“Where are you living?” It’s a question I must get asked about a dozen times a day. Now how do I answer that… My shoes are in my trunk; my tea kettle is in my back seat; my beloved books are in a storage unit on the fourth story of a storage building; and my plants are on my aunt’s kitchen counter. As you may have guessed, I am moving, and I find myself in a situation not to uncommon among young adults in their twenties – the question of where we live or where we belong is not so easy to answer as one might hope. Bits and pieces of who we are lie scattered in many places, waiting to be gathered up some day in to a complete picture. In reality, however, who we are is not to be found in the things that we own; and where we live is not a question of where our stuff is.
Without your stuff, who are you?
This is perhaps why I have been haunted, as I know many others have by a commercial on the television that claimed, “Without your stuff, who are you?” It was so depressing, so haunting. It is as if my generation has its whole life been slipping beneath the quicksand of commercialism; and then all of sudden, the quicksand has claimed victory with the statement “Without your stuff, who are you?” If that commercial bothered you, then chances are that you still have some fight left in you, and commercialism has not won the day yet. If you found yourself agreeing with it and feeling glad that someone understands that you are nothing without your stuff, then… wake up! The quicksand is winning.
The journey that we are on as young adults, and may I add the church, is one of discovering an identity outside of “our stuff” – discovering who we are instead of what we own. That is the path to freedom and the path to the future for our church. That is the question that I think young John Wesley and his friends struggled with when they were first starting the Methodist movement. When they were getting up from their desks and couches and going out into the world to do something in response to the Gospel – to feed the hungry, preach the Gospel, visit those in prison. The question of who we are is not found in what we own, but it may be found in what we do with what we own. As John Wesley was known to preach, it’s alright to make all we can and save all we can, but the third part is that we are called to give all we can. The first two parts may turn us inward, but the third part of that always draws us into relationship with God and with others and awareness of our calling to justice and compassion and generosity.
These are the kinds of issues that we see young adults all throughout the country struggling to get our nation to notice in the Occupy movement that began here in the Northeast Jurisdiction and spread throughout the country. What if you walk away from your stuff because there are more important things in life? What if who you are with is more important than what you are with? What if we all worried just a little bit less about whether we had enough to eat, and worried a little bit more about whether we had left anything on the table for the rest of the family? What does it mean to be an American, especially when looking around our world at the big picture we find that we are nearly all part of the 1%? What does it mean to prepare to worship a God who when born had no place inside to lay his head? How are you responding to these questions with the young people around you as you watch what unfolds? Today, in the season of Advent, when commercialism threatens more than at any other point of the year to monopolize our attentions, is the time to struggle with these questions.
