My mother used to dress me up,
And while my dad was sleeping
We would walk down to Your house without speaking.

This morning, Willa Moody tweeted, “@ahynes1 Join Me this morning for an exclusive worship experience at Agape Christian Center n New Haven 90-100 Goffe St. 10:30AM”. A similar message has been sent to various influential people on Twitter from the New Haven area, and I was interested to see the use of this as a means of outreach.

Meanwhile, Carolyn Vermont posted on Facebook, “Getting ready to go get my praise on at Messiah Baptist Church. Sermon~’ I'm Saved because of My Good Looks!’ Genesis 19:17-26. Rev. Tyrone P. Jones IV~Pastor.”

Between these two messages, I stopped and wondered if “Aslan is on the move”. I must admit that I don’t know a lot about the Agape Christian Center n New Haven or the Messiah Baptist Church, but I’m going to guess that these are not big prosperity churches, the sort of churches that preach if you vote Republican and hate gays, God will make you rich.

I know a lot of my friends have given up on church because of these prosperity churches. Yet I suspect that my friends who have fled the church may be closer to the Gospel than those who preach from gilded pulpits. Matthew 6:24 comes to mind,

"No one can serve two masters. Either he will hate the one and love the other, or he will be devoted to the one and despise the other. You cannot serve both God and Money.

It is a lesson I’ve been thinking a lot about recently, as people fight to make sure that the richest among us don’t pay any more in taxes, even as our country deters on the brink of default and then has its debt downgraded.

It seems like the underlying narrative right now, is that what matters most is how much people make. That, the story seems to go, is how you determine how successful someone is.

I’m very interested in the concept of gamification. People are motivated by the games they play, how high they score, their position on the leaderboard, and what they get for badges along the way. If we look at our country, it seems as if people have gotten stuck in an overly simplistic and poorly designed game, that the only score that matters is your bank balance, even when it gets to be so large that it becomes nothing but a score keeping mechanism.

Yet there are other ways of keeping score. How happy are you? How healthy are you? How clean is your environment? How much are you getting to do things that you love; to be creative and to help other people?

Today, I found a YouTube video via Facebook that drives this message home rather pointedly. I don’t know Matt Damon’s religious viewpoints, but it seems like he is preaching the Gospel better than most that I’ve heard recently.

"No one can serve two masters. Either he will hate the one and love the other, or he will be devoted to the one and despise the other. You cannot serve both God and Money.

Yeah, maybe “Aslan is on the move”. I guess a good way to wrap it up is from the song Get Together by The Youngbloods,

If you hear the song I sing,
You must understand
You hold the key to love and fear
All in your trembling hand
Just one key unlocks them both
It's there at your command
C'mon people now,
Smile on your brother
Ev'rybody get together
Try and love one another right now