Hilton Head, SC – July 9, 2023
The Chapel Without Walls
Job 42:1-6,10-12; Matthew 6:19-21,31-34
A Sermon by John M. Miller
Text – “Do not lay up for yourselves treasures on earth, where moth and rust consume and where thieves break in and steal.” – Matthew 6:19 (RSV)
Ultimately, wealth is a matter of degree. Someone who is poor in the USA or Europe might be considered rich by many people in parts of Africa, Asia, or South America. In 1923 any American with an annual income of $100,000 would be considered fabulously wealthy by nearly everyone in America, but anyone with an income of $100,000 in America today would be considered middle class at best, and maybe even lower-middle class, by those who make $200,000 or more. Anyone who is a millionaire by any definition would be considered wealthy by nearly everyone else, but a billionaire would think that a millionaire was struggling to make ends meet. It’s all relative.
What does the Bible have to say about wealth? Well, quite a lot, actually, although it depends to some extent on what part of the Bible you read, and how carefully you read it. There are many passages in the Old Testament which seem to promote the idea that anyone who is unusually wealthy may be unusually blessed by God. Abraham is praised for having great wealth, and his wealthy status is attributed to his devotion to God, who in turn, it is claimed, blessed Abraham with widespread landholdings and livestock, which were the common measures of wealth in the 18th century BCE.
Our first scripture reading this morning is taken from the fictional book of Job. Job, you may remember, was quite wealthy at the beginning of the book, but he lost everything is a series of disasters, including his whole family except for his wife, who was as helpful to him in his despair as five heart attacks and a bad case of shingles. His friends tried to convince him that if he lost everything it must be because he had been unfaithful to God, and therefore God had punished him. Job knew that wasn’t right, and he told them so; in chapter after chapter he told them so. At the end, God again blessed Job, and, as you heard, he had fourteen thousand sheep, six thousand camels, a thousand yoke of oxen, and a thousand she-asses, or as many might prefer to express it in church, female donkeys. Why he had no he-asses I don’t know. Incidentally the New Revised Standard Version of the Bible, as compared to the RSV, simply says that God gave Job twice as many assets as he had before his troubles, but it doesn’t list any of the critters. Maybe that’s one small reason why I prefer the RSV to the NRSV.
Through two thousand years of Christianity, I suspect that relatively few preachers have highlighted wealth as being one of the blessings God wants to shower upon us. There is an old evangelical hymn called Showers of Blessings, but big bucks or fat stock portfolios are not mentioned anywhere in the hymn as being part of God’s showers.
From time to time, however, preachers come along who gain widespread fame by claiming that one of the main things God wants for all of us is for us to become rich. The essential problem with that notion is not everyone can be rich. If everyone were equally wealthy, nobody would be wealthier than anyone else. If a few people are going to be rich, most people have to be either poor or have an average income or bank account. It is mathematically, economically, and linguistically impossible for everyone to be rich. “Rich” would have no meaning if everyone was rich.
However, every now and then a few preachers gain fame by preaching that God wants everybody to be rich. One such man who had millions of followers and enticed millions of dollars in personal contributions from them was born in 1935 in Ridgeland, SC, of all places. His name was Frederick J, Eikerenkoetter II. (He didn’t make up that name; that was his real name.) His parents moved to Ridgeland from the Dutch Antilles Islands in the Caribbean. Their son became known as Rev. Ike after he established a large congregation in Harlem in an old movie theater that he bought. He went on national television, and became a multimillionaire, telling his flock that God wanted them also to become millionaires with him. Here is a quote he often made. “Close your eyes and see green. Money up to your armpits, a roomful of money, and there you are, just tossing around in it like a swimming pool.”
These statements didn’t issue from his mouth like those of a common garden-variety snake oil salesman; they emitted from the mouth of a man whom multitudes reverentially called Rev. Ike, because he called himself Rev. Ike. He didn’t go to a college or seminary to become who he became; he just talked his way into it, and made millions doing it. When he died in 2009, he said he had sixteen Roll Royces in his possession. He could only drive one at a time, if it was he who drove them at all, but he was proud to own sixteen of one of the most expensive cars in the world.
Probably few if any of you have heard of Rev. Ike, but he was one of the early proponents of what ecclesiastical sociologists eventually came to call “The Prosperity Gospel.” Other fairly recent well-known practitioners were Oral Roberts, Kenneth Copeland, Benny Hinn, and Creflo Dollar. (If ever there was a manufactured name, Creflo Dollar is it.) They all were somewhat less blatant than Frederick J. Eikerenkoetter II, but they were forerunners of what now is a worldwide quasi-religious movement called the Prosperity Gospel.
Nevertheless, the American Prosperity Gospel is a pale copy of the Prosperity Gospel of South and Central America, Africa, and parts of Asia. Where people have traditionally been the poorest is where the message that God wants everyone to be rich is growing the fastest. There are scores or hundreds of churches with thousands of members, many of them Pentecostal churches. The pastors of those churches are preaching to thousands of people every Sunday and to millions of others by means of television and media such as You Tube. Mainline Christianity, both Protestant and Roman Catholic, is rapidly dwindling in the developed Western world, but in countries where the gross domestic product is among the lowest per capita, the Gospel of Wealth is spreading like the wildfires in the driest parts of Canada and the USA.
Joel Osteen is the most famous contemporary American example of the Prosperity Gospel. He is the pastor of the Lakewood Church in Houston, Texas. His father was its pastor before him, but he did not have a fraction of the success of his son. For years the elder Osteen begged his son to preach, but Joel wanted only to be the director of his father’s television ministry. Finally, within a week of his father’s death in 1999, Joel preached his first sermon in the Lakewood Church, and the rest, as they say, is history. Now it is one of the largest congregations in the country, perhaps the largest, with 43,000 members. He bought the old Astrodome and turned it into a huge church. It is stated that Joel Osteen is personally worth $100 million dollars.
Still, it is in in some of the poorest nations where the Prosperity Gospel has become the most dominant form of Christianity. That is a travesty, and a cancer on the “body ecclesiastic.” Only an apostate evangelical pastor could promote the idea that God wants to make people wealthy who believe the purportedly right things and do the right things. And, say these preachers, if they contribute liberally to their church, God will give them especially abundant blessings. It is little more than a religion-based extortion scheme.
P.T. Barnum said that there’s a sucker born every minute. In most instances that is humorous, but in the case of those who fall victim to these homiletical charlatans, it is tragic, especially because most of the victims are too poor or too poorly educated to see through the machinations of these perverters of Christianity, who say they are its chief proclaimers.
Furthermore, there is nothing in any of the four Gospels to support the concept of a Prosperity Gospel. If anything, Jesus taught his listeners not to count on special favors from God. In the Sermon on the Mount Jesus said we should love not only our friends and neighbors, but also our enemies. Then, to reinforce that, Jesus said that God makes the sun to shine on the evil as well as the good, and that the rain falls on both the just and the unjust.
Jesus expanded on those two maxims by saying, “Do not be anxious about your life, what you shall eat or drink, or about your body, what you shall put on” (Mt. 6:25). He followed that by noting that flowers own nothing, yet Solomon in all his glory was not clothed like the lilies of the field. Jesus concluded that part of the Sermon on the Mount with these words, “Therefore, do not be anxious about tomorrow, for tomorrow will be anxious for itself. Let the day’s own trouble be sufficient for the day” (Mt. 6:34).
The word “transaction” has taken on new meaning since a certain well-known person wrote a book called The Art of the Deal. It has taken me a few years to realize that “transaction” is now a direct synonym for “deal.” Those who want to be transactional in this new usage are those who are interested in making financial deals.
God doesn’t make deals. He is not a quid pro quo God, a tit-for-tat deity. He does not promise a “this” if we do a “that.” The Prosperity Gospel is the misnomer of misbegotten theology that unusually convincing preachers try to sell to easily duped listeners. No one can make deals with God, nor does God make any deals with anybody. Not only does God not shower riches on people, but He also can’t be bought by anyone.
The topic of this sermon is NOT a major issue for most Mainline Protestants or Roman Catholics, but it has become one for certain kinds of evangelical Christians in certain parts of the world. It is not likely to fade away, because the lure of get-rich-quick schemes, especially when they are yoked to religion, always beckons enticingly to certain kinds of people. Prosperity was NEVER a factor in the Gospel that was preached by Jesus of Nazareth.
Because that is so, you have never heard the Prosperity Gospel preached in The Chapel Without Walls. In fact, I have very seldom even addressed the topic of tithing, which IS in the Bible, although not as much in the Gospels or the rest of the New Testament. There are reasons for that, but I will not take time to explain them.
Tithing has nothing to do with prosperity; people of any income can do it if that is what they decide to do. However, I didn’t promote tithing every other Sunday as a brazen example of the Prosperity Gospel. I was concerned about killing the goose that might have laid the golden ecclesiastical egg, but deliberately was never encouraged to do so.
In hard times people long for easy methods for giving what they can and the Bible says they should give. It is understandable, but it also is illusory. Those who are the least affluent are the most likely to succumb to offers of newfound wealth from homiletic shysters. When Jesus spoke of “the pearl of great price,” he did not mean a literal pearl. The true Gospel is the offer of a transformed life that can be discovered by anyone who responds affirmatively to the good news of God that is made available to us by Jesus Christ. That alone, and not prosperity, is our hope and our salvation. Evangelicals, including Prosperity Gospelists, sing, “My hope is built on nothing less than Jesus and his righteousness.” The general idea is correct, but I am convinced Jesus would say that our hope is built on nothing less than Yahweh and His righteousness. But that’s the topic for other sermons - - - which I have preached not infrequently in your hearing. In my new approach to preaching, to which I referred in my sermon last Sunday, I am prepared to throw caution to the winds - - - but not to jettison it altogether. So presumably we shall go onward and upward from here --- but without the Prosperity Gospel.