NIMBY and Jesus

Then he said, ‘This is what I’ll do. I will tear down my barns and build bigger ones, and there I will store my surplus grain. And I’ll say to myself, “You have plenty of grain laid up for many years. Take life easy; eat, drink and be merry.”’

“But God said to him, ‘You fool! This very night your life will be demanded from you. Then who will get what you have prepared for yourself?’

“This is how it will be with whoever stores up things for themselves but is not rich toward
God.
--Luke 12: 18-21 NRSV

This week I’ve been watching a TV series on Amazon Video called Loudermilk. It centers on a recovering alcoholic who leads a support group for alcoholics and addicts. Fair warning--it’s a comedy with plenty of crude humor, curse words and sexual situations—so skip it if such stuff offends you. It also has some great writing, great acting and some powerful wisdom. Clearly some of the creators and writers are in recovery, because usually each episode contains a nugget of hard-won truth.

In the show, the sobriety group meets at a Catholic church in a well-to-do Seattle neighborhood. After meetings, group members stand around outside to talk, smoke and often, since this is a comedy, act like fools—loud ones. Neighbors who think of themselves as enlightened progressives have bought into the gentrified neighborhood and complain about the group, especially its noise and left behind cigarette butts. It’s a classic case of NIMBY-ism, as in “Not In My Backyard” or “Poor people and troubled people deserve places to be, just not anywhere near me.” When I watched the episode, my jaw dropped, because I have dealt with just this situation.

I worked at a church in an expensive neighborhood in Kansas City. The church had no parking lot, only on-street parking. Several AA groups met in the building, and as is the case with every AA group I’ve ever known, members would stand outside after the meetings to talk usually with cigarettes in hand. Because we are talking about alcoholics and addicts here, some of the groups’ members were loud and had little awareness of the world around them. That’s why we had conflict with one of the church’s neighbors.

He was a lawyer who lived across from the church’s main entrance. He didn’t like the kind of people who went to the AA meetings being so near his house and “his children.” He complained about the language they used and that “they left trash and cigarette butts on his lawn.” We passed his complaints on to the AA groups, but he was never satisfied. Finally, one day he stormed over to the church, chewed out an sainted older lady who was a church member and threatened to sue.

He was pretty hostile during our phone call. I explained that these meetings were literally saving people’s lives, but he didn’t care. He wanted them to hold their meetings elsewhere. He repeatedly threatened to sue until I finally offered to personally pick up any cigarette butt he found in his yard. Every day I was at the church building from then on, I walked the curb in front of his house to look for cigarette butts or other trash. I found one cigarette butt a week--maybe. I found more than that in my own yard and neither I nor my neighbors smoke. We don’t have any AA groups meeting nearby either. The litigious neighbor often saw me checking his lawn for cigarette butts but never spoke to me again about it.

In America, the suburban home is largely considered a symbol of safety and success. I should know. My family and I live in a nice neighborhood that we chose for its good schools and safety. Yet, I’ve come to understand my suburban home comes at a cost. I am removed from most of the needs and struggles of people who are unable to live where I do. My little pocket of perceived safety comes with a false sense of the world—a world where most people live with issues I don’t have to see every day. I’m sure the people in my neighborhood have all sorts of pain and struggle, but you’d never know it. I have purchased a form of blindness that lulls me into believing I have no responsibility to others in the community. Also, in the pursuit of my self-interest and my home value, I am tempted to keep the world outside of my blinders at bay by any means necessary.

As much as I’d like to think I’m better than the angry neighbor ranting about cigarette butts and threatening lawsuits, if I’m honest, I’m not as far from him as I would like.

I don’t often read Christianity Today because in general its theological outlook and resulting politics don’t appeal to me, but I came across this article about Christians and NIMBY-ism that strikes me as truly prophetic for us suburban Americans. In it, the columnist Bonnie Christian writes:

Home is a good gift from God, yet our homes become our idols if we make them the source of security we ought to find in Christ.

Ouch!

She goes on to quote St. Cyprian, a Christian bishop in North Africa in the third century and what he has to say strikes me as amazingly modern:

who, excluding the poor from their neighborhood, stretch out their fields far and wide into space without any limits … even in the midst of their riches those are torn to pieces by the anxiety of vague thought, lest the robber should spoil, lest the murderer should attack, lest the envy of some wealthier neighbor should become hostile, and harass them with malicious lawsuits. Such a one enjoys no security either in his food or in his sleep.

Kristian continues:

The security we seek in a Suburban Lifestyle Dream is a lie, Cyprian said, because searching for security outside of God leaves us with emptiness, fear, and vulnerability instead. Enjoying a large yard or a single-family house isn’t sinful. But making any home—suburban or not—the foundation of our identity or a fortress to be guarded against the “intrusion” of the poor into our communities most certainly is.

It isn’t just homeowners who suffer from NIMBY-ism. Suburban churches can suffer from it too. Our buildings and the respectability we desire for them can become our idols. In the same way homeowners can look to security in their homes rather than in God, church people can make the same mistake.

Jesus told the “Parable of the Rich Fool” to warn Christians that it is easy to place our security and trust in all the wrong things. No suburban home even in the most gated and guarded neighborhoods can guarantee us a life free of crisis, danger and pain, but such enclaves sure can  numb our spirts and harden our hearts towards exactly the kind of people Jesus calls us to minister to and care for. One of the greatest challenges for American Christianity is understanding the suburban lifestyle is not the same thing as following Jesus.

Grace and Peace,
Chase