" the evangelical alternative to the predatory economy is to come to an awareness that the goal of our life is not to have more but the goal of our life is to have the kind of trustworthy relationships that will sustain us in our fragility and our mortality"

I wanted to continue with what Walter Brueggemann said about Psalm 73 in the Sunday school lesson that was posted below.  As I mentioned, it's not what most people think of when they use the phrase "Sunday school lesson" because most people have the most incredibly superficial notions about The Bible, church, religion, etc. And they are encouraged to have an incredibly superficial notion about it, both on the right and the alleged left.   Some of that is the fault of churches, which depend on making things too easy so as to not turn off a lot of people who want it easy and self-gratifying even at the cost of betraying the whole reason for it.  The institutional churches are often guilty of that kind of thing.

But I'm concerned in this post about the real alternative to the commodification of life.

And the secular, materialistic society, it's vulgar right-wing and its pretentious, alleged alternative to that right-wing are opposed to that.  When those materialists use religion as a career or money making opportunity, they are the source of the greatest scandal and discrediting of religion.

But "the left," the materialist left, in so far as it presents itself as the alternative to Brueggmann's conception of the church is also rightly seen in relationship to its fidelity to its asserted morality.   There are those materialists, both vulgar right and intellectual left, who that doesn't exactly sit, completely, well with.  The materialist left that has a vague or even a somewhat developed feeling that there is something wrong with how that is going, sometimes makes a weak protest against it.  I've mentioned Katha Pollitt's article protesting the commercial commodification of women being taken up as "feminism" and its consequences for women, generally,  when what you would have to do to get to the point of deciding that is wrong takes far more than the materialism she, otherwise, pushes as the basis of her ideology.  You could say the same thing for any materialist, on the deputed left or the all too real right, whose feelings, notions and even developed expressions of moral values is, fundamentally, at odds with the exigencies and vicissitudes of materialism.   Just pretending, as so many on the right do, that their worship of Mammon can be squared with a worship of GOD - and, as Brueggemann pointed out that always implies and requires fidelity with other people -  when they have no less of an authority than Jesus who said it can't be done.

I do think one of the biggest dangers of neo-atheism, of the academic and media program of de-religionizing our society, our politics and our minds is that there is no alternative in this society to churches doing what Brueggemann says they should be in the business of doing.  Telling the truth, telling the truth about the consequences of the commodification of all life.  The increasingly libertarian "left" certainly won't take that up, it's too busy being kewl with the sex industry, the entertainment industry and excusing the history of leftist acceptance of genocidal killing, when done by the right despots, as being OK because their economic motives were good.  

It was exactly my coming to realize in the 1990s that point in relation to pornography and prostitution, that they weren't evil because of the sex, they were evil because of the commodification of people, that was my turning point.  If it could turn someone like Katha Pollitt, I don't know.  I suspect her time going to Marxist study groups, her personal investment in the atheism industry - such as it is - and her status in the New York scribbling and publishing world might be an effective road block to her further exploring the consequences for her materialism for her feminism.  But maybe I'm wrong.  It would be interesting to see how she could explain how, without making some phony, smoke screen argument about that infinitely flexible slogan, "natural selection", that could explain why a the worst misogynists are wrong to do what they want to do when they can get away with it.  I think anyone who asserts you can come up with a real reason for that in materialism is willfully superficial.

From about 35:00 on the video.  Any problems in the transcript are mine.

So I think it's not unreasonable to think that this fourth segment of the psalm is a reflection on [the fact that] that finally you have to put your buckets down in relatedness and that include finding GOD faithful and it includes being faithful to to neighbors. 

So it is our custom to take such psalms as this as a kind of an intimate personal reflection and it it certainly will function that way and one can imagine people like Solomon who wake up in the middle of their life and that kind of a thing.  But what I want to accent is that that I think it is a script to diagnose the pathologies of our society and the predatory economy into which we are generally seduced.  

I think that we now live in a predatory economy that believers that acquiring commodities and wealth that might properly belong to other people is the goal of life so that our banking regulations and our tax laws are all rigged toward the accumulation of more commodities by those who can accumulate. 

 And that the evangelical alternative to the predatory economy is to come to an awareness that the goal of our life is not to have more but the goal of our life is to have the kind of trustworthy relationships that will sustain us in our fragility and our mortality

And I believe that the worship life of the church is exactly the pivot point of verse 17.  I believe that there are fewer and fewer possibilities in our society to have a place to spend to do a critical assessment of what is happening in our society and to imagine an alternative to it.  And I think it is the function of the church.  It is the function of the church to maintain a sharp critique of the predatory economy that wants to reduce all of life to the accumulation of commodities.  And it is the work of the church to imagine what a life of authentic fidelity might look, like that we are at the edge of forgetting in our society.  So I might add Solomon,  late in his life, coming to [such] an awareness and then I take to heart with that act of imagination that in Solomon could imagine [ a just society.  

You may remember this last comment then I'll finish in Luke 12 when Jesus tells that parable about the guy who tore down his barns and built bigger barns.  He's called a fool.  He's given his life over to commodity pursuits and he's condemned because he was not rich for God, he was rich for self. And then in the next paragraph Jesus gathers his disciples, he's such a good teacher, and that little procedure of having what we call  in seminary a critical incident, the Parable is a critical incident.  And then you have critical reflection with the seminarians and you open the critical reflection by saying, well what did you notice?  

And that's the moment at which all seminarians know to avoid all eye contact.  And then Jesus waits a little while and they don't say anything.  So there he says, you know said guy that's filled with anxiety because he didn't have enough yet, therefore I tell you, do not be anxious.   Jesus wants his disciples not to participate in the anxiety of the commodity system.  Do not be anxious for what you shall eat or what you shall wear or where you shall live.  For which of you buy hustling can add a nanosecond  to your life.  And then he says, "Look at the birds and flowers."  And then he says, "Yet I tell you that even Solomon in all his commodity apparatus was not as well off as the birds."

I hope to do more of this.