Shopping: Evil vs. Tempting

Scripture: Matthew 6: 25-26
‘Therefore I tell you, do not worry about your life, what you will eat or what you will drink, or about your body, what you will wear. Is not life more than food, and the body more than clothing? Look at the birds of the air; they neither sow nor reap nor gather into barns, and yet your heavenly Father feeds them. Are you not of more value than they?

—

We are approaching Thanksgiving, but if you look in the stores you know it has been looking a lot like Christmas… since July. The season of consumption is before us. Jesus is coming, and everyone is running to the mall or searching on Amazon. It is a season where Fox News will begin broadcasting from the front lines of the War on Christmas; except the perpetrators will likely be sales clerks saying, “Happy Holidays,” rather than luxury car brands using the birth of an impoverished baby to sell extravagance or define worth. It is a season of gift giving, a season of meal making, cookie baking, party celebrating, and more. It can be driven by love and abundance but it can also be driven by excessive consumption and incredible debt. So today I want to pause and think about shopping, shopping as a faithful act. While we might all feel differently about shopping, loving it or perhaps hating it, this will not be a sermon that condemns it as evil… sorry if that is what you were here for.

I come by a love of shopping honestly. So when I approach shopping I think of my Grandma Lila. She loved shopping and gift-giving, and for the last 15 or 20 years of her life, the Wednesday before Thanksgiving was Grandma’s Shopping Day. On those days she got her motorized scooter out and hit the mall. We helped her shop for Christmas, sorted her coupons, helped her use her senior discount, and checked her list. We tried to warn people about her scooter before she bumped into them - we still recount the story of the day she tipped a rack of bras over and we needed help getting her unhooked.

My Grandma Lila loved shopping, and it was something we did together. When I was little, it was a big deal to be old enough to go with Grandma and Mom and my Aunties, particularly on days when my all of the male grown-ups were left to watch some athletic event and the babies. It was a chance to look around, to imagine, to think about gifts you were giving or see what interested you. It was a time we spent together and it became a part of all the big moments in life; like buying a dress for a school dance, buying a bra for the first time, or buying shoes for a graduation. It wasn’t just about what we were buying.

My Grandma loved shopping and giving and remembered all of your important dates, but she also illustrated a deep care for finances. She was frugal, perhaps even cheap sometimes. She knew where every penny in her account was spent. When she and my grandfather moved from their house of 50 years, she had ledger books detailing every expense they shared. My grandparents were a teachers, but once the school found out she was pregnant, Grandma was not allowed to teach. My Grandpa taught and did all the extras like coaching or teaching drivers ed, but I know they lived within their budget. My Grandma worked and sold Avon but when their four kids were little, I suspect they were intentional about their dollars and cents.

Our scripture invites us to worry less about the material, about what we consume for food or put on our bodies. It is part of a passage where Jesus invites spiritual practices around prayer and names that where we put our treasure is where we put our hearts. Our tradition pushes us again and again towards intention for consumption. Jesus speaks about money more than anything else, perhaps because he knows that is the most powerful indicator of our values. He pushes us again and again to be intentional about how we enter the economy, how the marketplaces and our national budgets say something about our collective values. These scriptures invite simplicity and deep intention.

In these scriptures Jesus says we shouldn’t worry about the material and warns against letting the material hinder your connection to God and community. These scriptures have also inspired people into anti-materialism or anti-consumptionism, suggesting that all consumption is evil. I find this to be similar to the ways the church - or at least the church fathers, the early ones and the middle ones and some of the current ones - related to women’s bodies; telling women how to dress, how long their hair should be and if they can braid it, if they can wear pants, or any number of suggestions. It is easier to decide something is evil or to codify it than it is to work through your own issues of sexuality and sexual expression. It is easier to tell women their place than to work through your patterns of objectifying and commodifying women’s bodies. It is the difference between saying something is tempting to me verses something is evil. And I don’t think we can blame objects or commodities for our broken values. This anti-material theology also gets into an unhelpful honoring of the poor - idolizing poverty, but from a distance. Liberation theology invites us to see God’s preferential option for the poor and to engage in solidarity. But it does not invite us to say, from our relative comfort, that somehow the poor are so lucky to be poor. I often imagine such a person in a dark wood study, swirling the brandy in their cup as they wax on about how lucky the poor are to inherit the kingdom of heaven and how hard it is to get a needle big enough for a camel’s entry.

On the other end of the spectrum from anti-consumption or material goods is a theology that suggests abundance or even excess is a sign of God’s love, a sign of God’s favor and blessing. This theology called the prosperity gospel can be found on television and in some of America’s biggest churches. It says you have not because you ask not and, at its worst, it teaches that you have not because you are not worthy.

Theologian Michelle A. Gonzalez, author of Shopping: Christian Explorations of Daily Living, invites us into a deeper reflection than either of these extremes. She loves shopping, whether she is going to the market in Honduras or the mall in the US. She notes how there is an energy and liveliness around the creative opportunity to shop, to choose, to imagine what you might make for dinner or bring into your life, or choose to make your house a home. It is a chance for creative expression but it is also dangerous. In her book, Shopping, she notes how our American economy is driven by consumption and really by excessive consumption. We see this in national crisis when we are asked to be good Americans, to go out and buy things. This economy impacts our wellbeing. As individuals, we can be driven to consume in a way that makes us feel like less, we have to buy more so we can be more. We can shop to feel like we are worthy, we can shop to keep up, and if we don’t shop we might feel like we are behind. Our model from last year can make us feel like we are not quite enough. We can shop to feel better about ourselves, we can shop and feel worse about ourselves - like when the dress doesn’t fit. We often are driven into a dangerous level of debt. This excessive consumption is not only hard on us as individuals but as a global community. We demand more than our fair share of the earth’s resources. Our demand for cheap, disposable goods means that our global brothers and sisters work in death-dealing conditions.

I say this as a person who has participated in all of the worst ways. I have purchased cheap shirts, likely produced in terrible working conditions. I have purchased shoes because I felt sad. I have shopped driven by loneliness rather than creativity. I have purchased a dress that didn’t fit thinking it would change my life, to stop eating and start wearing it. I have even purchased a pilates machine on a late night infomercial, which I planned to put in my office at First Church. I imagined myself using it all day while I worked and in the end becoming the most fit pastor in Western Christendom. The truth is, I never figured it out and couldn’t even figure out how to send it back. All of this is to say that I come to this conversation with a spirit of trying more than an attitude of having it figured out.

My hope for all of us this season is that we enter it mindfully. That we think about the gifts we are planning to give and the people we love. That we seek to consume and share in ways that are most ethical to our global neighbors as possible. There are tools for thinking about how we engage in the market place: If the maker was treated with care, if the labor of the clerk was valued, does this support the neighborhood I love? We can think about shopping as close to home as possible, and in doing so we can re-invest more into our community. A year ago there was a children’s toy store run by a woman with deep care, and when it closed I heard parents lament that they couldn’t go in there anymore. I have also heard those same parents tell me about shopping with Peggy and then finding the toys online for much less. They had a choice, spending the same amount, consuming less, and investing in a place they loved, or spending the same amount and consuming more because it cost less online.

We choose what kind of community we want to walk through daily. I hope we ask ourselves questions about meaning and intention. I hope we ask where a product is made and how people were treated. I hope we set boundaries in the forms of budgets that guide our spending, our giving, and our sharing. I hope we think about the community we want to be a part of and support the businesses that matter to us, those that invest in our world in a way that is important.

This is a season of preparation and a season of waiting. It can be a season of busy schedules, overwhelming showing lists, and deep debt, but it doesn’t have to be. We get to choose. We get to make our way into to this season of waiting.

Thanks be to God, we get to choose.

Questions for discussion:
What is your experience with shopping?
What does it mean to shop in ways that express your values?
What do you plan to give and share this holiday season? How will you make that meaningful and life-giving to those who receive it and to our global family?