What I Learned During the Great 2020 Quarantine: Welcome to the Upside Down

 Thing one: The First and The Last 

When the impatient Israelites made a golden calf to worship, God set upon them a plague so that they could remember their wrong (and, I assume, stop doing it). I don’t think it worked. Golden calfs and false gods fill the world today. They are the corner offices won through backbiting workplace politics, the high school letters collecting dust in closets, the irreparable family rifts and long-forgotten friendships lost to rivalry and competition. They are all tributes to a truth we all worship: in this life there are winners and losers. Be a winner. At any cost.

We believe it is part of nature. For all of our ranting against Darwin we actually believe his theory of survival of the fittest. We have ordered our world accordingly. The toys we first played with as toddlers molded us to be hyper-focused on sorting and creating order. We learned well. Our society is founded on the need to grade everything, first by color and shape, and then by more esoteric qualities until everything in the world is classified into the best and the worst. The winners and the losers. Red M&M’s are better than blue ones, and blue ones are better than green ones, and so on and so on. Everything is better when we turn it into a competition. Otherwise how would we know what we like the most?

That this impulse is founded in an important human value does not make it better. Yes, it is a Godly thing to do our best at all times, to employ the fullness of our gifts and talents. We are not called to complacency. There is great work in front of us and it will require us to strive constantly to fulfill our calling. Grace is not merely our excuse when we fall short, it is there to put us back on our feet and brush us off and get us back in the game. There are great stakes in play now. Living out the promise of the Kingdom of God is a matter of life and death and we are called to play to win.

But the contest is not against each other, though we never get that right. Even the first disciples turned following Jesus into a competition, arguing over who was the greatest among them, grasping for the prize of sitting at Jesus’ right hand when he comes to collect his winnings. Jesus didn’t even have to hear them say it out loud to know what they were thinking. His response must have been really confusing: “The least among all of you is the greatest.” (Luke 9:48 NRSV) Isn’t that a contradiction? The world has enough losers. Why should we aspire to be one too? This is not how we have been raised. This is not what we have been taught.

But it is obviously what he wants.

You might notice if you read the gospels that Jesus did not spend a lot of time with wealthy people. It is, in fact, an indication of what and who he valued. Matthew does record one encounter with a wealthy young man who engaged Jesus in the most essential question of them all: what do we have to do to gain eternal life? Jesus stalls the man with a brief catechetical exercise before delivering the punch line. “Sell your possessions, and give the money to the poor, and you will have treasure in heaven; then come, follow me.” (Matthew 19:21, NRSV) Jesus did not let him off with a few religious behavioral adjustments, he called him to a complete reversal of his fortune and his priorities. No wonder the man went away sad. He had just been told he did not really matter.

And in case the lesson not take for the disciples, Jesus punctuates this discourse with a well-known and generally disregarded parable: “It is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for someone who is rich to enter the Kingdom of God.” (Matthew 19:24 NRSV) Like its counterpart “turn the other cheek,” we consider it a quaint idea with some spiritual potential but no real application in the real world. The disciples are aghast. Then no one would be able to win! But Jesus reminds them that this is not about human choice or human desire or human accomplishment. This is about the will and the work of God. And the way of God, consistently and openly revealed in his Word through all the ages, is very clear: winning is not what you think it is. The first will be last and the last will be first.

This upside-down ideal of the Kingdom of God dominates the gospels and the rest of the Bible too. It is wired into the Torah. It is ever on the lips of the prophets. And it is the New Testament. From Mary’s pre-natal hymn praising God because “He has brought down the powerful from their thrones, and lifted up the lowly; he has filled the hungry with good things, and sent the rich away empty, (Luke 1:52–53 NRSV) to Jesus’ eschatological challenge to find him in those who are “hungry or thirsty or a stranger or naked or sick or imprisoned” (Matthew 25:44 NRSV), the primary theme of Jesus’ teaching is the promise of a world turned upside-down. Like the disciples, our lust for places of power and status is a barrier to following Jesus. We are called to take a seat at the lowest table at the banquet, to be satisfied with table scraps, to stoop to the task of washing dirty feet.

We do not. That we have not learned the truth of the Word is not so much the fault of our Sunday School teachers as it is an indictment of a faith community sold out to the values of this world. Followers of Jesus take up crosses and deny themselves, hard things in a world that turns its nose up on poverty and suffering. Part of our failure surely is how we confine the Kingdom of God to some life-after-death paradise instead of embracing its truth in daily life. God’s reign has entered into this very world, and it is the life work of those who follow his Son to bring the values of the Kingdom to light in the here and now. That’s hard to do when our eyes are blinded by the starlight of fame and fortune in this life and in the next.

There are two questions here. The first is about motivation. Are we only willing and able to put forth our best effort if we are properly rewarded for our efforts? Many rage against pass-fail grading and participation trophies for that reason. Even in elementary school we strive to teach children the importance not just of competing but of winning. What we mostly imprint on them is the experience of losing. It is no wonder so many have given up by the time they reach middle school. Why even try? Only a few are going to emerge as winners. Only a few will be recognized and rewarded. When you know that your place in the world is at the end of the line, why not just accept that you will always be a loser?

The second is about sharing. As in shared work and shared reward. Some do acquire their wealth and fame through hard work, intelligence and ingenuity. Their rewards are deserved, and rightly enjoyed. But the constant refrain of “I built this” ignores the reality that no one builds anything all by themselves. The assembly line workers, the custodians, the store clerks and many others contributed too. Without their hard work every great idea would be nothing more than plans on a drawing board. And most did it for less than a living wage, without health insurance or hope of sending their children to college. It does in fact take a community to do pretty much everything, and when all of the accolades and all of the renumeration flows into the pockets of the very few, the world is out of balance.

Our souls are out of balance.

2020 should be remembered as the year of the sheep and the goats, the year we discovered that the world actually revolves around the least among us. The callous murder of an unknown black man in Minneapolis brought millions out into the streets (even when it is dangerous to do so) and emboldened them to face down armed troops. Thousands of unwanted and underpaid but essential migrant workers have exposed the unsanitary working conditions that are common to the system that produces our food. The unchecked spread of CoVid-19 in packing plants nearly shut down an entire industry and created panic in the meat-eating public. Ones who actually “matter,” ones who are truly “essential,” changed this world more profoundly in a few months than any movie superstar or NFL MVP did in their entire career. An upside-down perspective on how the world functions indeed.

And an invitation to take an upside down look in our own mirror.