For Family of Christ Presbyterian Church, July 26, 2009
2 Kings 4:42-44
I’m going to break some rules in
this sermon and let you in on some of the code words that ministers,
seminarians and theologians use when talking to each other. As with any field we have our own shorthand
when we talk to each other so that we don’t have to keep going over the same
things that each of us already know.
In the case of this sermon, I’d
say something like “It’s about a communal gospel of prosperity against an
individual one, you know, myth of scarcity, social gospel stuff.”
If I said that to any of my
friends from seminary or to the any of the people in the ordination process
that I spent last weekend with, they’d know exactly what I’m going to talk
about.
In fact, I happened to bump into
Steve at the library yesterday as I was getting ready to write this out, and
when he asked what I was preaching about, that’s basically what I told
him. And he said, “Oh, that’s good
Walter Brueggemann stuff.”
At least, then, I’m in good
company with what I’m trying to say, although I don’t have much hope of saying
it as well as Dr. Brueggemann might.
I think the best way to go here
is to take those terms that I used and look at what they mean and how they
relate to the texts before us today.
The first term I want to look at
is the title of this sermon “The Gospel of Prosperity.” Sure does sound good, doesn’t it? And really, it could be a good thing,
applied correctly, but, unfortunately, most of the time you hear it, it’s a
horrible twisting of God’s good news to us.
There’s at least half-a-dozen
religious networks on our satellite system at home, and I’d be willing to bet
that if you turned almost any of them on and listened long enough, you’d hear
what passes for the gospel of prosperity in America today.
It’s message is a very personal
one, it says to you that if you just believe strongly enough, if you just pray
hard enough, then God will bless you, God will shine his (and God is always,
always a he on these channels) grace upon you and you will prosper, you’ll be,
to coin a phrase, “Healthy, wealthy and wise.”
And what if you’re not rolling
in the dough? What if you or a
loved one is fighting cancer or some other disease? Well then, obviously, you’re not praying hard enough, you
don’t believe strongly enough, you need to turn your life around, straighten up
and fly right. And you probably
need to send a bigger contribution to whatever televangelist is telling you all
this.
It’s an idea that permeates
American culture, because it’s been around since the very beginnings of what
would grow into our culture.
To a certain extent, the
prosperity gospel grows out of the beliefs and understandings of the puritans
who we remember every year on Thanksgiving.
As we Presbyterians do today,
the puritans looked back to Calvin as one of the originators of their faith.
One of the things that Calvin is
most known, and most reviled for is his doctrine of Double Predestination. I
don’t want to get into the endless arguments over double predestination, or the
fact that by the end of his life even Calvin had backed off in his belief in
it.
But it is important to bring up,
because you can trace this American idea of your prosperity being a reflection
of your godliness back to double predestination.
Double Predestination tells us
that, since the beginning of time, God has had two lists, one with the names of
all those who would be saved throughout all of history, those people are called
the chosen. The other list has the
names of all the people who, throughout history, who will not be saved, they’re
known as the reprobate.
Now, Calvin himself would tell
you that there is no way for us to know whose names are on which list, but the
puritans thought they had it figured out:
Obviously, they thought, God is going to look on those who are chosen
with more favor than he (again God was always a he for them) would on those who
were reprobate, and that you would be able to see that additional favor in the
way their lives played out. If
John was successful in his business, they just knew it was because he was one
of the chosen, and if poor old Samuel just couldn’t seem to make ends meet,
well it wasn’t going to get any better for him in the afterlife.
That simple, if misguided idea,
has stayed with us in America for almost 500 years. Most often, I don’t think it’s even associated with religion
anymore, we just know that success is evidence of virtue and failure is
evidence of some moral failing.
That’s why in this supposedly
Christian nation, we have so many people who think of themselves as moral and
Christian fighting against programs to feed the hungry and to provide
healthcare to those who can’t afford it.
Because they know, probably without even being able to articulate it,
that at least part of the reason those people are hungry is some moral failing
on their part, and if those others were really good people, then they’d have
health insurance and wouldn’t be asking us for help.
The gospel of prosperity when
preached at an individual level then can be very destructive to society and to
the individual.
I will always remember, and some
of you may have heard me tell the story before, the first time I kept the pager
as an Intern Chaplain at Grady Memorial Hospital in Atlanta.
A teenage girl who had been
accidentally shot in the head by her brother, was brought into the emergency
room where, despite the doctors’ and nurses’ best efforts to save her, it was determined
that she was brain dead.
Grady and I assume all other
hospitals have a protocol for determining if someone is brain dead and can be taken
off of life support. At Grady,
they were required to wait at least seven hours and have a second, independent
team repeat all of the tests before the final determination was made.
What that meant for chaplains at
Grady was that we often ended up sitting with families during those seven hours
of limbo, when pretty much everybody on the hospital side knew that the patient
was already dead, but when the family is still clinging to the thinnest reed of
hope that maybe their loved one will be different.
It was during that time that I
was called down to one of the family rooms near the ER to sit with the mother
of this teenage girl. The mother
was a student, studying to be a medical technician and had been called out of
class to come to the hospital, and several of her classmates had come with her.
When I entered the room, one of
the classmates was telling the mother, “you just have to get right with God, if
you get right with God, then there’s no way he’ll take Bethany away from you.” I was almost dumbstruck, because I
already knew that Bethany was gone, and if her mother took that advice to
heart, what was she going to be left with when turned out that God had taken
her daughter away. She was either
going to blame God, or blame herself, and neither one of those things would be very
healthy.
It’s the damage that it can do
on an individual and societal level that makes most liberal theologians cringe
when they hear the phrase “Gospel of Prosperity”
But after reading today’s texts,
I’d like to propose that it’s not the idea of God bringing about prosperity
that is the problem, the problem is when we apply that idea to the individual
and not to the community.
But before we go there, I want
to move onto another term, the “myth of scarcity.”
Since Steve brought him up
earlier, let me introduce you to the first Walter that’s going to appear in
this in this sermon, (There’ll be two)
Walter Brueggemann is an Old Testament
Scholar and theologian, professor emeritus at my seminary and a very prolific
author. Anyone who has heard Dr.
Brueggemann speak more than a couple of times has heard him speak of the myth
of scarcity and how the Bible speaks again and again against it in what he
calls the “Liturgy of Abundance”
The myth of scarcity tells us
that there’s not enough, that if someone else has a little bit that means we
have less.
The myth of scarcity tells us
limited time only, get it while you can don’t miss out, only 5,000 available.
The myth of scarcity tells us
that we can’t afford to feed the hungry, because we’ve got to protect what we
have, we can’t just give it away.
And when you add in the gospel of prosperity idea of the moral failings
of those people, then we really can’t afford to be giving them our money and
our food.
The myth of scarcity is also at
the heart of the same sex marriage debate, if we allow more, different people
to get married, then my marriage will mean less, because there’s only so much
meaning out there available for marriages.
And, I think the myth of
scarcity is there in Presbyterian Church’s debate over ordaining LGBT
people. I think there’s at least a
little feeling that if we let more people in, then somehow there’s going to be
less grace and blessing available for the rest of us.
In one corner then, we have the
prosperity gospel and the myth of scarcity.
In the other corner we’re going
to have our two Walters.
First, already introduced is Dr.
Brueggemann and his Liturgy of Abundance.
Let’s let him take it from here:
The Bible starts out with a
liturgy of abundance. Genesis I is a song of praise for God's generosity. It
tells how well the world is ordered. It keeps saying, "It is good, it is
good, it is good, it is very good." It declares that God blesses -- that
is, endows with vitality -- the plants and the animals and the fish and the
birds and humankind. And it pictures the creator as saying, "Be fruitful
and multiply." In an orgy of fruitfulness, everything in its kind is to
multiply the overflowing goodness that pours from God's creator spirit. And as
you know, the creation ends in Sabbath. God is so overrun with fruitfulness
that God says, "I've got to take a break from all this. I've got to get
out of the office."
And in today’s psalm we hear:
The Lord upholds all who are
falling and raises up all who are bowed down…The Lord is near to all who call
on him, to all who call on him in truth.
The Bible again and again tells
us about the about God’s abundance, about how God always has more to give and
that there’s enough for all.
In both our feeding stories
today, there’s not only enough for everyone, there’s more than enough, they
have leftovers, in the gospel story twelve baskets full of leftovers. Now that’s
abundance!
But the important thing to note
in these lessons is that the abundance is not for individuals, there’s no
discussion of whether the people being fed are worthy, or anything else about
them, other than they were there and they were hungry.
The other Walter in our corner
has a similarly difficult name, Rauschenbusch.
Walter Rauschenbusch was born in
upstate New York in 1861, the son of a conservative German preacher who taught
at the Rochester Theological Seminary.
He grew up to reject most of the doctrines his father taught him and to
be one of the founders of what became known as the Social Gospel, the final
term that I wanted to define today.
According to one source:
The Social Gospel
was an early 20th century Protestant Christian movement which placed its
emphasis on the application of Christian principles to society's problems.
Until this time, most Protestant ministers did not do much to address any of
the growing problems of industrial society.
The Social Gospel was about
carrying the good news of the Bible not just to individuals but to the whole
society. According to Garry Dorrien, a professor at Union Theological Seminary
in New York:
The social gospel made a novel,
radical and far-reaching contribution to Christianity and society by claiming
that Christianity has a mission to transform the structures of society in the
direction of equality, freedom and community. If there was such a thing a social structure, redemption had
to be reconceptualized to take account of it; salvation had to be personal and
social to be saving . . .[Rauschenbusch] always qualified the idealism in
another way: that the commonwealth of God is the very life and word of the Lord
Jesus and that it must be struggled for even though it cannot be fully
attained: “We shall never have a
perfect social life, yet we must seek it with faith…. At best there is always
an approximation to a perfect social order. The kingdom of God is always but
coming. But every approximation to
it is worthwhile.” That was the radical core of the social gospel.
That radical core lives on to
this very day in the Constitution of the Presbyterian Church (USA), in G-1.0200,
we list of the Great Ends of the Church, which date back to 1910:
The proclamation of the gospel
for the salvation of humankind; the shelter, nurture, and spiritual fellowship
of the children of God; the maintenance of divine worship; the preservation of
truth; the promotion of social righteousness; and the exhibition of the Kingdom
of Heaven to the world.
So there are all our players, on
one side we have the gospel of prosperity and the myth of scarcity, on the
other is the liturgy of abundance and the social gospel.
In the middle lie our two
stories about feeding crowds.
I think the stories tell us,
without a doubt, that we must reject the myth of scarcity. It just cannot possibly fit into these
stories.
But, I think there is a way to
bring the gospel of prosperity into the mix. We just have to learn that the
gospel of prosperity is not about individuals, it is about communities, it is about
societies.
We need to put our trust into
God, as Elisha and Jesus did in these stories, not in the hope that God will
reward us if we do, or in the fear that we will suffer if we do not.
No, we need to put our trust in
God in the sure knowledge that there is abundance for all, that there will be
plenty for all of us if we unclench our fists and let go of the fear that if I
share with others, if I don’t hang on to everything I have, then there won’t be
enough.
The call of today’s stories
comes in three parts:
We need to show the faithful
stewardship of the young boy and the man from Baal-shalisha
We need to trust in the abundant
grace of God, as did Elisha and Jesus,
And we need to remember that we
are all part of the needy crowd, who gather around to taste the almost
unbelievably plentiful grace of God.
When we can do these things, we
will know a true, communal gospel of prosperity and that will be good news
indeed.
Amen
