence—he had no physical beauty to attract our attention.” Contrary to our high Christology, Jesus did not embody the magnificence of Michelangelo’s David.  Anthropologists now know that the average male height in first century Palestine was all of 5’ 2’’ tall.  Are we comfortable with this picture of Jesus? A Jesus who may have struggled with his weight, who may have been bald, and according to Scripture, was not above being tempted to subvert his own life’s mission and purpose?

It is only in learning to accept the limitations of this perfect human being that allows us the capability to accept our own human deficiencies, as well as the limitations of others.  He unveils not only the divinity to human persons; Jesus reveals humanity to itself. The humanity of Jesus is the mirror through which we see our own humanity as it should be, not the false self we parade through social media.

Therefore, if we keep in mind that Jesus reveals both the nature of God and the essence of the human person, what does it signify that he spent the majority of his life in complete obscurity?  Or, “being in very nature God, did not consider equality with God something to be used to his own advantage.” In a culture of incessant self-promotion, Jesus demonstrates the path of downward mobility, reminding us that “whoever is least among you—he is the greatest”.  As Henri Nouwen reminds us:

“The one who was from the beginning with God and who was God revealed himself as a small, helpless child; as a refugee in Egypt; as an obedient adolescent and inconspicuous adult: as a penitent disciple of the Baptizer; as a preacher from Galilee, followed by some simple fishermen; as a man who ate with sinners and talked with strangers; as an outcast, a criminal, a threat to his people. He moved from powerful to powerlessness, from greatness to smallness, from success to failure, from strength to weakness, from glory to ignominy. The whole life of Jesus of Nazareth was a life in which all upward mobility was resisted…The divine way is indeed the downward way.”

Though we share the same skin Jesus wore, we search for significance, even celebrity status to validate our human condition. Yet in Him we experience the fullness of the divinity enfleshed in the ordinary. Think about this, God became flesh and lived almost his entire life in utter obscurity! What does this tell us about our own human existence? Simply, a life well lived shouldn’t consist of ‘Selfish’ promotion, but selflessness. Maybe if we stopped spending so much time looking at ourselves, we would have room in our hearts to see others. Jesus reminds us that ‘Whatever you did to the least of these, you did unto me.” It’s hard to see the least of these with an Iphone in front of your face. Loving God more than self is not some abstract ethic, it is overwhelmingly physical. "It means seeing in every person the face of the Lord to be served, and to serve him concretely."  

Recognizing the poor, insecure, normal face of Jesus in the eyes of the broken and marginalized frees us from our narcissistic selves, allowing us to tangibly identify with the living Jesus enfleshed all around us.  And in so doing, we may just find that in losing our life, we will find it.  Then and only then will we know what it means to be fully human as we seek the divine.

Why I'm Quitting Facebook

The role of the church is to take up space in the world. But in our brave new social media world, governed more by virtual reality than physical presence, it’s becoming harder to do so. In a culture when nearly everyone is living an alternative reality on Facebook, Twitter and Instagram, is it possible for the church to offer a divergent reality?  Simply, does the Gospel have an answer for the social media trends disfiguring our humanity?  If Jesus doesn’t, Don Draper sure does…

The day he quit tobacco was quintessential Don Draper: impetuous, brash and utterly brilliant. His advertising agency on the hit show MadMen was teetering near bankruptcy after the loss of their largest client, Lucky Strike cigarettes. Hoping to change both the conversation and the trajectory of the company, Don’s ‘I broke up with her, she didn’t break up with me’ full-page New York Times editorial condemning the cigarette industry saved SCDP’s soul, and her bottom line.  

His agency was peddling a product that never improved, caused illness and made people unhappy. Everyone knew it wasn’t good for them, but they couldn’t stop.  Don could have written the exact same thing about another addictive product: social media.

The average American spends over 11 hours a day online, three of those hours spent on social media sites like Facebook, Twitter and Instagram. In fact, if Facebook was a country it would check in as the third largest nation in the world, with over 1.3 billion users. It rarely improves, makes people psychologically unhealthy and is creating a culture of lonely narcissists. And akin to tobacco, it is killing us. Much like Draper’s chain smoking customers, we are addicted.

A 2012 Harvard University research study revealed that sharing personal information about ourselves is an intrinsically rewarding activity targeting the ‘nucleas accumbens’ area of the brain. This is the very same region of the brain that lights up when cocaine or other illicit drugs are digested. In a separate report, The University of Chicago determined that social media cravings rank higher, and are harder to resist than nicotine cravings.  “If you look at people in a restaurant, nobody is having conversations anymore. They’re sitting at dinner looking at their phones because their brains are so addicted to it.”  And why? Because we are both bent toward narcissism and bored with reality. ‘Like’ me, notice me, help me escape the here and now. The constant contact from status updates, ‘favorites’, re-tweets, and ‘likes’ attempts to fill the vacuum in our soul. But in reality, we are more isolated, alone and distracted than ever before. “This media we call social is anything but.”

Social media advertises real relationships and personal significance by making three bold promises: you will never be alone, you are not bound by place or time, and you are perfectible. Online, you are no longer tethered by human limitations. Yet our physical nature begs for concrete existence.  Being human necessitates we inhabit real, geographic place: this town, this neighborhood, this house with these people. Second, we are anchored in time. We have a fixed past, we inhabit the present, and we anticipate a real future. And finally, we are broken and incomplete, not ideal.

Yet social media sells a surrogate personal phenomenon, one that may not be very human after all. On Facebook, you can be anywhere and everywhere all at once, yet present nowhere. You can chat with Sam in Vancouver, while ‘liking’ Brandon’s pictures in New York, all the while neglecting your kids in the next room. Secondarily, you can manipulate your past, control your present and project your perfect self.  The virtual you isn’t fixed, it isn’t fallen, it is editable and perfectible. You can take the perfect picture, from the perfect angle, to pimp your perfect self. But, is the virtual you the real you or a distorted version of reality? And, how is the endless amount of time spent on ourselves impacting our witness in the world?

We’ve added Facebook, Twitter and Instagram to our lives but haven’t added any hours to our day. “The decision to be on online on Facebook is simultaneously a decision not to be doing something else.” We are trading connection for intimacy, self-promotion for presence, and the virtual for the real. Social media isn’t making us more human, in many ways it is creating ‘post-humans’, disembodied creatures disconnected and disengaged with the physical world. And while virtual existence is expanding our world, it is also shrinking reality down to the three inch screen in front of our face. It seems being informed is more important than being present.

The totality of our technological enculturation is causing the church to lose her identity. We are abandoning both the tradition and praxis of living as the physical manifestation of Christ in the world. Christianity is more and more inward, private, individualistic, and neighborless. Instead of enduring as parish people rooted in a geographic community, we are tempted to exist primarily in pseudo-reality, tending to our own needs instead of the needs of the other. In fact, the virtual world has no use for the outsider. The sick, the vulnerable, and the handicapped don’t even exist in cyberspace. But the Body of Christ abides in the present to call into question this provisional reality.

“We need to learn to be where we are.”  The Gospel isn’t an abstract theory, it is a lived reality. Yet our addiction to the virtual is hindering the ability to be the fully enfleshed Body of Christ in and for the world. In a culture of social media addicts, the church functions to challenge the dominant ordering of relationships. The prophetic call of God is for his people to live as an alternative social reality, to nurture and nourish a subversive narrative. As the world runs headlong into the virtual abyss, we stand fixed in the physical, advertising the one corporeal thing we have to give, our full humanity. “It is hard for us to admit that our flawed humanity is the nearest thing to God on earth and that what gives humanity its special character is precisely its possibility and desire to become ever more like God.”

The Incarnation reminds us that God is very interested in the physical. “Matter matters to God.” Bread, wine, water, hands, and feet divulge the divine. The material is sacramental. It’s what Walter Brueggemann calls ‘the scandal of the particular.’ Simply, the physical world is a doorway to the universal. God has chosen to reveal eternity in the concrete, making our very humanity the sacramental expression of the living Christ. Maybe that is why we should be so cautious when abandoning the physical for the virtual. 

Christianity will not survive without the body. An embodied, present God desires an embodied, present people as His witness to the world. Our existence with others is the physical mediation of spiritual reality. Being mindful of, and living in the daily may well be the path out of our virtual, self addiction. What could you do if you took back those three hours a day you spend on social media? Your full presence in the life of the world may not only change your community or neighborhood, it may well transform your own physical and psychological well being. 

That’s why I’m breaking up with social media. It’s not you Facebook, it’s me. 




Originally published by Missio Alliance