The Rebirth of a Kingdom Mythos

The Merits of a Sabbath Economy

The whole work of creation was performed for the sake of the Sabbath
Jürgen Moltmann

What is played out in the imagination of the artists foreshadows, however dimly, the social reality of tomorrow Daniel Bell The Cultural Contradictions of Capitalism

I don’t frequent the discussions of end time musings nor do I relish the world’s potential demise due to its hubris or faithlessness. In fact, I feel as if my own heart has been revealed in recent weeks and months as the financial worlds of global business communities and governments have been shaken to their very core. The scenes played out in countries as far apart as Iceland and the US disclose a deeper array of images that form the very manner in which we see and know the world. Our economic imaginations are famished and the word is weary from the toil.

The breakdown of trust in the world of commerce is not a mere blip on the screen. This is an erosion of hope and is in part due to revelations that much of the world has been under the same spell as America. Although we now shame the elite of Wall Street and corporate America, in retrospect, we too turned our eyes away from the avarice of undue remuneration. From sporting figures to the cream of the crop religious leaders, we (as a culture) paid them and paid them well. We all thought the world and its coffers were limitless and so we kept on borrowing and kept on leveraging. We too used inflated housing markets to build our dreams. We too partied when our savings were nearly gone. We too toiled well into the midnight hours hoping to hit the jackpot and make it rich. This is not the disease of the privileged and coddled. This is the very dream of America and much of the world.

Why the crash now? What has happened to us lately that reveals the deeper truths? Some have pointed to the ultimate wilting of the modernism’s flower. After centuries of the self being exalted and the individual being regarded as the center, we now are realizing our children and their children now see little meaning in tomorrow. The Protestant work ethic has little spiritual juice to maintain any sense of direction as self preservation and personal survival trump any sense of community. Time itself has narrowed to our private desires and the hero of bourgeois society is the self made man full of himself and impenetrable to other’s attempts to dethrone him. Our very sense of time and space has been so restricted by our own personal dreams and aspirations that our awareness of history has equally shrunk to contain only that which our psychological self can imagine.

Our story has become my story. Our redemption has become my redemption. The salvation of the world has become deciphered through my personal devotions and God’s hand in my personal life. As I said above, our very imaginations are famished and our dreams are fitful nightmares of personal comeuppance. We’ve tried to get God to join our franchise and He has declined. We’ve tried to make true prosperity to mean financial gain. The sense of confusion on the part of the Church in America is due in part to the capitulation of our calling to a foreign understanding of work, rest, and abundance. We have given the very heart of our faith over to someone else’s definition of wealth. Now, in a world of an abundance of things, the very soul of humankind is so so hungry for something more. We are now frightened by our very selves and our own insatiable appetites . As the adage says” We have discovered the enemy and he is us.”

Is there a divine perspective on these economic times? I have wondered why so little has been said by the Church at large. Are we as well totally given over to the whims and maneuverings of the consumer culture? Are we too unable to make sense of all the seemingly indiscriminant and irrational jumps in the stock market and world economy? Some have said this is a crisis “of the system” and not “in the system.” We are not in a time where we should retool or refurbish the old model but totally redefine the manner in which we engage economics. Is this the time for us as a people to offer up a divine point of view on economics and work itself?

This is a great opportunity for the Church to reintroduce the truth of the Sabbath rest. Will authors and poets bring the new lexicon of meaning into our deepest parts or will we go back to worn our concepts and wearisome assumptions about how the world works? Some of this work will involve deep repentance and submission to one another. This is more than a shift but a total turning away from a false God. Are we up for it?