"The trouble with kids today ..." "When I was their age, I ..." "Remember the days when ..."
You get the idea. Old people talking about young people. And ever has it been so between one generation and the next. Old folk look back and see the time of their own youth if not as a golden age, then certainly as a better age than the world of today’s little creeps. We tend to view time from the then to the now as one of decline and fall. And young people, in turn, look at grown-ups and see people out of touch, who don't understand them, who don't understand anything. One word sums it up: We're "boring", and, if you're parents, you're embarrassing" too. "The young think the old are fools, and the old know the young are fools" -- that's one George Chapman, writing four hundred years ago! Plus ça change, plus la même chose. "Whatever", teenagers would add!
Me, I think this is a healthy state of affairs -- at least for the young. Kids who don't go through a period of viewing their elders with -- well, the range is from condescending hilarity to lofty contempt -- kids who don't go through a stage of alienation and -- yes, rebellion -- they're missing out on an essential part of the human experience. Indeed a younger generation that doesn't set itself against their elders bodes ill for the time when they will become the older generation. For does not every generation of young people have something to be angry about and rebellious against? Has not every generation of parents left their children a world in a worse state than the one that was bequeathed to them by their parents? Do we not therefore warrant the accusation that we have screwed things up, and today, given the ominous state of the ecology, screwed things up big-time? The rebellion of the young, I'm suggesting, is, at heart, of moral significance, with its idealism, energy, and can-do optimism, in contrast to the quite immoral cynicism and complacency that, alas, inevitably seems to set in with thinning hair and sagging bottoms.
That's why I'm worried.
I'm worried by what I take to be a distinct lack of rebelliousness in today's young people. Instead of repudiating and bucking the system, the system has sucked them in. They've become its biggest fans. The in-your-face self-expressiveness of young people, always an essential element of their identity -- it strikes me as so conventional, conformist even, it smacks of the manufactured and manipulated. By whom? By us older people, of course! By the marketers, advertisers, and commercial providers. Young people have become, fundamentally, economic units, consumers, defined, indeed defining themselves, by their spending power.
Don't let this irony escape you. We lament they're growing up too fast -- but the whole endeavor is being funded by us adults. Check out the magazines kids read: They're adolescent versions of the glossy world of fame, fashion, and ersatz beauty that obsesses and drives the twenty-to-fifty-somethings. And so the advertising industry quite rightly treats the purchasing public as such as children. For the flipside of children growing up too quickly is adults not growing up at all -- we have become infantilised. That's what money and ennui will do to you. But savvy kids should know better.
Which leads me to make some connections here. Namely Luke 18.15-30.
Two stories. A contrast. Which leads me to point out the interesting juxtaposition of passages there. On the one hand, there is the story of Jesus blessing the children who come to him; on the other hand, there is the story of the rich man who walks away from Jesus. The juxtaposition is hardly arbitrary, and it's one of contrast and critique.
Jesus is talking about how a person enters the kingdom, or reign, of God. Not how to get to "heaven" (that's not a biblical idea!) but how to become part of the world God wants it to be, a world of peace, justice, and love, the world Jesus came to announce and inaugurate. How? Answer: By receiving it like a child. But what particular childlike quality does Jesus have in mind? Not, I can tell you, innocence or humility. We're talking real kids here, not Teletubbies! There was nothing sentimental about Jesus' view of children; Jesus was no Victorian romanticist. Indeed if the text suggests anything about children it is their weakness and helplessness -- they have to be brought to Jesus. No money, no possessions, no position, no power -- these are the things that make them role models for the kingdom. Interesting that. We're always banging on about children needing adult role models, whereas our Lord thinks just the reverse: It's adults who need children as role models.
And this interpretation -- that it's children's pennilessness and powerlessness that make them role models for the kingdom -- this interpretation is confirmed by the following story of the rich man. For here is the proverbial man who has everything -- and observe that he is a good man too, he keeps the commandments, he is a pillar of the community, a member of the Rotary Club or the Round Table -- yet so possessed is he by his possessions that he is quite unable to enter the kingdom of God, which demands dis-possession -- demands weakness, not strength, demands helplessness, not control.
Here's the thing I'm getting at: Kids these days are more like the rich young ruler, and we promote it! Just look at the possessions -- from designer clothes, to mobile phones, to personal computers. And odd though it may at first sound, they've got the power to go with them -- and it comes by via the tacit permission of their parents. Just think of all the hoopla you see for young girls and boys and think of their target audience, the target audience, for that matter, of all girl and boy bands: ten-to-twelve-year-olds. And think of how parents, in oblivious obeisance to the market economy, and to keep the domestic peace, collude in turning their children into shoppers. Ever tried shopping for kids' clothes? Give it a try sometime, with a critical eye. You'll be shocked at what we're doing to our young.
I know, I'm beginning to sound like the old man I began with: "The trouble with kids today ..." I don't mean to. Rather I'm simply trying to sketch out the reality of youth culture today, which strikes me as virtually the same as the virtual reality of adult culture today. Consumerism is the common theme: The commodification of everything that moves, the itching and scratching of restless, insatiable desire, the celebration of ever-expanding choice, choice, and more choice. Isn't this our common reality?
Economics as one of the powers that shapes our life, often in such subtle ways that we don't realize its powers. Capitalism is Mammon.
Contrast all that with infant baptism.
Whenever we baptize a child in the name of the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit,baptize him/her into Christ, we initiate him/her into a different reality, an alternative reality, a counter-cultural reality we call the church. At least that's the theory. Because you and I both know that, in practice, on the whole, Christians are asmesmerized as non-Christians by the idol of consumerism. We worship Mammon more than we're willing to admit.
What we need to do is "fess up". And we do, week by week. Where else will our children learn to laugh at the pretensions of Mammon? Capitalism's little gods are ridiculous when you give them a good look. When we learn to expose the lies we're told to live by, we can hear the advertising for what it is. It's Capitalism's evangelism. Mammon is out for our souls. And we sacrifice our children everyday, in little ways. And thereby turn them into little rich rulers who look just like us. And we like them.
Get it? The trouble with kids these days is that they look so much like us. And we look like them.
God passes judgement on wealth and power, valorizes the vulnerable, and calls us into a community of belonging, need, and care. So if we want in that kingdom, get behind the poor and vulnerable. Get behind the kids. Get behind the poor.