Blessings

A prosperity gospel preacher promises you God’s blessings of wealth if you follow him and give him money. Many easily condemn that as “not how God works”. But also…

A wealthy man speaks of having “received so many blessings from God” as he reflects back on his life and announces a new charitable donation to a crowd.

Grandfather sits at the head of the table and prays over the Thanksgiving meal, giving thanks for all God’s blessings to the family, listing off homes, jobs, health, and so on.

The preacher brings out the annual sermon on “stewardship”, speaking of our call to be good stewards of all God has given to us and give back to the church. A few shift uncomfortably, but no one is chatting at lunch about “bad theology” like they do when the prosperity gospel preacher comes up.

Narratives are repeated easily and unthinkingly in church circles that what we have, particularly our wealth and material things, are blessings from God. For many, that sentiment is coming from a desire to have a righteous attitude of gratitude towards God.

Gratitude is good. But let’s dig a little deeper.

Following the Logic

What happens when you take the logic of those prayers to their conclusion?

If the material things we have (and potentially even non-material things like health, jobs, status, roles, relationships), without any distinctions, are truly God’s blessings, provided to us by God’s active decision-making, then the logical conclusion from that is that it is God's will that the wealthy have what they have, and by extension, that the poor do not.

If that is the case, the entire social order is then willed by God. God wants the rich to be rich, the poor to be poor. The powerful are enthroned by the divine and the downtrodden trampled under divine instruction. Empires enjoy their heights of glory and stockpiles of resources at God’s direction. God’s stamp of approval is on the world as it is.

If God has willed it, who are we to challenge it? Attributing what we have to be the will of God undercuts any ability to critique the entire social order, unless we somehow pick and choose what parts are God’s will and what parts are not. Do we silently accept a world of inequality? Or do we do mental gymnastics and live with the cognitive dissonance that our own “blessings” are from God but someone else’s are not?

And then this extends logically to those things that are not going well for us too. If our good things are from God, are our sicknesses and firings and poverty and tragedies as well? Sometimes it shows up in the ways people try to comfort those suffering - “God must have a reason.” or “God gives the toughest battles to the strongest soldiers.”

A Counter-Witness

Scripture is clear throughout that the wealth of the wealthy is not God’s will. From the very beginning, wealth drives Abraham and Lot to separate, Jacob and Esau to rivalry, Pharaoh to enslave the Hebrews, and king after king into evil. The prophets of God consistently critique the powerful and wealthy for their piling up of wealth and oppression of the poor. Jesus continues in their lineage and proclaims a new kingdom order of good news to the poor where the first shall be last and the last shall be first. Wealth is a dangerous burden that alienates people from the Kingdom of God and erodes community. As Jesus said, “It’s easier for a camel to squeeze through the eye of a needle than for a rich person to enter God’s kingdom.”

If the way things are is clearly not what God would intend, how do we know what is? And how ought we see our so-called “blessings”? Those are difficult and debated questions deserving much longer discussion, but these might be some helpful touchpoints:

• God makes each person in the image of God. We are all equally worthy of dignity and care, equally loved by God.

• God’s character is proclaimed to be love and Jesus embodies this love and teaches love of neighbors as the most foundational ethical principle.

• Jesus proclaims the kingdom of God which undermines and reverses the ways of the world, slowly bubbling up freedom and justice and mutuality from grassroots communities of love. He roots the vision of his ministry in the Hebrew scriptures’ teaching of the Jubilee year in which all debts were forgiven and land redistributed equally so that all have a share.

• The early church prominently honors rejection of wealth and redistributes that wealth to make sure all have enough.

• Prophets, from Israel to the early church, condemn those who become wealthy through oppression of others, declaring with the letter of James, “Listen! Hear the cries of the wages of your field hands. These are the wages you stole from those who harvested your fields. The cries of the harvesters have reached the ears of the Lord of heavenly forces.”

So, when we see the wealthy expressing their gratitude to God for their wealth, it is not the God of our scripture who has given it to them but the god of capitalistic oppression. To attribute it to the Creator is a stealthy justification of their own oppressive history, whether their own or inherited, building up fortunes on the backs of the workers. Followers of Jesus do well to challenge that narrative and the world order it supports.

Looking Within

But that challenge extends to our own lives as well. When we give thanks to God, are we really justifying the goodness of our own comfort? Careful self-examination is needed. Is what we are giving thanks for not a blessing but rather a dangerous temptation or a false god ruling over our lives? What if the work that we do for our paycheck contributes toward injustice and destruction? While we may not be in the obvious category of the unjust super-wealthy billionaires driving oppressive conditions and rampant destruction of our earth, in what ways is our own comfort resting on oppressive conditions for others? How might our comfort be numbing us to the world around us, distracting us from what it looks like to live like Jesus? What might be in our own pockets that our neighbor desperately needs?

What if what we have is not a gift from God to steward but sustenance robbed from our neighbors, a black hole warping our souls around itself? Will we be able to perfectly discern the impacts of our every action and disentangle ourselves entirely from the intricate webs of capitalism’s oppression? Likely not, but we can take steps to learn more and become more interdependent with one another, breaking the hold of wealth upon us, collectively meeting one another's needs so that each has “enough” but not too much, and rejecting easy assumptions about the divine origins of our comfort. In rejecting that our ownership of what the world calls good is divinely ordained, we'll also be able to reject the divine origins of our individual sufferings, shattering the worldview that God has willed every detail of this broken world of inequity and tragedy. Rather we'll embrace that God is in our midst rather than calling the shots from above, and is walking alongside the downtrodden with tears streaming down, inviting us to participate in the divine project of healing all that humanity has twisted in this world.

Can we still pray for provision of work and shelter and food and health? Can we still be grateful that we have these necessities. Of course, but at the same time we need more acceptance of mystery, complexity, and critical thought about unjust systems when we ascribe causes to the way the world is rather than a simple attribution of all things as a gift or trial from God. Without it, with might find ourselves justifying those vampirically destroying our world without realizing it.

Photo by Ashkan Forouzani on Unsplash

Movie: Wake Up Dead Man

Rian Johnson's third Knives Out movie, Wake Up Dead Man, is extremely well-done, one of my favorite movies I’ve seen in years. Not only a good mystery, it explores faith with care and thoughtfulness. Faith is taken seriously and given a well-rounded representation of all its best and most flawed. Johnson explores pressing topics for the state of religion and culture today, like cults of personality and religious nationalism. With a cast of characters giving windows into the ways people are drawn to these movements and a heart of compassion, Johnson delivers a prophetic and insightful reflection that challenges the viewer wherever they sit. At the heart of the movie is a contrast of two images of the church, one that looks like Jesus on the cross, with arms outstretched and offering welcome, or one with fists raised in defensive hostility. Johnson makes the case for the first, beautifully. I loved it.

Here’s an interview with Johnson from Jesuit magazine America.