God is not a vending machine: the problem with the prosperity gospel

Oh Lord, wont you buy me a Mercedes Benz ?

My friends all drive Porsches, I must make amends.

Worked hard all my lifetime, no help from my friends,

So Lord, wont you buy me a Mercedes Benz ?

–Janis Joplin

This song was written to be a satire on the materialistic culture of America.  Like all satires, it’s funny because it’s true: we do pray to God for that ‘Mercedes-Benz,’ whatever that may be for us.  There is a widespread belief that in the “prosperity Gospel”: if God loves you, you will be healthy and wealthy.  If you are spiritual enough, if you pray the right prayers, if you go to the right churches, if you have the right positive attitude, God will give you what material gifts you ask for.  And it makes sense–we all know people who self-sabotage, who assume the worst or prepare for the worst and through that very belief cause, in some sense, the worst to happen to them.  So if the opposite is true, that you can influence what happens to you by having a positive attitude, well, that seems fair.  And after all, didn’t Christ say “Ask, and it will be given you; search, and you will find; knock, and the door will be opened for you.  For everyone who asks receives, and everyone who searches finds, and for everyone who knocks, the door will be opened” (Matthew 7:7-8).  It seems clear enough.  Decide what you want, trust in God, ask, and it’s yours.

A best-selling book was written about the Prayer of Jabez from 1 Chronicles 4:10, explaining how this one verse can lead you to a deeper spirituality that will result in material prosperity, as if God were a vending machine.  Put in the correct change (the right belief and the right attitude), make the correct selection (the right prayer) and the treat drops down into your hand.  Joel Osteen and other televangelists make similar claims, as do a wide variety of other spiritual figures from Conservative Christians to New Age gurus to business consultants and life coaches.  (And what does it say about our society that business consultants give spiritual advice?)  We all want a good, long, prosperous life.  God loves us and wants us to be happy, and has said he’ll take care of us.  Surely, putting the two together can’t be a bad thing?

But what happens when things go wrong?  What happens when we don’t get that Mercedes-Benz?  What happens when bad things happen–abuse, illness, injury, the death of a loved one, the breakup of a marriage, the loss of a job?  If God rewards the right attitude, the right faith, and the right prayers with material prosperity, then the only explanation is a failure of the person in trouble.  Maybe they didn’t have a positive enough attitude.  Maybe they didn’t pray for the right things.  Maybe their faith wasn’t strong enough.  This is the fundamental problem with the prosperity gospel: during the darkest times of our lives, when we need the love and presence of our God the most, we are abandoned.

Now, I don’t mean to say that God actually leaves us, because he doesn’t.  But if we assume God only works through material prosperity and good fortune, if we assume that bad things are a sign that he is not with us, we will almost certainly blind ourselves to the ways that he is with us during times of trouble.  And then we have nothing to fall back on.  God is always with us, even if we can’t see him.  But if we can’t see or feel him, we feel as bereft as if he was truly absent.  I worked for a summer as chaplain in a mental facility, and one of the people living there was a woman with severe depression who had suffered many things in her life and so believed God was not with her.  However untrue that belief was, her anguish over the perceived abandonment was real.

But God does tell us “Ask, and it will be given you; search, and you will find; knock, and the door will be opened for you. For everyone who asks receives, and everyone who searches finds, and for everyone who knocks, the door will be opened.” (Matthew 7:7-8).  How do we interpret this if not through the lens of the prosperity gospel?  How do we pray to God and share with him our needs and concerns without assuming that if those needs and desires aren’t met, God has ignored us?  Let’s compare Jesus’ words in Matthew with those of James in his letter to the church:

You want something and do not have it; so you commit murder. And you covet something and cannot obtain it; so you engage in disputes and conflicts. You do not have, because you do not ask. You ask and do not receive, because you ask wrongly, in order to spend what you get on your pleasures.

-James 4:2-3

Why do we ask for things?  How do we decide what we need, and how does that relate to God?  James points out that our attitude and our greed matter.  If we try to treat God like a cosmic vending machine, handing out treats on demand, we’re asking wrongly.  It’s not that pleasure is by itself bad, and it’s not that wealth itself is bad.  The problem comes when we allow our wants and desires and appetites to direct our thinking instead of our relationship with God.  If we’re focused on our own wealth and well-being, we’re probably ignoring both God and our neighbor.  James points out that selfish thinking separates us from the community as we try and get what we want through whatever means we can; we shouldn’t be surprised if it has the same effect of separating us from God, so that we cannot see the ways in which God is calling us and supporting us.

God is always with us, even when we can’t see or feel him.  God is with us even when we focus on our own selfish desires.  God is with us in good times and bad, and God knows our true needs better than we do ourselves.  God will never forsake us, in good times or in bad.  God’s love cannot be measured by health or wealth, but only in the fullness of his grace and mercy.

Sin and Spirituality

Second Sunday after Epiphany

Sunday, January 18 2009

1 Samuel 3:1-20

Psalm 139
1 Corinthians 6:12-20
John 1:43-51

Preached by Vicar Anna C. Haugen

First Evangelical Lutheran Church, Greensburg, PA

May the words of my mouth and the meditations of my heart be acceptable in your sight, O Lord.

Grace to you and peace from God our Father and the Lord Jesus Christ.

This weekend was the council retreat at St. Emma’s retreat center, just outside of town.  It was the first time I’d ever seen a nun in a full black habit in person and not on TV, which was interesting.  I admit I was a bit freaked out by the crucifix in my room-instead of having Jesus flat against the cross like on most crucifixes, the one in my room had a Jesus who was hanging forward off the cross, head hanging down.  Given the position and size of the crucifix and the position of the bed, Jesus was staring right down at the pillow.  I slept on the other side of the bed.  I was glad I went.  It was a productive meeting, both in terms of what got accomplished and as a way of helping us come together as a group, so that the next year can continue to be productive.

What happens in Corinth, stays in Corinth.  It was the Las Vegas of the ancient world, the sin city of its day.  Everything was available in Corinth, one way or another, no matter how immoral or unethical it was.  And everyone knew it.  It’s no wonder that Paul had more problems with the Corinthians than any other church he founded.  Paul preached the Gospel of Jesus Christ to them.  He told them that as Christians, all of our sins are forgiven and we have been saved by the cross of our Lord and Savior Christ Jesus.  The power of the law and sin and death have been broken, and we are free.  This is good news, indeed.

The Corinthians took this to mean that they could do whatever they wanted, and take advantage of all the things that Corinth had to offer.  They didn’t have to answer to the Law, any more; no worrying about consequences, it’s all been taken care of.  After all, God would forgive anything.  They wanted to do whatever they wanted, do what felt good and satisfied their cravings, what titillated them, and leave the mess and the consequences to God.  They wanted to be able to ignore God all week, come in for an hour Sunday morning, and go right back to ignoring everything that God was doing.  Surely, they said, it wasn’t like they were being that bad, was it?  Everyone ate meat sacrificed to idols, it was everywhere.  So were prostitutes.  So were a lot of other ways to sin.

I can just hear them saying it: everyone does it.  It’s not that big a deal.  It’s not that bad.  I enjoy it, so it must be good.  God doesn’t really mind that much.  God loves me anyway, so why should I care?  A thousand justifications for doing things all the things they knew they shouldn’t do.  It’s not so different from today, really.  There are so many things out there that we know we shouldn’t do, that seem so tempting.  Doing drugs, having affairs, cheating … it seems like everywhere we look, people are doing sinful things.  It makes it very easy to find excuses for our own behavior.  We are God’s people, but God seems very far away sometimes.  With all the terrible things happening in the world today, surely God has more important things to do than keep track of every little sin.  So why worry about it?

Paul didn’t accept those excuses, and neither should we.  The thing about sin is, it makes us focus in on ourselves to the exclusion of all else.  That’s what all sin has in common, at its heart-sin makes us concentrate on our own fears and pleasures, makes us concentrate so much on ourselves that we can’t truly see the people around us.  Sin blinds us to the pain we cause ourselves and others with our actions.  God wants us to be healthy, and happy, and whole, in right relationships with him and all of our fellow human beings.  Sin gets in the way.  Even little sins like jealousy can fray our relationships with those around us.

Our bodies were created as gifts from God.  God the Father created them, Jesus Christ redeemed them through his life, death, and resurrection, and the Holy Spirit sanctifies us this day and always.  But like all of God’s gifts, our bodies can be used in sinful ways.  Addictions focus us inward, to the exclusion of all the people around us, harming our relationships with them and destroying the body God has given and redeemed.  Adultery exchanges momentary pleasure for a long-lasting breakdown of our relationships with those we are closest to while cheapening the gift God gave us.

There are so many ways to sin, so many ways to take God’s gifts and turn them to wrong uses.  Christ Jesus redeemed us from our sins, broke the power of sin, and still like the Corinthians we slip back into old habits, needing Christ’s presence and renewing forgiveness constantly in our lives.  Why do we do it?  What makes us unable to walk the straight and narrow path all our lives?  What makes us stumble, and choose to go astray?

Humans need God in our lives.  Every culture in history has had religion in one form or another.  We have a hunger to connect with the divine.  We want to be truly known and accepted, we want to feel transcendent joy.  We are afraid of being alone and depressed.  In seminary I read a book written in the 1950’s in which the author predicted that modernism and rationalism would mean the end of religion.  Boy, was he ever wrong.  In America today, many people are turning away from Christianity … but they’re turning towards psychics and paganism and new-age mysticism and other alternatives; some even make science into a religion.  They’re still looking for God, even if they don’t want Christianity.

Have you ever heard that song, “Looking for love in all the wrong places”?  When that hunger for the divine goes unfulfilled, that’s what we do.  We look for God in all the wrong places.  When we can’t see God where we look for him, when building relationships with God and our fellow human beings is too much effort, when we don’t want to put in the effort or don’t think it’s worth it, we turn to other things that we think can make us happy.  Sex, intoxicants, music, food, television and movies, anything that can entertain us, draw us out of ourselves, make us feel good, and distract ourselves from what’s really wrong, even if only for a little while.  We pursue them even at the cost of true and lasting relationships with our friends and family, even at the cost of the relationship with God we truly crave.  And so we tell ourselves comforting lies that it’s not really that bad, and everybody does it, and it doesn’t really matter anyway, and turn away from God’s love and salvation.  There are other reasons to sin, of course, but trying to fill the deep need for God’s grace is one of the main reasons.  And the problem is, nothing we do on our own to seek God or to distract ourselves from our spiritual emptiness can ever work.

You see, God is the one who searches us out, not the other way around.  Our Lord is the one who came to Samuel as he lay sleeping, to wake him up and give him the Word.  Our Lord is the one who found Phillip and commanded him to follow, who saw Nathaniel under the fig tree.  Our Lord is the one who searches us out and knows us, our sitting down and our rising up, our journeys and our resting places.  Our Lord is the one who created us, and knew us from conception to this moment now to all points in the future.  Our Lord is the one who knows all our deepest thoughts, who loves us even when we sin, and handed himself over to death on a cross to save us and make us clean and renewed.  Our Lord is the one who empties himself, that we might be filled.  Our Lord is the one who chose to manifest his grace through pain, and suffering.

The cross through which Christ comes to us is not a pretty sight.  It’s not glorious.  It’s not sweet and gentle.  It’s not comfortable.  It is, in fact, pretty freaky and disturbing when we really think about it.  At St. Emma’s two nights ago, I tried to avoid that big crucifix as best I could because it made me uncomfortable.  In a less literal way, we don’t want to have to think about what it means that God seeks us out, that God uses things like the cross to do his work, so we try and go out and find what God does that’s more comfortable to us, more appealing.

The problem is, when we go out looking for God, we sometimes get so caught up in what we think we want that we miss Christ’s presence and power in our lives.  We can’t see the God who created us and redeems us and knows us on the deepest level because we’re too busy looking for a God that looks like we want him to.  We turn inward to our own hopes and fears and try to find a god who matches them.  And we fill up the emptiness we feel by doing all the destructive things we know we shouldn’t, distracting ourselves with pleasures that bring a short time of enjoyment at the cost of our relationships with God and one another.

Yes, we have been freed from sin by our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ.  Yes, he forgives us all our sins.  But that doesn’t mean we have free reign to go out there and do whatever we want.  When Christ saved us, he made us whole at the cost of his own life.  That’s a precious, awesome gift, and one we shouldn’t take for granted.  We have been called to follow Christ.  We should do so in ways that glorify God, not our own appetites, trusting in Christ to catch us when we fall.

Up and Down religion

You know what the most common theological problem among Christians is?  It’s that, without realizing it, we all tend to twist our religion into something about us, that despite its trappings has very little to do with our lord and savior Jesus Christ’s life, death, and resurrection.

We are slaves to sin.  This is not something we want to admit to anyone, least of all ourselves.  We want to believe that we are fundamentally in control of our own lives and our own destinies.  We want to believe that we can get into heaven on our own merit.  This is “up religion” because We want to believe we can climb up to heaven by ourselves.  Even if we can’t control everything, we want to control what we can–there’s an old slogan, “Do your best and let God do the rest.”  In other words, most of it rests on us–God just fills in the gaps between what we can do and what we can’t.  To make ourselves feel better about our failures, we look around us for people who fail more often than we do, so that we can say “Well, at least I’m better than them.”  It leads to works righteousness, the belief that we can create a right relationship with God and with the world around us (be righteous) by doing good works to make up for any sin we might do.  It also leads us to turn our focus into our self, a kind of theological navel-gazing.  It’s about what we want, not about what God wants.

The problem with “up religion” is that however much we might like the idea, it doesn’t fit what we know of God.  God’s deepest and most fundamental relationship with humanity is through Christ Jesus–who did not stay up in heaven and invite us up, but came down to meet us and promised to be with us always down here on Earth in our daily life.  Christ Jesus became an ordinary human, and he took our sins on himself through crucifixion–the messiest, most painful, most shameful death imaginable to the time and place he lived.  We are sinners and we can’t do enough good to balance out our sin, but God loves us anyway.  We cannot climb up to heaven–and if we do, all we will find is a distorted mirror of our own desires, a god made in our image.  Instead, God comes down to us and claims us as we are.  We cannot go out to find God, but God does come to find us.  We can shut God out of our lives, but we cannot bring him in by our own efforts.

So how do we keep from slipping into an “up” religion?  First, be aware of the difference.  When you think about anything related to God or religion, ask yourself if you’re thinking about it in an “up” way or a “down” way.  Is it about you, or is it about God?  Are you leaving space for God to work in you and in your life?  Do you accept the fact that you are not the one in control of your life?  You won’t be perfectly open to this all the time; all have sinned, remember, and “up” religion is one of the most natural heresies to slip into.  But that’s okay.  God loves you anyway.

Be still, and know that I am God.

“Therefore I tell you, do not worry about your life, what you will eat or what you will drink, or about your body, what you will wear. Is not life more than food, and the body more than clothing? 26 Look at the birds of the air; they neither sow nor reap nor gather into barns, and yet your heavenly Father feeds them. Are you not of more value than they? 27 And can any of you by worrying add a single hour to your span of life? 28 And why do you worry about clothing? Consider the lilies of the field, how they grow; they neither toil nor spin, 29 yet I tell you, even Solomon in all his glory was not clothed like one of these. 30 But if God so clothes the grass of the field, which is alive today and tomorrow is thrown into the oven, will he not much more clothe you– you of little faith? 31 Therefore do not worry, saying, ‘What will we eat?’ or ‘What will we drink?’ or ‘What will we wear?’ 32 For it is the Gentiles who strive for all these things; and indeed your heavenly Father knows that you need all these things. 33 But strive first for the kingdom of God and his righteousness, and all these things will be given to you as well. 34 “So do not worry about tomorrow, for tomorrow will bring worries of its own. Today’s trouble is enough for today.” (Matthew 6:25-34)

“Be still, and know that I am God!” (Psalm 46:10)

It seems like everyone’s worried about something these days. If you’re not worrying about the economy, you’re worried about politics. If you’re not worrying about politics, you’re worrying about the environment or the world hunger crisis or international relations or your health or the way kids these days behave or the way adults just don’t understand or your job or your spouse/significant other or …. the list is endless. We work frantically to try and fix whatever problems we think are fixable, or work frantically to try and ignore the ones we think aren’t. We try to drown out our worries in work or play. We get so caught up in our worries that we don’t have room for anything else, and that takes a toll not just on our mental and spiritual well-being, but on our physical well-being.

Here’s the thing: we don’t have to worry, and we shouldn’t worry. When we worry, when we turn problems over and over in our head and agonize over what can or can’t be done to fix them, we enclose our minds and souls until they are only big enough for the problem we’re worrying about. We don’t leave room for God to work in us and through us. The fate of the world does not rest on our shoulders alone, but on God’s as well. Things will not always go well. But whether things go well or badly, God is always with us, and he’ll take care of us if we let him. This doesn’t mean we shouldn’t do whatever we can to solve our own problems, but it does mean that the problems shouldn’t consume our attention, and when we fail it’s not the end of the world. Do what you can, and trust God–in whose care the entire world rests, including you and me and everyone else–to take care of the rest.

When you find yourself worrying, don’t give in to the temptation to frantic action. Don’t give in to the temptation to turn your worries over and over in your mind. Instead, stop and take a deep breath, and remember that God cares for the world and everything in it. In the words of the Psalm, be still and know that God is God. Then take time to pray or meditate. Turn your worries over to God to deal with. Find something to be grateful for, something to rejoice over, and lift that up to the Lord. Then ask God for guidance and help dealing with whatever it is you’re worried about. Then act.

Introducing Anna Haugen

I am a seminary student at the Lutheran Theological Seminary at Gettysburg, working towards ordination as a pastor in the Evangelical Lutheran Church of America.  I’m currently on my internship year, serving as an assistant pastor in a congregation.  This blog is to talk about faith and God with laypeople (non-clergy) who have a serious interest but don’t want to get bogged down in technical terms.  If there are any faith questions or topics you would like me to cover, please comment.  I’d love to hear from you.