I’m reading from All Saints: Daily Reflections on Saints, Prophets, and Witnesses for Our Time by Robert Ellsberg.
The saint for January 6th is Jacques Ellul, the French theologian and sociologist.
He believed that the task of Christian living was “to create a new style of life,” in opposition to secular criteria. Robert Ellsberg puts it this way:
…this involved preserving a consciousness of the Transcendent. At the same time, the Christian should desacralize the idols of modern society–whether politics, the state, or the marketplace–and create alternative zones of ‘free life.’ In other words, Christians should be ‘troublemakers, creators of uncertainty, agents of a dimension incompatible with society.”
In these times of economic uncertainty, a little “desacralizing” of modern day idols may be just what we need. Rather than offering false proclamations of certainty, we can go about stirring up a little trouble by being “creators of uncertainty.”
