I Love My Office. Drat!

I have an office in Bellevue.  It measures eight feet by twelve feet.  It has no windows.  It has no external light source.  It is lit by three lamps.  The carpet is minimal.  The furniture is used.  It has a pocket door to save space and a white board to save paper.  It's really not much of an office.  And I love that nine hundred and sixty cubic feet like no other office I've had in thirty years.  Why?

Because I built it with my own two hands.  Brenda painted it.  We decorated it together.  I love to just sit in there and look at what we did.

I am subject to the Endowment Effect.  This psychological reality has lots of dimensions, but one of them is pertinent to preachers this week.  The more we put into something, the more ownership we feel for that something.  That's true of my office.  That's true of our marriage.  That's true of a congregation or a farm or a business or a community.

Jesus said, "Where your treasure is, there your heart is also."  That's not a prescription.  That's a description.  Our investments will, in large part, determine our commitments.  Dan Ariely calls this "the Ikea effect."  He says that the more time we invest assembling furniture for example, the better that furniture looks to us.  When it's a whole office, the Ikea effect becomes something of an obsession.

Ownership creates several psychological "quirks," as Ariely describes them.  One is that we fall in love with whatever we already own.  A second quirk is that when it comes to parting with what we own, we focus far more on what we will lose than on what we will gain.  The third quirk is that we believe other people will see our stuff as just as valuable as we see our stuff.  You can read Ariely's analysis in Predictably Irrational (http://www.amazon.com/Predictably-Irrational-Revised-Expanded-Edition/dp/0061353248).

These quirks often make selling a home, for example, an experience of sheer misery.  We have invested in our homes in numerous ways.  We love our homes, warts and all.  We hate to leave behind that wonderful pumpkin color of the walls in the living room.  Who knows what we will encounter in a new space (even though we were the ones who painted the old space and could do so yet again)?  And we cannot understand how in the world someone could make such a low-ball offer for such a beautiful home.  More than that, how dare they suggest that we might need to make some improvements on perfection?

Perhaps this is yet another argument against having preachers live in parsonages.  Do you really want someone who is not fully invested in your community for the long run?  Well, just a thought...

In Luke 14, Jesus may be suggesting that we have to get some distance from all the things we "own" in this life.  That may even extend to our most cherished relationships, our deepest personal priorities, and all our plans for the future.  He uses the Middle Eastern hyperbole of "hating" those things we most love in order to help us see just how invested we are in things that are really temporary.

After all, in the long run we all really end up dead.

It's one of my favorite G. K. Chesterton quotes: "Christianity has not been tried and found wanting; it has been found difficult and not tried."  I'm not sure, however, about that quote.  I'm sure he's right about the first half. Most people who populate our churches are for all intents and purposes functional atheists.  I don't believe, however, that they've taken a good hard look and then decided against the Christian path.  I think the quote ought to end this way: Christianity "has not been tried and therefore has been assumed to be too difficult."

I think we try to talk people into following Jesus, and for the most part that doesn't work.  I find that engaging people in constructive action is a more effective first step.  Please, come on in.  You don't have to believe in anything to gain admission.  But you might want to try to live like Jesus--love your enemy, be fanatically generous, stand up nonviolently to all sorts of bullies, live with intense gratitude and trust. Live that way and you might find yourself following Jesus with great passion and conviction.

The cue comes from AA.  You don't have to believe anything to get in the door.  You just have to do certain things and "wait for the miracle to happen."

"So therefore, none of you can become my disciple if you do not give up all your possessions." (Luke 14:33).