What Time Is It?

Despite the stories our culture tells about the "time," we find another voice in the wilderness telling us a different story.

You might remember I recently wrote about the need for productive hope in our cultural wasteland. There I connected the ancient prophetic voice of Haggai during the rebuilding of the ruined temple with the work of Yuval Levin in terms of the institutional decay we experience in our culture. There I said:

In this sort of cultural wasteland, Christians are called to be people of productive hope, investing in building the social structures around them. Most especially, we’re called to build families and churches. Many are also called to build businesses and bureaus, companies and communities.

Now, I want to explore the decay of our own cultural institutions by describing some of the cultural stories around us in a little more detail. Putting together these stories with an exploration of their relationship to the church in the American and Western world means there are a lot of moving pieces, but we can summarize them all by defining the way that each “tells the time” of our cultural moment.

Individualism

It’s a complicated backstory, but partway along the plotline we started to believe that we were all individually masters of our own destiny. We started to believe that we have the right to define for ourselves what is right and wrong, what is true and false.

As a church planter, I spend a lot of my work day moving around to two or three coffee shops and cafes in the area. I do this in part to be on mission while I’m working on administration or preparation for Bible studies and sermons. One of my office spots is Starbucks near our homes and our church in South Florida. Recently, a bunch of the baristas were wearing a Starbucks t-shirt with a quote from Lady Gaga on the back: “Don’t you ever let a soul in the world tell you that you can’t be exactly who you are.” While this quote rings true in our cultural story, it actutally rings truer (I should say falser) to the more ancient of lies and temptations. The serpent promised our first ancestors, “You will be like God.” They believed him, with devastating consequences.

We still want to be in charge of our own lives.

The individualist mantra is, “It’s time for me.”

Materialism

Materialism holds hands with the scientific and rationalist impulse of the last few centuries. This impulse believes that everything is reasonable and observable. The upshot is the materialist teaching that the only physical, visible things are real things. Spiritual or invisible things are like fairies: fun and harmless, cute for kids, entertaining at storytime. But, like Santa Claus—materialism tells us—all the grown ups know that none of it is real.

The materialist mantra is, “It’s time for now.”

Consumerism

While free market capitalism has brought a lot of good and prosperity to the world, it has a cultural darkside. In high school, I had a rock star for an economics teacher. I enjoyed his class so much that I enrolled as an economics major in my first semester in college. My first college economics professor, with his receding reddish hair pulled back in a ponytail, would smoke a cigarette outside the building before walking in and starting lecture with his back to the class. He taught us first about the fundamental capitalist incentive: “the profit motive.” People want to make money, and this moves the gears of the free market economy.

A free market economy requires selling and buying goods and services, motivated by profit for the sellers. But what motivates the buyers? It starts with the basics of food, clothing, and shelter, but it grows into everything currently available on Amazon. A free market economy depends on consumption. This isn’t bad in and of itself. We must consume things to live. God designed us this way. But consumption becomes a problem when we define our lives by what we consume. This problem has become an epidemic. We define our lives by logos and find fulfillment in our purchases.

The consumerist mantra is, “It’s time to buy.”

Politics

As serious religious engagement has receded, people have started to lose touch with larger meaning in their lives. As they have lost touch with meaning, they have started to latch more and more onto political beliefs as a form of identity. Many in our culture defines their lives by their politics.

My dad for almost 30 years owned his own tire and auto repair business. For about 10 of those years, he was minority owner with a family that owned half a dozen stores in the San Jose, California area. He was the managing partner of his store and his majority partners only allowed him a small amount of vacation. He worked at the front counter 70 hours per week, and no one else at the shop could do his job when he was gone. When he did get some much earned vacation time, another older retired man who had worked for that group of stores would cover for him.

Everyone called this man by his last name, “Kelley.” One day, around the turn of the millennium, Kelley was at the store talking about the election between George Bush and Al Gore. Kelley said to my dad about Bush winning the presidency, “Well, Jeff, it looks like that oil man of yours is going to win.” After Kelley left, I asked my dad about their conversation. I will always remember his response. He said,“Kelley is two things. He’s a Raiders’ fan, underline, period. And he’s a Democrat, underline, period.” Kelly’s Demoratic politics were a defining factor of his life. Many today are the same way.

Politics are important, but they have taken on a transcendent, even religious, importance in our culture. The rhetoric around each election elevates the stakes. Every election cycle now is discussed in apocalyptic terms. Each election is described as the most important election ever held. Some say, “Everything depends on So-and-So being re-elected.” The others say, “Everything depends on So-and-So being defeated.”

The mantra of politics is, “It’s time to vote.”

Family

The family in our culture has been under attack in a variety of ways. And some have reacted by putting the family in a place of ultimate importance. For many people family-time has replaced church as the context of spiritual meaning. Sunday used to be a special day in our culture, but for many families it’s now more like a second Saturday. People gather their family for what we call in our church the “Killer Bs:” ballgames, birthdays, brunches, and boats.

In a sense I get it, especially during the winter where we live in South Florida. Summer in South Florida is hotter than the surface of the son, but winter is paradise. One Sunday winter morning, I went outside to think, pray, and review my sermon notes. It was what a friend of mine calls a South Florida “postcard day:” 60-something degree weather, blue skies, sunshine.

If my greatest value in my life was my family, I would think, “Why in the world would I go into a room to sing songs and listen to a lecture on a day like today when I could be spending time with my family?”

The mantra of family is, “It’s time for us.”

Time to Build

The church must address the themes of our cultural story, and the ancient prophet Haggai again helps pave the way as he addressed the themes of his own time. As the people of Israel shuffled through the unfinished construction site on the temple mount in Jerusalem, they saw only futility. In his commentary on Haggai, Andrew Hill says, “The construction site lay neglected for nearly two decades, due to the problems of sheer survival in a ruined city surrounded by hostile foreigners and plagued by drought and crop failure.”

The people had so many more pressing issues than rebuilding the temple. In other words, the urgent needs of life were tyrannizing them. Stephen Covey in his classic book Seven Habits of Highly Effective People explains that most people let the most urgent things in life crowd out the most important things in life. Left alone in the ruins, we fall into the wrong priorities; the people of Israel were there too. They were stuck. They needed a word from God to stir them from their spiritual discouragement and failure. They had lost their vision. They had lost their first love. God loved them enough to give that word to them through the prophet Haggai. God called them to a better way. This was a mercy. This was grace. Instead of swimming in the ocean of the stories the culture told them in the wasteland, they needed to listen for the voice of God.

We do too.

When I was a kid, we used to call information to find out the time: “At the tone, the time will be…” followed by a beep. Our cultural stories keep trying to inform us that it’s time for me, it’s time for now, it’s time to buy, it’s time to vote, it’s time for us. While there may be legitimate moments for these things, the prophet is telling us, like he told Israel so many centuries ago, “At the tone, it’s time to build.”

Beep.