Materialism and the need to belong
This post is the next in my 2023 Lenten series, where we’re following Jesus into the wilderness on his journey to his death and rising, and looking at places in our hearts and our broken world that are in need of resurrection and renewal. You can see the posts in the series so far right here. I’m glad to be on the pilgrimage with you.
This Lent, I have been reading through Malcolm Guite’s “The Word in the Wilderness: A Poem a Day for Lent and Easter.” It is my second time reading it, and it has been delightful and beautiful and instructive. In it he shares one of his sonnets that gives a more modern staging for Satan’s second temptation of Jesus in the desert in Luke 4:
“Then the devil led [Jesus] up and showed him in an instant all the kingdoms of the world. And the devil said to him, ‘To you I will give their glory and all this authority; for it has been given over to me and I give it to anyone I please. If you, then, will worship me, it will all be yours.’”
In his reflection on the poem, Guite says that this second temptation of Jesus—that of success, power, and authority as a thing to be grasped and prized above all else—is “the supreme temptation of our materially obsessed culture.”
The pull of materialism touches each of us in different ways, I think. “More! Better! Right Now!” is the drumbeat of our culture, but the things we amass in response to it can look different from person to person. It’s not just impulse buying throw pillows or too many shoes or the newest gadget or wasteful spending, as we most readily think of it. It could be connections or accolades. A certain kind of books on a reading list or a parenting philosophy or the right sort of self-care.
In the end, the desire for gain through material things is only a symptom of a deeper issue. It is never really about the stuff. Materialism, as Guite explains it, is a method of ensuring we have the status symbols necessary—whatever they may be—to indicate that we are “in” and not “out.”
At its core, materialism is a soul-cry for belonging. It’s a symptom of a good, God-given desire of our hearts, part of our inheritance as image bearers, that hasn’t found its fulfillment in Jesus. Sin always seems to work this way.
I want to pause to clarify what I am not saying here. I am not advocating that we should excuse ourselves from confession and repentance because a need went unmet. I am not saying that you should not take your sin seriously. Jesus who said, “If your right hand causes you to sin, cut it off and throw it away” (Matt. 5:30), who experienced temptation and resisted sin for 40 days in the desert and then 40,000 times after that, who shed his own blood to break sin’s power over his cosmos, would bid us take it deadly seriously.
What I am saying is that you will find yourself playing “sin whack-a-mole” for all your days if you are not willing to examine in the presence of Jesus what unmet desire is lurking underneath the patterns of sin that you can’t seem to shed. Even if we were to tame the surface sin of materialism by gaining control of our spending or no longer finding our value in our accomplishments, the human need for belonging remains, and our hearts will continue to search for belonging in other places and to cry out for healing from all the times they have been wounded in trying and failing to find it.
We belong to the One who made us to know him. As the Heidelberg Catechism says in response to the question “What is my only comfort in life and death?,” we are “not [our] own, but belong with body and soul, both in life and in death, to [our] faithful Savior Jesus Christ.”
When we offer Jesus our allegiance and give ourselves fully to this belonging that is already ours through him, the signs of that belonging no longer look like the trappings of materialism, but rather are the Bread and the Wine, his body and blood, fully given, not earned, grasped, or strived for.
In this complete belonging won by Christ, we are freed from the vice-grip of materialism. We can stretch and bend our limbs into a different posture toward the material world. We are healed to see that life in this world is God’s gift, not an opportunity for gain. Our “status symbols” of belonging are the “one baptism for the forgiveness of sins,” communion and a seat of the table of the King, his love in us and through us, offering others the wide welcome of Jesus.