Two Masters

No one can serve two masters; for a slave will either hate the one and love the other, or be devoted to one and despise the other.  You cannot serve God and wealth.

-Matthew 6: 24

Maybe it was because I was ambivalent about the game, since I couldn't really even pick a team to root against.  Maybe it's because of the current political drama. Maybe it's because I'm not exactly a financial genius, or even a good budget keeper.  Maybe it's because I have basically felt besieged by materialism and consumerism for years, all the while fully participating in said "isms," like a junkie.

Whatever the reason or reasons, watching the Superbowl, it struck me that the actual football game was just a marginally necessary accessory to what is otherwise a rather perfect storm of conspicuous consumption.  It is a field day for advertisers, and many people admittedly watch the game for the commercials.  Here's the whole picture: gangs of men who get paid ridiculous amounts of money to play a game, which in turn makes the owners of the teams inordinately wealthy, engage in 60 minutes of violent conflict involving an oblong leather ball, punctuated by the best (and most expensive) advertising you can imagine, broken in the middle by a mini rock concert that trots out a mixture of musical celebrities tailored to give a little something to everyone (hip hop, pop, alt rock) with elaborate and often bizarre choreography, which produces a mild hypnotic that causes one to absorb the corporate sponsorship uncritically, so that you barely even notice that everything is a shill for something.

It's not really a joke to say that football has become a religion, but actually pro sports in general are simply small temple cults of the larger religion: materialism.  I am a worshiper, I am a junkie of the consumption of things.  This is, I confess, in direct opposition to the teachings of Jesus Christ, and the first commandment: "Have no other gods before me." I am idolatrous, and I am addicted to it.

The best and only really successful way of dealing with addictions is to work the twelve steps.  So here are the twelve steps written for those who would like to break the addiction of money and stuff:

1. We admit that we are powerless over our greed, and that our greed has become unmanageable.
2. We believe that a power greater than ourselves can restore us to sanity.
3. We agree to turn our lives over to the care of God (as we understood God, in my case Jesus).
4. We make a searching and fearless moral inventory of ourselves (this might take a minute when it comes to materialism).
5. Admitted to God, to ourselves and another human being the extent and nature of our absorption with money, wealth and things, and ways in which that has become damaging to ourselves and others.
6. We are ready to actually have God replace our desire for dollars and stuff... wait hold on a minute, we're only at step six, and this is already getting really hard, perhaps even unworkable.  I'm starting to feel kind of intimidated by this process.  I think I just started writing about the Superbowl and now I'm into some really uncomfortable territory...  deep breath... press on.
7. We humbly ask God to remove our shortcomings.
8. We make a list of all those our selfishness and greed have harmed and became willing to make amends to them all... Okay, this is just not going to fly, I'm far too enmeshed in an unjust economic system.  I wear too many things that were probably produced by workers earning substandard wages.  For that matter I'm guilty of taking advantage of the people who work at Wal-Mart and McDonalds for less than a living wage.  I don't even come close to compensating for the external costs of my energy intensive, carbon-heavy industrial lifestyle.

I think I just derailed my own twelve step program, and made it into a seven step program (step 8 being where it became impracticable), but it might yet prove to be a worthwhile exercise, if for no other reason than pointing me to the reality that this is not just about me.  Materialism is not an individual sin, it is a cultural flaw.  I can't think of too many places in the Bible where God gets super mad at one dude, it's when the whole society goes off after Baal or Moloch, or when whole cities like Sodom and Gomorrah act wickedly and defy the rules of hospitality and generosity, that stuff gets real.  For step 8 to take place in any meaningful sense, we are going to have to reckon with steps one through 7 on a societal level, which is no small undertaking.

Short of becoming a hermit or a vagabond, I'm probably not going to be able to break free of the systemic hold of materialism, the best I can hope to do is mitigate it's effects on my own soul and by extension the society of which I am a part.

In the fictional world of Star Trek, there is a point at which humanity realizes that their future lies beyond economic realities.  That in order to advance past a certain point their society is going to need to get beyond the need for profits and wealth.  It comes when they finally make contact with intelligent life from other planets (specifically Vulcans). There is a collective, but not entirely simple, realization that the universe is impossibly big, and there is enough... of everything for everyone.

Fiction, to be sure, but don't most of our greatest visions start out as dreams?