How To Lose Friends and Irritate People

Have you ever read the book How to Win Friends and Influence People? It’s a classic, written by Dale Carnegie back in 1936, and it’s one of the best-known and best-selling self-help books of all time. It’s also still quite relevant and useful today, even if its advice is basically common sense – listen to people and be genuinely interested in them, be friendly, remember their names, etc. It’s considered required reading in the sales field, which (believe it or not) I dabbled in for a very short time. I was never a very good salesman, but the wisdom of the book has also been very useful for me as a pastor because it’s still all about building connections with people.

Now Jesus never read Dale Carnegie’s book, and even if he did, it would seem that he didn’t take its advice to heart. Sure, he did have some friends, and he influenced quite a lot of people, but if we look at Jesus’ earthly ministry it seems more like he read a different book – “How to Make Enemies and Irritate People!” Jesus managed to be a thorn in the side to lots of different people, especially those in power -- whether they were religious authorities, or people in government positions, or just regular folks who wanted to keep things the way that they were.

Jesus’ approach isn’t unique in the Scriptures, in fact, it is part of the great Hebrew tradition of the prophets. In the Bible, prophecy or being a prophet is not about predicting the future, but rather about speaking the truth to power about what is happening in the present time. Prophets reveal God’s perspective, using jarring images and words and confrontational speech to force us to look at things differently.

One of my favorite scholars, Walter Brueggemann, wrote about this extensively in his book The Prophetic Imagination, where he talks about the prophetic consciousness over and against what he calls “royal consciousness.” These are really two competing “master stories”, or ways of looking at the world.

Royal consciousness is the story that says we human beings are in control of what happens. The world is scary and chaotic, and so we want to build things – systems, structures, societies – to guard ourselves against danger and make things manageable and predictable. It’s an old story that goes all the way back to the Tower of Babel. God might be a part of this story, but he’s mostly there to bless us in whatever we’ve decided we need to do!

And naturally, when we build these systems and structures, we inevitably want someone to oversee them. So here’s where the “royal” part comes in – we delegate that control to a king, or a government, that we trust to take care of us (and also blame when anything goes wrong!). The only problem, as 10,000 years of human history shows us, is that kings and governments do a much better job of looking out for their own interests than the greater good of the world.

The royal consciousness also tends to create hard divisions – there are “our” people, who are blessed by God, and then there are the “others” who are not. There is the “holy” or “sacred” place – the church or the temple – and then the other, “secular” or “profane” places. It creates a system of insiders and outsiders, the blessed and the cursed, the deserving and the undeserving.

The prophetic imagination that Jesus represents tells a different story. Instead of a king, Jesus gives us a much different image – a chicken! Or to be more specific, a mother hen brooding over her chicks. This mothering God seeks to welcome in everyone, even those who’ve chosen the royal path, into the warmth and protection of her wings. It’s an expansive view of a God whose love knows no limits.

And wouldn’t you know it – this view of God is not very popular with those of the royal consciousness, especially the actual royal folks! The prophetic story will not win you friends, and it will only influence people to persecute you. Even the Pharisees, Jesus’ enemies, try to warn him about this – and he tells them, “Yep, I know. It’s a tale as old as time.”

The powers of the world seldom find the good news to the poor, the prisoners, the blind, and the oppressed to be good news to them. Especially when their power depends on keeping those “lesser than” folks in their proper place. Jesus knows this well – and he invokes another animal metaphor, this time the fox – to show who Herod and all of those who subscribe to the royal consciousness really are.

But a lot of times, in the battle between the fox and the chickens, the fox seems to have the upper hand. This is the fate of the prophets, and this is also the way of the cross that Jesus knows he’s going to walk. And we read this unsettling passage in Lent because if we choose to follow Jesus, the way of the cross is our way as well.

So then the question becomes – which way will we choose? The chicken or the fox, the prophetic imagination or the royal consciousness? Where and how are we seeing these ways being displayed right in front of us in our own world? Where is the way of the cross in a world that seeks to divide and marginalize in order to maintain control?

As we journey through the wilderness of Lent together, may our practices lead us to see more clearly the story behind the story, the way of grace and mercy that God extends and that kings and rulers cannot offer. And may Christ lead us, not in the path of least resistance, but perhaps to a path of more resistance – away from the status quo and into the wider, more compassionate, more loving way that has been made possible in Jesus Christ.

Rev. Brian Petersen