Bought Out - A Lenten Meditation

HP Sauce is English ketchup.  An American corporation owns the label and makes the condiment in Holland.  The MG typifies British sports cars.  China now owns the name and makes the vehicles. 

The initials in the label of the UK’s famous brown sauce stand for “Houses of Pariliament,” an architectural icon whose image appears on the label.  The Brits prefer it by a seventy-one percent margin over other toppings.  The stuff dates back to the late 1800’s and a Nottingham grocer who concocted the recipe.  Heinz bought the name and formula for four hundred and forty million pounds, closed the plant in Aston, England, and outsourced the whole deal to Europe.  The label looks the same, but the contents now have no connection to the sceptered isle of kings.  Heinz says the move is purely a matter of economics.

The MG embodied the fighting spirit of the British during World War II but the company had not been doing well of late.  China had a yen to make the little roadsters; well, three and a half billion yen, to be exact - the amount they invested in a new manufacturing plant, along with the fifty three million pounds it took to purchase the brand name.  The communist giant can crank out cars far more cheaply than its English competition.

One wonders what meaning labels retain when origins shift.  The same money that buys a name in order to invoke a heritage often denies the inner essence.

The Christian name has been bought and sold throughout its history.  The new owners frequently make decisions based on market share rather than doctrinal fidelity.  Constantine’s edicts of toleration trademarked the title in ways that boosted its market share.  Some Christians felt that Rome had purchased the cross at the cost of tax breaks for clergy and real estate options on pagan temples.  The product proffered on Sundays still carried the original label but seemed to contain a cheaper product made in a very different kingdom than the one Jesus preached.

At the other end of history, American evangelicalism must confront the intricacies of truth in advertising.  Politicians and publishers, singers, painters, clothing manufacturers and the folks who make those little “Testamints” have all paid their portion to capitalize on the label.  We have to wonder, however, who now controls the assembly lines where modern Christianity is manufactured. 

As Jesus prepared to take the message of salvation to a world which misunderstood the meaning of Messiah, he trekked into the desert.  In a three-round bout of single combat he steadily rejected the devil’s lucrative offer of a buy-out.  Satan offered a high investment-to-return ratio:  one publicity stunt from the temple’s top, one quick genuflection to acknowledge a new CEO, and Jesus owns the world without the mess and risk of the cross.  The Lord famously refused.  He would set up production of eternal life in a radically different kingdom and hire only hands who professed single citizenship to that alternate reality. 

When the desert fathers felt that their church had kept the brand-name but voided the truth of the faith, they stalked off to the Egyptian wilderness of the Thebaid.  They rejected assmebly-line religion which honored efficiency at the cost of intensity.  In caves and huts they set up mom-and-pop shops (well, really “amma-and-abba” shops) which handcrafted the image of Christ on one heart at a time.  It was inefficient.  It was unprofitable.  It was nuts.  And it saved Christianity.

And so during Lent the church goes to the desert, to the lonely places abandoned by empire.  Interestingly, this may be the one Christian observance that the secular world has no interest in owning.  No chubby gift-giver or flop-eared rodent arises as the cultural ikon of this season of self-denial.  The odd restaurant ups its offering of fish, perhaps, but that’s about it.  During the forty day pilgrimage of Lent the church revisits her native land, where she remembers that the hood ornament does not define the heart of the product, and that it does little good to put Zion’s temple on the label if we outsource the cooking to the kingdom of this world.

Jesus never authorized the sale of salvation.  Judas got what he could for it but offed himself in the face of a certain indictment for fraud.  Simon the Samaritan attempted a hostile takeover but received only a big-time board room rebuke from Peter.  Next time you pick up a product with a cross on the label - whether you find it in a Christian bookstore, a seminary logo, or a church steeple - stop long enough to read the fine print and discover where it was produced:  Wall Street or the Via Dolorosa, at the top of an industial pyramid, or on top of a skull-shaped hill?

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