Deserve
/Praise the Lord, you that fear him; *
stand in awe of him, O offspring of Israel;
all you of Jacob's line, give glory.For he does not despise nor abhor the poor in their poverty;
neither does he hide his face from them; *
but when they cry to him he hears them.-Psalm 22:22-23
The ‘prosperity gospel’ has been making a comeback in recent years. It’s a belief that if you live faithfully enough, you will be rewarded by God with prosperity in this life. Promoted by televangelists and celebrity preachers, often part of that faithful living they’re advocating includes sending generous financial gifts to them , which does tend to make the televangelists quite prosperous!
This concept is nothing new - it has been around forever. In my view, the prosperity gospel is used as justification by people who are privileged and want to believe that they don’t need to share because God wants them to have all this. It’s a denial of the inequality in our world. The prosperity gospel says that you deserve everything you consider yours because of all your good and faithful work. Preaching the prosperity tempts people who want more wealth to do everything they can to ‘enter the club’ of prosperity, even though all the wealth pretty much goes to the preacher. Nothing about any of this is the gospel of Christ.
Remember that passage when Jesus said it would be easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for someone who is rich to enter the Kingdom of Heaven? All his disciples were shocked! What? If a wealthy person is not right with God, who is? Their assumption was that prosperity indicated God’s favor. This view seems to be somehow embedded in our DNA, no matter who we are. We want to know that we deserve what we have and that those who have less deserve that, too. But it is a long established Christian spiritual practice to let go of that view.
Whether in stories like the one about Jesus and the eye of the needle, or in and these two little verses of Psalm 22, there is ample evidence in scripture that we do not have a transactional relationship with God - as in - we do something good, God rewards us. We do something wrong, God punishes us. No. Rain falls on both the good and the bad, misfortune visits everyone, and what is truly “rich” in the Kingdom of God might not look at all like what we presume prosperity looks like. There are those who have much in this world, and those who have little. In a world where the disparity between rich and poor is growing, faithful people are called to steward our belongings, money and gifts with compassion and justice. We are not given our gifts simply to keep piling it into barns because we deserve it.
This weekend, Keene is celebrating the new Juneteenth national holiday. For those of us who are not of African ancestry and whose ancestors were not slaves, this is an opportunity for us to learn about the experiences of others in order to fill out our view of history more richly. In the same way, may our view of God continue to deepen and be enriched each time we engage with Scripture, worship or prayer, that we adhere ourselves to the gospel of love and justice for all God’s children.
