Wheel of Fortune part 2

In the first Wheel of Fortune post, I wanted to show the connection between the concepts of fortune, luck, fate, personal advantage, and mammon. I wanted to show that the Jews of Jesus' time understood "Mammon" as their cultural equivalent of the Greek/Roman cultural concept of Fortuna- the goddess that could bestow personal advantage upon a person. The monotheism of the Jews could never allow "another God", and so Mammon, the Jewish counterpart of Fortuna, was not depicted as anything positive, but as a distraction from the true God.

The problem within Christianity is that it's understanding of mammon as Jesus used the term is generally understood as "money/wealth". Thus, they understand Jesus as teaching, "you cannot serve God and money/wealth". This is why I mentioned in the first post that most broadly speaking, mammon denotes "personal advantage" and I think this needs more unpacking.

"Personal Advantage" comes in many stripes and colours, and these stripes and colours are usually chosen for their camouflaging abilities. We like to hide our quest for personal advantage within some noble looking outerwear. Personal advantage can be financial, but it can also be a person's reputation, a sense of belonging, a sense of superiority, an emotional or intellectual satisfaction.

A pastor might no longer believe a certain doctrine that he once professed, one he is expected by his congregation and denomination to believe in. He keeps his unbelief to himself because he does not want to lose his privileged position, his good reputation. Even if this pastor is unpaid, his focus on privilege and reputation at the expense of what is true, is worship of Mammon. Any Christian that refuses to change their mind about things they have "always believed" when shown the error of those beliefs, does so out of fear of uncertainty. They would rather have a false certainty than to admit uncertainty. This false certainty they hold is mammon(personal advantage), and they would rather be "certain" than honest. In general, to sum this up, this is what Jesus meant when he said, "

Anyone who seeks to preserve his life will lose it, and whomever loses his life for my sake will find it."

Our "life" is not in seeking and maintaining of personal advantage/mammon, but we think it is. We have God given "life/vitality" but when we make our constant attempts at preserving it, we lose out on what life really is. Only when we lose our "life" (which we believe to consist in all our self-seeking behaviours) do we find what "life" truly is. True, meaningful, fulfilling "life" is not something that we can preserve, and when we try we end up finger-painting on a Mona-Lisa. The more we finger-paint on it and step back to look on it, the more dis-satisfied we become. We ask, "What is this mess on the canvas known as 'life'? ...it doesn't seem too impressive", not knowing that this "mess" is merely our over-painting that we ought not to have done. Not realizing our error, we continue our finger-painting touch-ups, hoping that they will eventually make a satisfactory work of art.

When Kim Kardashian was asked why she has no tattoos, she responded, "You don't put a bumper sticker on a Bentley." Life is a Bentley, our attempts at self-aggrandizement/self-preservation, are bumper stickers. The problem is that we have loaded that Bentley with so many stickers, we doubt that there is any Bentley underneath it all. Jesus says there is, and offers us a scraper and some goo-gone.

Much of organized religion, including Christianity, is mammon worship in disguise. We center our lives around the altar of self-advantage, and in general we are blind to it. We have not built our foundation on the teachings OF Jesus, but on believing ideas ABOUT Jesus. Jesus preached salvation FROM the self, we twist that into a preaching of salvation FOR the self. Jesus preached the good news that you could be free from your "self" and showed the way to do so. Christianity tells people that the most important thing in this life is to save your "self" from ultimate ruin.

Jesus taught people to pray in this way: "May God's will be done."

Christianity teaches people to pray like this: "Please do what I want."

Many cherished Christian beliefs, even core beliefs, can be bumper stickers. A bunch of bumper stickers do not make a Bentley. Jesus came to show us how to live, not to tell us what to believe.

When we learn how to live, then we come to "know" God through truly living, we are not dependent upon an unverifiable, yet highly treasured set of beliefs. Christianity is not another name for following Jesus, it is another thing altogether. Attempting to be a good Christian can often make it very difficult to follow Jesus. Why? Because Christianity promotes allegiance to itself. Jesus promoted the removal of anything getting in the way of direct allegiance to God. Christianity attempts to equivocate allegiance to it's belief system with direct allegiance to God. This is sinful.

But how does all this relate to Mammon? What Christianity offers to the world as "salvation" is really a camouflaged type of self-advantage. Thus it promotes mammon worship and puts itself on equal footing with direct allegiance to God. Due to this, Christianity has made no headway in bringing salvation FROM the "self". How so? To outsiders the mark of a Christian is the mark of a heightened, not diminished ego/self. Christians are marked as more judgemental, more self-righteous, and more hypocritical than the average person. All this makes perfect sense if what Christians have been swallowing has been a form of mammon worship, a form of self-serving. Here something interesting reveals itself, the relationship between mammon worship and self-serving. Biblically speaking to "worship" a God is equivalent to serving that God. Jesus places God and Mammon as two opposing "masters" which both cannot be served by one person. Thus essentially, in practical terms, we have two Gods: God the Father and Mammon. Now if Mammon is self-service/self-advantage, who then is this "other God" who stands in opposition to God the Father? None other than our own self. We cannot serve two masters, we cannot seek self-advantage and God the Father at the same time. These two masters (Gods) are in direct opposition to each other. When God the Father is not the God of our life, we, by default, are Gods unto ourselves. We seek self-advantage as our highest priority, our life is organized around how to best serve ourselves, we worship ourselves. To live in this manner is to live according to the spirit of the Anti-Christ, this is because Jesus (the Christ) taught us to forsake self-seeking. But "instead of" and "opposite to" that (which is what "anti" means), we build a life out of seeking self-advantage. Each of us have just one false god to contend with, and it is not the god of some other religion, it is the god that we have made ourselves out to be through the persistent seeking of self-advantage. Whether that advantage be financial, religious, reputational, or positional, it really doesn't matter. When our own self-advantage is the engine that powers our life we are worshipping/serving something in opposition to the will of Christ, this is the Anti-Christ, the false god/master called Mammon.

This false god Mammon, or personal good fortune, is so unpredictable. You could have all the money, reputation, and power, and then fall terminally ill. Or you could be at the peak of health and finance and have you reputation ruined, etc, etc. There are so many weak spots in the human condition that a person cannot maintain the level of self-advantage that they would want to be satisfied. When we finally get one area of our life sorted out, another area of our life comes to our attention that is woefully lacking. The more we serve our self, the more we feel we lack. Even our prayer is tainted and twisted from "THY will be done" to, "MY will be done". Our world culture is characterized by the seeking of personal good fortune. We weep with every personal loss, and rejoice with every personal gain, ever driven on and dizzied by the whirling wheel of fortune.

Everyone who comes to me and hears my words (of selflessness) and does them, I will show you what he is like: he is like a man building a house, who dug, and deepened, and laid the foundation on the rock. And when a flood arose, the stream broke against that house and could not shake it, because it had been well built. But the one who hears and does not do them (instead serves his/herself) is like a man who built a house on the ground without a foundation. When the stream broke against it, immediately it fell, and the ruin of that house was great.” Luke 6:47-49 

The journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step. Laying down our life is not something we do once and for all when we "make a decision for Christ", or when we get baptized, or confirmed, or what have you. The rock that we build our foundation upon is unearthed little by little, as we dig and deepen with every small choice we make we are at the same time making room for God to lay the stones of our foundation. We do not get down to all the bare rock at once. With each effort of digging and deepening we make room for these foundation stones. These foundation stones are not a set of beliefs, but a set of experiences that support the knowledge of God. With every act of digging up our self-serving ways, we are gaining insight into what "life" truly is. We are gaining insight into the fact that "life"... true enduring, meaningful, purpose-filled life, does not come from our efforts to preserve it, but as a free gift from God. We do not need to "get it" all at once, but we store it up, bit by bit, as we progressively see the benefits of halting our self-serving habits. The once super famous poem "The Rubaiyat Of Omar Khayyam" summed up this concept nicely:

"One moment in Annihilation's waste,

one moment of the Well Of Life to taste."

Bit by bit we can let go of me-centeredness, and bit by bit we can gain insight into God's provision of "life". It must be stressed that this insight cannot be gained through belief and theory, this insight can only be gained through practical experience. This experience of the Living God accumulates in our heart. This is how we store up for ourselves heavenly treasure. This is how we "taste" it. This is salvation from the "world" of self-centeredness. Self-centeredness is damnation to a hollow and meaningless way of life. In humbly seeking to follow Jesus, we dig this selfishness out of ourselves one shovelful at a time. In so doing we see what type of treasure God replaces the dirt of selfishness with. This treasure is not corrupted by circumstances that blow in on the winds of fate, nor is it swept away by the floods of misfortune. This is why this treasure, this life/vitality, is called "eternal", not because it "goes on forever" (though it very well might), but because it endures all that luck, fate, fortune, or destiny might throw at it, and we find it undiminished. This is the salvation experience as taught by Jesus, no "beliefs" required. This is the "knowing of the truth" that sets a person free.