Jesus says there are also vital signs that Jesus' Second Time is about to burst upon us. Some years ago in Chicago, just after Thanksgiving, two little boys, eight or ten years old, nearly knocked me down as they flailed their way out of a revolving door in a downtown department store. They and the security guard who pursued them knocked over the fat red kettle of the Salvation Army Santa Claus out front. I was secretly glad they got away. The Holiday season had arrived.
Shopping is the chief sacrament of consumerist culture.
Stealing is attendant to it, as Lying is attendant upon political campaigns. The cat burglars of Cristo Rey Sunday, with their miserable loot and the urchins of the revolving door were actually not much different from ruling class Episcopalians doing their shopping on the Internet. The one who dies with the most toys wins. In the first place a crass materialism, and at the same time a radical dissatisfaction because one quickly learns, unless one is shielded from the flood of publicity and ceaseless, tempting offers of products, that the more one possesses the more one wants, while deeper aspirations remain unsatisfied and perhaps even stifled. And Paul wants us to have unblameable hearts.