Flip This World

I like to think that my business is a bit different than most. I left the big corporate world to work in a small IT consulting company 12 years ago. For the last 6 years, I’ve run a privately held software development and web design company with 16 employees. The most exciting part of my job is that I know we are counter-cultural, yet we succeed where others have failed. There are no slick marketing campaigns, no fancy hype, no telemarketing calls, no spam email, no suits and ties, and no mistreatment of workers. We are able to do this because we made the conscious decision to reject the worldview of corporate America that views its customers and employees as consumable resources. Instead, we flipped the model upside down and we view our company as a sustainable resource used by its clients and employees to build better lives. We don’t view any business deal as a success unless it also makes our clients successful. We have frequently hired people cast off from the corporate world and we give them the tools to succeed. Our employees are well supported, blessed with company wide profit sharing, flexible work schedules, quality health care coverage and the best working environment I’ve ever seen. The strange thing is that in the end, of any company I’ve worked for, this is the most profitable.

Running an ethical business is just one small step. We can't stop there and assume we've succeeded in modeling Jesus' vision. The empires of commercialism, military domination, and religious ideology each want us to apply self-imposed limits on our options and reach. The empire wants us to assume there is no hope of banding together to make large scale changes that would throttle its powerful control. The ability to squash hope and limit vision is possibly the most powerful tool of any empire. Walter Brueggeman calls this "royal numbness and denial". To speak prophetically means to cut through this numbness and denial with words that will cause us to imagine something different. The power of the Bible is that it can expand our vision and restore our hope by giving us another way of seeing the world. But, that can only happen if we will allow the Bible's subversive voices to cut through the many superficial layers of numbness added during 2000 years of domestication. We will also need to look beyond our own lives and recognize the irony of joining a revolution when our own religion has been used by many to support the same ideals we are called to resist.

"Nothing that is worth doing can be achieved in our lifetime; therefore, we must be saved by hope. Nothing which is true or beautiful or good makes complete sense in any immediate context of history; therefore, we must be saved by faith. Nothing we do, however virtuous, could be accomplished alone; therefore, we must be saved by love. No virtuous act is quite as virtuous from the standpoint of our friend or foe as it is from our own standpoint; therefore, we must be saved by the final form of love, which is forgiveness." - Reinhold Niebuhr "The Irony of American History" 1952

Christian Capitalism?

How can a person worship the God of Justice and follow Jesus’ radical message of subversive resistance to the values of Empire while operating a thriving business within a capitalist society? It is no secret that capitalism is built to reward greed at the expense of others. Gordon Gekko - the fictional character from the 1987 film Wall Street - is an icon and has inspired a generation of Wall Street capitalists by insisting, “Greed is good”. He might be correct in assuming that greed is the fuel feeding capitalism but history has proven that this mentality always fails to deliver anything satisfying.

I run a business, own property, buy products, sell services, employee people, construct lucrative business deals, and at the end of the day, I have to admit I benefit from our capitalist society. I often question my prosperity and the power I’ve been awarded to change lives through my business dealings. I am a capitalist, yet I view the Bible as a socialist document and I accept its principles as the driving force in my life. How does my biblical ideal for justice coexist with the reality that I clearly benefit from the unjust results of capitalism?

What Does The Bible Say About Greed? The Bible’s long narrative of the nation of Israel begins with the desperate cry of mistreated workers who have fallen victim to the power of Empire and its obsessive greed. The Exodus began with workers who dared to say “No more bricks!” The Israelite’s captured their response to the imperial values of Egypt in a 10 point list of subversive anti-Pharaoh statements about their new community (the Ten Commandments). This subversive text begins with the remembrance of their bondage in Egypt and how they were delivered in order to create something new. Located within that list of rules for building their new society, one item sticks out as something radically different. The centerpiece to this alternate-view of how to build a community is the fourth commandment (remember the Sabbath).

Walter Brueggemann suggests that fundamentally keeping the Sabbath must involve: “periodic, regular disengagement from systems of productivity whereby the world uses people up to exhaustion. That disengagement refers also to culture-produced expectations for frantic leisure, frantic consumptions, or frantic exercise.”

The purpose of the Sabbath, which literally means to desist or stop, is to withdraw from the forces of Empire whose goal is to exhaust everything it touches. We must realize that any society operating within the normalcy of Empire will inevitably crumble as it burns up the very resources which once made it strong. This is even true when the most valuable resources of a society are its people. The commandment to remember the Sabbath reminds Israel never to become like Pharaoh.

The more I understand the Bible’s subversive perspective on reality, I'm beginning to realize it can actually work. It seems evident that most people have eyes to read these ancient texts but they cannot see its truth. It is sad that we have yet to convince more people to open their eyes and implement these ideals on a national and global level. I have hope and I agree with Jesus that one day we will.