A Sunny Place for Shady People

A few random thoughts this month, beginning with greed.

 

“King Pyrrhus of Epirus was planning an attack on Rome. A trusted advisor asked, What if we should defeat Rome, what then? The king vowed to attack the rest of Italy. What next? Libya and Carthage, then all of Greece! And then? We will live at our ease, my dear friend, said the king, and drink all day and divert ourselves with pleasant conversation. Replied the advisor, What hinders Your Majesty from doing so now?”

 

Unlike the aspirations of King Pyrrhus, we can’t have it all. Choices and trade-offs have to be made. You’ve likely heard of FOMO, the fear of missing out. But how about JOMO, the joy of missing out? Learning to say, “No” appropriately might be one of the most liberating decisions you make. Not having it all doesn’t mean you don’t have everything that really matters.

 

To say it another way, “Because idols are fashioned out of created matter, rather than ex nihilo, something good is taken from creation and turned into a god. Wright notes four Old Testament things from which gods are manufactured: things that entice us, things we fear, things we trust and things we need” (Their Rock is Not Like Our Rock: A Theology of Religions, Daniel Strange, p. 207). It seems to me that these four things can also function as sources to which greed can attach itself.

 

Digging a bit deeper, “Herein lies a deep irony of human existence. According to Jesus’s teachings, when people seek to keep everything together and provide for themselves apart from God, the result is not the sought-after peace, but rather, anxiety. That is, there is an organic connection between the warning against greed in [Matthew] 6:22-24 and the exhortation against anxiety in 6:25-34. Greed causes anxiety.

 

“It is the non-God-directed heart that is laying up earthly treasures that ironically does not have peace. But the people who live like the flowers and birds, apparently foolish from the world’s financial perspective, are the ones who are free from anxiety. They seek first God’s kingdom and as a result get all their needs met without anxiety.

 

“This is not to say that all anxiety is caused by greed; there are many other sources of anxiety, real and perceived. But it is to say that greed will inevitably result in the double-souled anxiety that is the opposite of the human flourishing to which Jesus is inviting his hearers” (The Sermon on the Mount and Human Flourishing, Jonathan Pennington, p. 252).

 

Lastly, “Sociologist Cecilia Ridgeway describes experiments that tried to locate the point at which our need for status, once acquired, stabilizes. ‘There was no point at which preference for higher status leveled off,’ she writes. The researchers thought one reason the desire for status is ‘never really satiated’ is because ‘it can never really be possessed by the individual once and for all. Since it is esteem given by others, it can always, at least theoretically, be taken away.’ So we keep wanting more. And more and more and more.”

 

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More than one friend of mine has encouraged me to watch The Chosen series. I recently came across an excerpt entitled, “Why Haven’t You Healed Me?” (6:35) and it may be enough to get me started. True, the exchange here between Jesus and James is fictional, but if you’ve studied the Gospels at all then this short conversation is certainly within the framework of Jesus’ character and teaching. I deeply identify with the struggle James is voicing, and I know many of my clients would too. Maybe you or someone you know might as well.  

 

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Last year, my wife and I spent some time out of town with family. As we were driving down a road to where we would eventually eat dinner, we passed a restaurant that my brother in-law was familiar with. He told us that the owner refers to his restaurant as, “A sunny place for shady people.” I immediately fell in love with that line because, whether the restauranteur knows it or not, the line smells of the Gospel of Jesus.

 

One of the ironies of Jesus’ Gospel is that for His Spirit to shine through your life you must first be honest with yourself and Him that you’re a shady person. As in, “The corner office, or head place setting, over there is for the Chief Shady Officer, and I occupy it. And the sunshine that radiates from it is not that I drop lines about what I’ve accumulated or signal status by what I’ve done or have but that for reasons unknown to me God has been merciful to love me in all the many shades of my  shadiness.  

 

Because “A smile from Jesus in the morning will be sunshine all the day” (Charles Spurgeon).