Edgework

One of my new friends here in Altona is Kawsar. I met her for the first time last spring the day she registered for a garden plot at the Altona Community Garden.

It has been more than a decade since I have preached a sermon. For the most part I enjoyed my preaching career and over the years I received a lot of affirmation that public speaking was one of my gifts.

Since starting to write regularly again about a year and a half ago I have posted 36 essays in which I explored lessons I am learning about spirituality as well as insights I have gleaned from observing life around me.

In this essay I will wrestle more directly with the question of how I, as a Jesus-Follower, should think and respond to global economic systems. In other words, I will be asking how visions of Kingdom economics should affect how I live.

As you may have noticed, in my former essay I used Economics 101 and Economics 202 as “handles” to depict capitalism as it was envisioned by Adam Smith in 1776 and how it has been corrupted in subsequent centuries.

In my recent reading of Marcus Peter Rempel’s book, Life at the End of Us vs. Them (2017), I found some help in understanding the story of capitalism, especially the fact that capitalism seems to have flourished best in those parts of the world influenced by Christianity.

To say that 2018 has been a momentous year is an understatement. Indeed, it has brought out some of the best and the worst in people around the globe.

Borders are front and center these days. We are told that a country without strong borders is not a country at all.

For much of my life I have conflated Jesus, born in Bethlehem, with the cosmic Christ through whom the world was made. It is only recently that I have come to see that “Jesus and Christ are not the same.”

In my previous essay, I reflected on the similarities of the moves toward authoritarianism in Germany in the 1930s to that happening in the United States of America today.