The iconoclastic, anti-marketing non-profit group called Adbusters is pretty caustic when it slams modern consumer culture.
     The group organizes a "Buy Nothing Day" on the busiest shopping day of the year, the day after Thanksgiving. And its bi-monthly Adbusters magazine satirizes the latest outrages by corporate marketeers.
     Last fall, Adbusters organized a media campaign to "culture jam" the sports shoe giant Nike and its "swoosh" logo.
     In nationwide ads, it encourages people to buy its own Black Spot sneakers. The "unswoosher" would sell for $65 and be emblazoned with a simple black dot.
     But as the online magazine Slate pointed out, "That black spot.... is also, unavoidably, a logo itself."
     Uh-oh.
     Adbusters' dilemma is emblematic of a more general human propensity to apply labels. Adam's naming of things in the Garden was the prerequisite for self-realization. Next thing you know, they're caught with fruit all over their faces.
     The most important label for each person is their own name. It's interesting Jesus didn't hesitate in rearranging people's most important label.
     He renamed Simon bar-jona as Cephas (in Aramaic), or Peter (the rock) in Greek. James and John became the "sons of thunder."
     Saul of Tarsus had a perfectly good Bible-based name. But he became Paul once the church had sent him out as apostle to the Gentiles.
     These name changes were to reflect the inward exchange of identity that had taken place.
     Other people labeled believers as "Christians." Originally the church was to be the "I am" people, reflecting Yahweh's own non-swoosh Old Testament logo.
     Jesus kept telling people not to label him as the Messiah-not because they were mistaken, but because their preconceptions about the Messiah would keep them from seeing Him as He really was.
     He warned the disciples not to be called rabbi, "for one is your master, even Christ, and all are brethren."
     In the same place (Matthew 23:9), Jesus instructs them to "call no man your father upon the earth; for one is your Father, who is in heaven."
     This must have seemed arbitrary and even nit-picky to some who heard it. But Jesus was making a point about humility, emptying of self and turning away from the hubris of self-definition.
     "Neither be ye called masters; for one is your master, even Christ. But he that is greatest among you shall be your servant. And whosoever shall exalt himself shall be abased; and he that shall humble himself shall be exalted."
     Jesus saw that even the natural roles necessary for societal life can be a grave hinderance to knowing who we really are. In His view, they had to be totally discarded. The same applied to occupational definitions. Our worth does not come from what we do.
     Jesus' radical test of discipleship, recorded in Luke 14:26, is: "If any man come to me, and hate not his father, and mother, and wife, and children, and brethren, and sisters, yea, and his own life also, he cannot be my disciple."
     Much scholarly effort has been directed toward lessening the severity of the word "hate." But on the contrary, our English term is not strong enough. Jesus absolutely hated the roles and labels we apply to one another that keep us from experiencing His life and interacting without hypocrisy or constraint.
     In the same way that Abraham had to leave his own land, people and kindred, so must each believer.
     "Whosoever shall do the will of God, the same is my brother, and my sister and my mother," Jesus said (Mark 3:35).
     He took the radical step of meeting for his last Passover meal with his disciples, not in individual households with their natural families. This was unheard of. It meant He was redefining the family as a spiritual body.
     There is a fascinating chapter in the classic text The Ancient City by Fustel De Coulanges. He describes the family in both Greece and Rome as tied together by worship at its private hearth fire, where the families' ancestors were venerated as gods.
     Petitions to these gods could not be on behalf of the welfare of others, only for the family. And its rites were conducted in secret.
     Strangers were not allowed to witness the worship. For this reason, Coulanges says, "they were called the concealed gods, or the interior gods, penates."
     By Plutarch's time, to "sacrifice to the hearth" was another way of describing a selfish man without a sense of civic responsibility. Yet the practice was still a strong presence in every household.
     This religion predates the worship of the Olympian gods and traces from the ancient Indo-European tribes. Similar practices are recorded worldwide, in ancient India, throughout Chinese history, among the Sumerians, and elsewhere in the Near East.
     In Jericho, they imbedded the painted skulls of their ancestors in the walls, where they would ward off enemies, and be available to "speak" to worshippers in a trance.
      This is all too much like Ezekiel's vision of the "seventy men of the ancients of the house of Israel" worshipping the abominations and idols portrayed on the walls of the Temple, "in the dark, every man in the chambers of his own imagery" (Ezekiel 8).
     Christianity extinguished the hearth fires from history. But ancestor worship merely receded into our subconscious.
     If we're honest, we can see traces of this in our own family traditions, rules, biases, the tendency to protect. It's often a full-blown interior "worship" that can control and ruin one's life.
     Freud once said the human psychological landscape most resembled an ancient Canaanite fertility religion. He might also have included the worship of the hearth fire.
      In light of all this, it's satisfying that Paul uses metaphors of both marriage and adoption to describe our relationship to God. In both cases, the emphassis was on a total break from one's original family's hearth fire and ancestor worship, in order to take up the worship of the new household.
     And as with true discipleship, there could be no going back.

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