A few weeks ago I saw something that
startled me as I was getting ready for church. I turned on the tv and Joel
Osteen was on. Believe it or not that’s not what startled me; I’ll get to the
startling part momentarily. My kids began to ask me why I am not a big fan of Joel,
so in trying to help them understand I said, well let’s listen to him and as it
comes up I will tell you what I disagree with. After his opening monologue and
misinformed confession about the Bible, his message then followed something
like this:
God wants you to succeed in life and
He has a destiny set up for you! And good news, God is in control of it and has
carefully orchestrated the good and the bad; nothing randomly ever happens! Not
just the good is purposely put there, but also the bad from your (proverbial) “closed
doors” to someone doing you wrong, to betrayal, but it is all strategically placed
there by God to work for your good! Negative circumstances and negative people
are just pawns in the hand of God and they cannot stand in your way! God will
use those pawns to push you forward into your destiny! [1]
At this point I had to shut it off
because I had more to discuss with my kids than I even anticipated like why
each one of them were pawns that God was using to get me somewhere, preferably
someplace wealthier. They looked horrified, but I felt pretty good about where
this whole thing was going.
Okay, what I was really thinking was
do I talk to them about freewill vs. determinism and what is in our realm of personal
responsibility? Or why this does not logically work out if this is true of what
God does for everybody? Or perhaps I should do damage control on why God is not
a monster that propelled the Jews into concentration camps for their “destiny,”
or explain that this whole message is a self-centered and self-maximizing look
at the world that comes at the expense of others.
Then the startling moment hit me,
this is not Christianity at all, it is capitalism. It was startling not just
because Osteen is viewed by billions of impressionable people every week, but
because capitalism in Christian clothing has been more pervasive than I noticed. And it is not
just in the health, wealth and prosperity teachings, but also in the practice
of our wealthy consumer industries made up of Christian advertisement, high
selling worship music, theologically flawed and shallow books, merchandise and
teaching sets of endless promises that it can never live up to and some that
shouldn’t even be for sale in the first place (Acts 8:18-20).
Now this is not to say that economics
and Christianity should be separate, but rather all the scriptural concern about
Sabbath, Jubilee, caring for the underclass and God forgiving our debts as we
forgive our debtors carries its own economic practices that stand decisively
against western capitalism. Capitalism requires greed from its consumers to sustain
itself to the point that it would be catastrophic if the majority became
satisfied with their current possessions. This in part is why advertisers set
out to make you feel inadequate or left out for not owning their product, or
they go the direction of nurturing our giving into impulsive desires and
cravings. In doing this it has linked itself directly to human desire.
However, in reality if the (roughly)
60% of Americans that claimed Christianity stood against greed and were content
with what they had thereby restraining themselves from buying in excess (food,
homes, cars, clothes, shoes, endless electronic devices and service plans etc…)
we could bankrupt the economy in under a year. So to my point, the modern
Christian industries (especially televangelists) participate in and perpetuate
this by simple fact that we are a big help to the economy.
What undergirds such economics (and
Osteen sermons) is an ideology in which one can and should pursue their ideas
of affluence, comfort and freedom without any discernment over the desire
itself. But this is opposite to the way of the cross; the way of dying to a
self enslaved to desires and passions of the flesh. This is exactly why
Christian life is formed with the help of ascetic practices, primarily having
periods of concentrated abstinence from what entangles us (food, sex, or binge
consumption of most kinds).
Nevertheless, just as capitalist
economics is directly linked to fulfilling our desires, so is the particular
brand of Christian teaching that floods the Church and media in which God
becomes some sugar daddy in the sky that is there to make sure your desires are
met in exchange for loyalty, but that is Mammon not YHWH.
Christianity is about communion with
God in such a way that the desires of upward mobility get sent packing so that
our life can be found in God. Then we become sustained by God instead of our
desires, which are really just an attempt to ease the pain of our brokenness
and mortality. Yet, we must hold despair and hope together. We are to remain sober and attentive to the
very real anguish that impairs our world, but we also tell a new story that
stands against our present despair by living an ethical economic practice that
values each other, our ecology and all of life.
As I was saying in a recent post on
church as a microcosm, church is the coming together of heaven and earth in its
liturgy through the “holy mysteries” of sacrament revealing this New World. As
Alexander Schmemann observes, “The early Christians realized that in order to
become the temple of the Holy Spirit they must ‘ascend to heaven’ where
Christ ascended… For there in heaven they were immersed in the new life of the
Kingdom; and when, after this ‘liturgy of ascension,’ they returned into the
world, their faces reflected the light of ‘joy and peace’ of that Kingdom and
they were truly its witnesses… In church today, we so often find the old world,
not Christ and His Kingdom. We do not realize that we never get anywhere
because we never leave any place behind.”[2]
Thus, if you walk into a church that
reflects the world you are walking away from, though they may put on an
impressive show of music, self-help catch phrases and “you” centered messages,
they are still a wasteland of death that have really not done the work of dying
to the old world or to self and therefore have no way of discipling others in
any Christlike way. Ultimately we are looking for hope in all the wrong places
and it forsakes the way of Love and stands against our transcendent
Creator. So if your church does not bear witness to a new hope and new world
and well a Christlike God, then it might be time to find a new church.
[2] Alexander Schmemann. For the
Life of the World (Crestwood, NY: St. Vladimir Press) p. 28.
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