Crucified to the World?

We had a visitor at church today, a guy who had never been there before. When I was talking to him between services, he was telling us how much God had been doing for him and working in his life. Then he gave us a specific example – it turned out that last night he slept outside our local bank, under the awning, after getting ditched by some friends miles away from the shelter where he could have had a bed for the night. It got down to about -15°C last night (with the wind-chill), so it was a pretty serious situation. When he woke up this morning, he found himself covered in a blanket. If someone hadn’t put that blanket on him last night, he might just not have woke up, period.

I sat there about 3 feet away from this guy, this morning, using my 32gb iPod Touch to find the passage that the preacher was on. Now, I’ve been preaching at my students lately about my iPod Touch, and how it represents my own selfishness, my me-first consumerism, my “buy-in” to the world’s view of things. I’ve been comparing it to the BMW that Tony Campolo talked about way back when, when he said he didn’t figure Jesus would have a BMW in his driveway as long as there were poor people in Haiti (or, for that matter, in the seats in my church). For me, I drive a ’93 Civic, so I felt pretty good about myself until I thought about that 32gb iPod Touch that I’d recently bought. When I bought it, I stood in the Costco for a good 15 minutes, trying to come up with a reasonable justification why I needed not just an iPod Touch, but the 32gb version. The thing cost me about $500.

The preacher this morning was preaching from the end of Galatians. He got to this passage this morning, which I finally dug up on my iPod Touch:

May I never boast except in the cross of our Lord Jesus Christ, through which the world has been crucified to me, and I to the world. Neither circumcision nor uncircumcision means anything; what counts is a new creation. ~ Galatians 6:14-15

I sat there, feeling rather uncomfortable. What does it mean to be crucified to the world? What does it mean to be a new creation? Is there anything about me that doesn’t shout “I love the world!”, but rather says “I love God”? Does my willingness to rush out and drop $500 on an electronic gadget that I really don’t need at all, while a guy sleeps outside the bank 2 blocks from my house, nearly freezing to death, say “I’m a new creation”?

I think if the “world has been crucified to me”, my attitude about the things of the world, the “stuff”, the “lust of the flesh”, the “pride of life”, ought to be different than the attitudes of those who are “of the world”. Why is it that, so often, and perhaps most obviously around Christmas time, we let ourselves become enthralled with things?