If a man is called to be a street sweeper, he should sweep streets even as Michelangelo painted or Beethoven composed music or Shakespeare wrote poetry. He should sweep streets so well that all the hosts of heaven and earth will pause to say: Here lived a great street sweeper who did his job well.” -Martin Luther King Jr.

“Rank must be preserved.“- the Ancient Roman Philosopher Cicero

I was a college minister for a few years, in a city that was had several different Universities, and a couple of different community colleges. Whenever I met people would were coming to a college ministry event, I could tell within a second or two what school they were at, and how they felt about it. If they were going to a 4 year school, they’d immediately answer your question with a confident, “ACU” or “UTA” or some other acronym.

But if they were going to a community college they would almost always answer with something like, “Now see, what’s happening right now is that I’m waiting on some paperwork to come through, and I’m trying to just get my basics out of the way…but I’m going to get my degree at…” and then they would tell you where they were going to go, not where they currently were going.

I learned that there was a status that was associated with college, and that each student was keenly aware of their status.

I heard a preacher say one time, we live in the Land of Er. We constantly are comparing ourselves to other people, wanting to be smart-er, thin-er, fast-er, strong-er. We want to know how we are doing at life, so we look around to compare ourselves to other people.

But this leads to problems.

One Harvard Business School professor interviewed what he called 500 “high-need for achievement professionals.”These were people who were at the top of the world, but the overwhelming majority “questioned their own success and brought up the name of at least one other peer who they had felt had been more successful than they were..they’re making themselves miserable by constantly comparing themselves to others.”

“Some men worship rank, some worship heroes, some worship power, some worship God, and over these ideals they dispute and cannot unite-but they all worship money.”-Mark Twain

In his book, Gods at War, Kyle Idelman talks about how one of his friends was on the fast track in his career. It seemed like making money came easy to him, and he loved what he did. But he was constantly working for more. One day he was having lunch with a man who was quite a bit more successful then him and he asked him what he was working on.

The man told him that what he really wanted was the new Executive line Rolex watch. And the man asked him how much it would cost him. He said, “More time away from my wife and kids. Less weekends at home with them. Maybe skip a vacation, but you’ve got to make sacrifices to live the way you want to.”

We make fun of the ancient world for sacrificing children, but we sacrifice them all the time for the insipid god of more.

And it’s not just the very wealthy people who struggle with this.

Retail Therapy

Have you ever found yourself feeling down, or having a bad day, and so you wound up going to the mall? They’ve actually started to refer to this as Retail therapy. We shop when we feel bad.

Neurologists have actually scanned the brains of religious people while they asked them to think of the times they’ve experienced God’s activity in their life. Then they showed them pictures like stained glass, incense, or pictures of the cross, and discovered that the one area of the brain (the Caudate Nucleus) responded when those people felt close to God.

Then the neurologists tested some different people. And this time they didn’t talk about religion, but showed these new people pictures of consumer goods that were connected to very popular brands.

And the same area of the brain lit up.

James Bryan Smith points out that that consumers who buy certain well-marketed items have something close to a religious experience.That’s why we buy and consume and always on the lookout for ways to get more.

Protestant Christians are notorious for talking about the abuses of the Catholic church…back during that short period of time when they literally tried to sell salvation. But if we are honest, the majority of us still participate in a system that is constantly trying to buy redemption. just not at church, at Target.

The Secret of Contentment

There’s a time when the Apostle Paul is writing a letter from prison. He’s writing to the church in Philippi that is in the middle of a church fight, and he writes some words that I’ve read a thousand times, but never like this.

I know what it is to be in need, and I know what it is to have plenty. I have learned the secret of being content in any and every situation,

Think about that. I know what it is to have plenty. What a gift that would be. Because if I’m honest I don’t know what it is to have plenty. I’ve travelled the world and seen people who have so much less, but I still am a sucker for the advertisements I see constantly.

The whole purpose of advertisement is to stir up dis-content, and they have been very effective. So we have more and more, but feel like we have less and less. Because we don’t know what it is to have plenty.

I don’t know if you’ve seen the Reality T.V. show Best Funeral Ever, if you haven’t, then please don’t let me get you started. But the show is kind of a fascinating glimpse into the human condition.

It’s about a funeral home in Dallas that does Themed Funerals. Like, for the woman who loved Christmas they buried in a sleigh and had it come down a Holiday themed, snow-covered aisle.

For the guy who sang the Chili’s “Baby-back-Ribs” jingle, they threw together a “Party Barn” funeral. Complete with a BBQ sauce fountain, live pigs, and a preacher who wore a chef’s hat and preached from a smoker/podium.

And remember this is called Reality Television.

But the reason I think this is so fascinating is that it’s now assumed the emphasis behind most funerals should be something other than death.

Passion for Life

It’s interesting to me that Jesus wept and cried in Gethsemane. If we were there I think we would have said something like, “There, there, you’re going to get raised from the dead in three days. It’s kind of just a tough weekend if you think about it.”

Now for most of us, we are unmoved by Jesus weeping. We’ve heard this story way too many times to be surprised, but in the ancient world, there were other stories of men who died better than Jesus. Socrates drinks the hemlock poison and cooly drifts off into death, while his disciples weep. That’s how you die like a man!

Heck, there are even lots of stories of Christians who died better than Jesus.

But Jesus doesn’t just grit his teeth and detach emotionally. He’s not some Spock like machine here. He weeps and cries and begs for his life. Because he thinks that this life matters.

That’s what is behind Gethsemane. Jesus doesn’t want to die, but more than that, I think this is the product of loving people around you well. Jesus wants to live.

It’s interesting to me that in certain Christian circles, Passion has gotten a bad name. We don’t like emotion because we’ve seen people use it to manipulate. But to this day, in many dictionaries, the Number one definition of Passion is this:

The last 24 hours of the trial and death of Jesus.

I like that.

Jesus is the definition of passion. He’s the definition of what it means to be fully alive…and we get that definition from the time that he was preparing for death.

Heaven is Overrated

A couple of years ago, right around Easter, the controversial L.A. Times Journalist, Joel Stein started campaigning for Starbucks to quote him on one of their cups. Eventually Starbucks agreed, and they put a quote by him that said this:

“Heaven is totally overrated. It seems boring. Clouds, listening to people play the harp. It should be somewhere you can’t wait to go, like a luxury hotel. Maybe blue skies and soft music were enough to keep people in line in the 17th century, but heaven has to step it up a bit. They’re basically getting by because they only have to be better than hell.”

I think he’s kind of right. Not about classic Christian Theology, but about what most people think of when they think of Heaven. What most Western Christians think of for Heaven is over-rated, because it doesn’t deal much with this world.