The Gospel of Prosperity

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

 

Comments

[Chris Thompson]

Thank you for this courageous message. As a blogger who visits churches and then blogs my visits, I'm wrestling with writing up a recent visit to a prosperity gospel church. I appreciate your references to Brueggemann and the depth of your remarks. While not alone in this area, Presbyterians do seem to "get it" over many other churches today.