What do I see as my ultimate goal and my story - what’s the point of my life?  Whether I actually sit down and think about it or not, so many of my day-to-day choices are driven in one way or the other by what I think a good, successful life should look like.  That view, unfortunately, is often driven by the culture I live in. In his book The Secular Age, theologian Charles Taylor* writes of our modern western world that “for the first time in history, a purely self-sufficient humanism came to be a widely available option....a humanism accepting no final goals beyond human flourishing, nor any allegiance to anything else beyond this flourishing.”  Taylor refers to our age as a “disenchanted” age - our society seeks to find fulfillment in the here and now rather than looking to anything outside of this world for satisfaction. Justin described our world on Sunday as a “vacuum of transcendence” where we are taught to look only to things in our temporal world for significance.

When we seek to find our fulfilment purely in things on this earth and give in to the “disenchanted” narrative of our society, we fall prey to the work of the Beast of Revelation 13:11-18.  This is the beast of propaganda - the beast that tempts us to misplace our worship and our loves, to seek life and fulfillment in counterfeit gods! It tugs our hearts away from Christ, toward other (lesser) good things and then tells us to view these good things as ultimate things, to find our value and significance in these things.  The Beast presents us with so many options - Eat all organic and fair-trade food, and you will live. Run a marathon, and you will live. Buy a house, and you will live. Achieve respect in your workplace, and you will live. Bring about social justice, and you will live.

Our modern view, Taylor says, is a “Subtraction Story” - a story that tells us we don’t need God in order to find fulfillment and meaning.   We are, as Justin read from David Foster Wallace, worshipping creatures, and the Beast helps us find so many substitute gods to worship! The trouble with those other gods, though, is that they will “eat you alive.”  Because if, (as in my case), my god is my achievement at work, there will always be another rung on the corporate ladder, another project that I should stay late to finish, another way that I could impress my boss. My efforts and accomplishments will never be enough to fulfill my desire for meaning, because my work was never the way that I was supposed to find meaning.  The Beast, and all the counterfeit gods he tells us to worship, are completely incomplete - 666, thrice one short of the perfection that would be represented by 777.

So what do we do instead?  Taylor says that “we define who we are, and what we ought to do, on the basis of what story we see ourselves in,” and says that “if you’re going to counter subtraction stories...you need to tell a different story.”  If I don’t want my counterfeit gods to eat me alive, then I need to focus on the real and risen Christ, the one who offers me a story that gives real significance to my life. I need to find a greater love than my husband, my career, my house, or my fitness.  The God who created the whole universe and yet knows and loves me intimately, and who is bringing about full and complete redemption both in me and in the world, is the only thing that is truly and fully worthy of my love.

On Sunday one of the songs we sang was Be Thou My Vision, which is one of my favorite hymns.  Two lines from the hymn say,

Riches I heed not, nor man’s empty praise

Thou my inheritance, now and always

May that be true of me this week and always!

~ Alyson Noell

*Note: I reference theologian Charles Taylor several times.  I recently read a book called How (Not) to be Secular: Reading Charles Taylor by James K. A. Smith, and I’d highly recommend it!  It discusses how to live as a Christian in a hostile, post-Christian age, and it is a fantastic complement to Justin’s sermons!