by Jen Hatmaker
On the positive side, there are marvelous companies who not only guarantee a slave-free product but economic leverage for some of the most vulnerable workers. Free-trade organizations, living-wage employers, Third World suppliers, companies with a conscience—your dollar can accomplish more than making the rich richer. (At the end of the book, I included a nice, long, delicious list of companies you’ll be super thrilled to purchase from, so definitely check it out as a starting place.)
While it is easy to become paralyzed by the world’s suffering and the inequalities created by corruption and greed, we actually hold immense power for change, simply by virtue of our wealth and economic independence. Because we decide where our dollars go. Never has so much wealth been so concentrated; our prosperity is unprecedented. If enough of us decided to share, we would unleash a torrent of justice to sweep away disparity, extreme poverty, and hopelessness.
The world is waiting. Our kids are watching. Time is wasting.
Are we willing?
Day 25
I am a word girl. I’m English/Language Arts/creative writing/history. I am fully right-brained; the left is a dormant holding cell for the Pythagorean theorem and something about isotopes I forgot twenty years ago, three seconds after I learned it. I correct misspelled words when I text. When the PowerPoint has a grammatical error during worship, I have to close my eyes to avoid this language failure. If I lost access to a thesaurus, I would undoubtedly quit writing.
Consequently, words move me. God and I do our best business in the Bible, and stories have changed my life. One well-crafted sentence can sustain me for weeks. Like this one we sang Sunday at ANC:
“God, may we be focused on the least, a people balancing the fasting and the feast.”
I almost came undone.
That statement sums up all my tension and hopes for the American Christ follower, the American church, the American me. With good intentions but misguided theology, the church spends most of our time, energy, resources, prayer words, programs, sermons, conferences, Bible studies, and attention on the feast, our feast to be exact.
Now certainly, there is a feast, and thank you God for it. Where brokenness and starvation once consumed us, God sets us at a new table:
“Your love, O LORD, reaches to the heavens, your faithfulness to the skies. Your righteousness is like the mighty mountains, your justice like the great deep. O LORD, you preserve both man and beast. How priceless is your unfailing love! Both high and low among men find refuge in the shadow of your wings. They feast on the abundance of your house; you give them drink from your river of delights. For with you is the fountain of life; in your light we see light.” (Ps. 36:5–9)
This is the feast of the redeemed; Jesus made it possible for the wretched to dine with the Most High, neither offending His holiness nor compromising His justice. For those adopted by grace and faith, He no longer sees our failures or omissions; He only sees the righteousness Jesus covered us with. We stand safely behind Christ, made white-as-snow perfect from His substitution on the cross.
The currency of salvation includes blessings, redemption, fulfillment, peace, healing, sustenance, forgiveness, and hope. It’s a spiritual jackpot. For those salvaged from the gutter by Jesus, these are new mercies every morning. We are easily overwhelmed by the goodness of God, which knows no bounds. The gospel is so liberating; it is worthy of adoration every single second of every single hour of every single day forever. We will never be the same. This is indeed the feast, and to celebrate it is utterly Christian.
But the feast has a partner in the rhythm of the gospel: the fast.
Its practice is unmistakable in Scripture. Hundreds of times we see reduction, pouring out, abstinence, restraint. We find our Bible heroes fasting from food—David, Esther, Nehemiah, Jesus. We see the Philippian church fasting from self-preservation, sending Paul money in spite of their own poverty, a true sacrifice. John the Baptist says if we have two coats, one belongs to the poor. The early church sold their possessions and lived communally, caring for one another and the broken people in their cities. We see God explain his idea of a fast: justice, freedom, food for the hungry, clothes for the naked. This balance is a given in Scripture.
If we ignored the current framework of the church and instead opened the Bible for a definition, we find Christ followers adopting the fast simultaneously with feast. We don’t see the New Testament church hoarding the feast for themselves, gorging, getting fatter and fatter and asking for more; more Bible studies, more sermons, more programs, classes, training, conferences, information, more feasting for us.
At some point, the church stopped living the Bible and decided just to study it, culling the feast parts and whitewashing the fast parts. We are addicted to the buffet, skillfully discarding the costly discipleship required after consuming. The feast is supposed to sustain the fast, but we go back for seconds and thirds and fourths, stuffed to the brim and fat with inactivity. All this is for me. My goodness, my blessings, my privileges, my happiness, my success. Just one more plate.
Not so with the early church who stunned their Roman neighbors and leaders with generosity, curbing their own appetites for the mission of Jesus. They constantly practiced self-denial to alleviate human misery. In the Shepard of Hermas, a well-respected Christian literary work in the early 100s, believers were instructed to fast one day a week:
Having fulfilled what is written, in the day on which you fast you will taste nothing but bread and water; and having reckoned up the price of the dishes of that day which you intended to have eaten, you will give it to a widow, or an orphan, or to some person in want, and thus you will exhibit humility of mind, so that he who has received benefit from your humility may fill his own soul, and pray for you to the Lord.
In the early 200s, Tertullian reported that Christians had a voluntary common fund they contributed to monthly. That fund was used to support widows, the disabled, orphans, the sick, the elderly, shipwrecked sailors, prisoners, teachers, burials for the poor, and even the release of slaves.8
The difference between Romans and Christians on charity was widely recognized by unbelievers. The pagan satirist Lucian (130–200 c.e.) mocked Christian kindness: “The earnestness with which the people of this religion help one another in their needs is incredible. They spare themselves nothing for this end. Their first lawgiver put it into their heads that they were all brethren.”
These Christians did not limit their assistance to members of their own subculture either. The Emperor Julian, who attempted to lead the Roman Empire back to paganism, was frustrated by the superior compassion shown by the Christians, especially when it came to intervention for the suffering. He famously declared: “The impious Galileans relieve both their own poor and ours. . . . It is shameful that ours should be so destitute of our assistance.”9
What would the early church think if they walked into some of our buildings today, looked through our church Web sites, talked to an average attender? Would they be so confused? Would they wonder why we all had empty bedrooms and uneaten food in our trash cans? Would they regard our hoarded wealth with shock? Would they observe orphan statistics with disbelief since Christians outnumber orphans 7 to 1? Would they be stunned most of us don’t feed the hungry, visit the prisoner, care for the sick, or protect the widow? Would they see the spending on church buildings and ourselves as extravagantly wasteful while twenty-five thousand people die every day from starvation?
I think they’d barely recognize us as brothers and sisters. If we told them church is on Sundays and we have an awesome band, this would be perplexing. I believe we’d receive dumbfounded stares if we discussed “church shopping” because enough people don’t say hello when we walk in the lobby one hour a week. If they found out one-sixth of the earth’s population claimed to be Christians, I’m not sure they could reconcile the suffering happening on our watch while we’re living in excess. They’
d wonder if we had read the Bible or worry it had been tampered with since their time.
But listen Early Church, we have a monthly event called Mocha Chicks. We have choir practice every Wednesday. We organize retreats with door prizes. We’re raising three million dollars for an outdoor amphitheater. We have catchy T-shirts. We don’t smoke or say the F word. We go to Bible study every semester. (“And then what, American Church?”) Well, we go to another one. We’re learning so much.
I think the early church would cover their heads with ashes and grieve over the dilution of Jesus’ beautiful church vision. We’ve taken His Plan A for mercy to an injured lost planet and neutered it to clever sermon series and Stitch-and-Chat in the Fellowship Hall, serving the saved. If the modern church held to its biblical definition, we would become the answer to all that ails society. We wouldn’t have to baby-talk and cajole and coax people into our sanctuaries through witty mailers and strategic ads; they’d be running to us. The local church would be the heartbeat of the city, undeniable by our staunchest critics.
Instead, the American church is dying. We are losing ground in epic proportions. Our country is a graveyard of dead and vanishing churches. We made it acceptable for people to do nothing and still call themselves Christians, and that anemic vision isn’t holding. Last year, 94 percent of evangelical churches reported loss or no growth in their communities. Almost four thousand churches are closing each year. We are losing three million people annually, flooding out the back door and never returning. The next generation downright refuses to come.
Ironically, this is the result of a church that only feasts.
When the fast, the death, the sacrifice of the gospel is omitted from the Christian life, then it isn’t Christian at all. Not only that, it’s boring. If I just want to feel good or get self-help, I’ll buy a $12 book from Borders and join a gym. The church the Bible described is exciting and adventurous and wrought with sacrifice. It cost believers everything, and they still came. It was good news to the poor and stumped its enemies. The church was patterned after a Savior who had no place to lay his head and voluntarily died a brutal death, even knowing we would reduce the gospel to a self-serving personal improvement program where people were encouraged to make a truce with their Maker and stop sinning and join the church, when in fact the gospel does not call for a truce but a complete surrender.
Jesus said the kingdom was like a treasure hidden in a field, and once someone truly finds it, he will happily sell everything he owns to possess that field, a perfect description of the fasting and the feast. It will cost everything, but it is a treasure and an unfathomable joy. This is the balance of the kingdom; to live we must die, to be lifted we bow, to gain we must lose. There is no alternative definition, no path of least resistance, no treasure in the field without the sacrifice of everything else.
Oh Lord, may we be focused on the least; a people balancing the fasting and the feast.
Day 30
This. Month. Was. Hard. But good. It’s one of those. A good hard.
Vast consumption is so ordinary that its absence was shocking. I didn’t realize how casually I “grab lunch,” or “run through the bookstore,” or “pick up that little scarf.” I admit: I have a compulsion to buy something somewhere. My craving is nonspecific; it just involves being in a store or restaurant and handing my debit card over and getting something back.
Specifically, I have never cooked so much. With zero restaurants on the list, I’ve spent forty thousand hours in my kitchen this month, and I’m a little sick of it. That’s right, the girl who loves fresh ingredients and cookbooks and sauté pans wants Chick-fil-A sauce on a fried sandwich. I want to not figure out what to do with collard greens. I want to call Pizza Hut. I want to sit on the deck at Serrano’s with my girlfriends and soak up this delicious weather over a massive intake of chips and salsa.
I’m missing the convenience of consumption, but I missed the camaraderie more. I’ve created conjoined twins out of buying and connecting. Time with another human meant eating at a restaurant or buying a four-dollar latte. My friends and I habitually bond over meals at our favorite haunts. Food brings us together with ease.
For the first week I holed up in my house, turning down invitations like a neurotic recluse. It didn’t dawn on me to suggest an alternative connecting point. (I am slow.) Finally, I recognized time together was the real prize, not the $5.99 lunch special. Enter the rest of the month:
•Breakfast at Jenny’s with four of my girlfriends.
•Lunch with my friend Stevie Jo. I pulled a sandwich right out of my purse.
•Amy, Lynde, and Alissa over for brunch.
•Long walks after hours with Jenny and Shonna. (We are “training” for a half marathon. It’s next weekend. I don’t want to talk about it.)
•Tuesday Night Glee Fest at Molly’s. You know she has it recorded.
•Reciprocal brunch at Amy’s with Lynde and Alissa. I invited us over.
•National Night Out with my neighbors.
•Potluck dinner with my oh-so-beloved Restore Group.
•Family four square tournaments. (“Someone” is a cheater, and his name rhymes with Paleb.)
•Longhorn football party on our deck. We’re polishing up the phrase “rebuilding year.”
So yes, eating is still a starting player, but being in each other’s homes, cooking and sharing food together is delightful. Eating a meal in a restaurant is one thing, but friends padding around barefoot in your kitchen and chopping carrots for your soup and sipping their coffee on your deck is another creature altogether. This exits the expediency of consumerism and enters the realm of hospitality.
There is something so nourishing about sharing your living space with people where they see your junk mail pile and pee wee football schedule on the fridge and pile of shoes by the front door. Opening your home says, “You are welcome into my real life.” This square footage is where we laugh and hold family meetings and make homemade corn dogs and work through meltdowns. Here is the railing our kids pulled out of the wall. This is the toilet paper we prefer. These are the pictures we frame, the books we’re reading, the projects we’re undertaking—the raw material of our family. It’s unsanitized and truthful. We invite you into this intimate place, saturated with our family character.
Maybe this is why hospitality was big to the early church. Living life together in the sacred spaces of our homes is so unifying. When our Christian forerunners were persecuted and misunderstood, when belief in Jesus was dangerous and isolating, they had one another. They had dinner around the table. They had Sabbath together. They had soft places to fall when they traveled. Safe in the home of a fellow Christ follower, they could breathe, pray, rest. What a gift.
So here at the end of the month, I have some sweet memories, mostly in my own and my friends’ spaces. There were hilarious stories confessed around my table, which I shall go to the grave with under threat of beheading. I let my girlfriends inspect all my closets one morning, which is like going to work naked. People rummaged in my pantry and used my chopping board. I examined Amy’s garden and lounged on her couch over five cups of coffee, enjoying our XM Radio Coffeehouse Channel obsession. I’ve dropped seven pounds, thanks to the absence of restaurant food and walks with my girlfriends. My little tribe enjoyed double the evenings around the dinner table, laughing through High/Low. (Caleb: My low is that my feet really stink right now.) We put a chunk of money into adoption savings and gave a few hundred away, because guess what? When you don’t spend money, you have more at the end of the month. This financial wizardry is brought to you free of charge.
I’ve discovered reduced consumption doesn’t equal reduced community or reduced contentment. There is something liberating about unplugging the machine to discover the heartbeat of life still thumping. Maybe we don’t need all those wires after all. Maybe we’re healthier unhooked from
the life-support of consumerism than we imagined. Is there a less-traveled path through our me-first culture that is more adventurous and fulfilling than the one so heavily trod? One that sacrifices none of the good parts of the story but inspires us to reimagine the sections that are bleeding us all dry?
I think maybe there is.
It is no accident that despite the fact that bazillions of dollars are spent telling us we are just consumers, and that’s all the story we could ever need, people by the thousands and sometimes even millions are frustrated and looking for a better story. And it is here. Is it any wonder, if you live your life like a baby bird with your mouth open that what gets dropped into it every time is a worm? People will attempt to reshape your worm and convince you that it is extra yummy this time, but it is still a worm. And the story of consumers is still boring.
If you are going to get better than that, we’re going to have to participate, and go out and seek new sources and resources and options, we’re going to have to replace much of our consumption with rituals of non-consumption. We’re going to have to write a good and compelling story with our lives. The good news is that it is a lot more fun to be a citizen than a consumer, and rituals of non-consumption are just as satisfying as retail therapy. The good news is that there are better stories out there for the claiming and the living, and events are conspiring to keep our times interesting. The good news is that we can do better than worms.10
Month Seven: Stress
•Conferences and retreats
•Airports
•Conference calls
•Radio interviews
•Meet the teacher
•Jersey Boys
•Coffees (tons)
•Lunch dates (gobs)
•Brunches (lots)
•5th-grade parent meeting