“A Strange Prosperity"

A Sermon Preached by Rev. Bruce Sanguin
Sept 9th 2007

 Luke 14: 25-33

There we are, on the first tee of Big Sky Golf Course, in Pemberton. My wife, Ann, and I are paired up with a nice young couple from Seattle. The conversation turns to what we do for a living. Reluctantly, I tell him that I’m a minister in the United Church of Canada. I say reluctantly because typically this means that when they find out I’m a minister my playing partners feel the need to apologize every time they swear after hitting a bad shot. But, I didn’t need to worry. They were Christians, belonging to City Church, in Seattle. And they were proud to tell me about it. Largest church in Seattle – 7000 members and counting. Then they turned to me. So how many members do you have in your congregation? Ahem…a few less than that, I tell them. Everywhere I go these days somebody is telling me about other churches that are huge – 5000, 10,000, arenas filled with enthusiastic believers. The implication that my overly sensitive ego sometimes draws is that I’m being told that they sure must be doing something right that we aren’t doing. It seems pretty obvious after all, that if you’re faithfully proclaiming and enacting the gospel, you’re going to become the next mega-church. It’s just a matter of time.
 

An article in the Christian Century magazine writes about the phenomenal growth of the Pentecostal church in Africa - it’s the fastest growing church in the world. They are preaching a gospel of prosperity. Jesus, they contend, wants his followers to prosper, financially and in other ways. Members are encouraged to start their own businesses. True believers succeed in the world. T.D. Jakes, a neo-Pentecostal preacher in the United States, is also proclaiming this gospel of prosperity. Rev. Jakes lives in a 2 million dollar home and enjoys a multi-million dollar income. Weekly, he challenges the growing flock to aspire to the same level of prosperity. They’re turning them away at his Cathedral.
 

Now, this may be exactly what our black brothers and sisters need to hear given their context. They may need to be challenged to take responsibility for getting themselves out of the poverty trap. It’s a fine line, though, that’s being walked. The sub-text of the gospel of prosperity is that if people are poor it’s their own fault. If God’s faithful prosper, then they must be falling short. And the way out won’t be found by looking at the systemic barriers that keep them poor. They simply need to call upon the God who wants them to be rich and “He” who removed the stone from the mouth of Jesus’ tomb will roll away all barriers to upward mobility. The point of this sermon is not to challenge the theology of these churches. Who knows? It may be exactly what some blacks need at this point in history. The gospel of prosperity may be right for them.
 

But associating personal prosperity and church growth with the essence of the gospel doesn’t square easily with the reading this morning. Look at what’s happening in the reading: “Large crowds were traveling with Jesus” (Luke 14:25). By the standards of the mega-churches, Jesus is a rip-roaring success. We’d be writing articles about him in the Christian Century if he was drawing these kinds of crowds today. We’d be marveling at this capacity to fill arenas with devotees. But what Jesus does with all this success must seem weird to those who associate the faithfulness with success.
 

“He turned and said to them, ‘Whoever comes to me and does not hate father and mother, wife and children, brothers and sisters, yes and even life itself, cannot be my disciple. Whoever does not carry the cross and follow me cannot be my disciple” (26-27). Then he launches into a couple of examples of a builder and a King who didn’t sit down and count the cost of the project before taking it on – the builder risks ridicule for not being able to finish a tower, and the king risks defeat for not appreciating what he’s up against. As if this is not enough, Jesus then tells them that in order to be his disciple, they must sell all their possessions. This has more to do with the cost, not the benefits, of discipleship and with turning one’s back on all that the world associates with success in order to follow Christ. Strange way to build a following! I can just imagine the large crowd slowly thinning out, as one after another slowly peel away and make their way back home.
 

Let me say right off the top that I don’t know what to make of this text. It comes up a little too often for my taste. Peter, in the office, thought I should just skip over it and choose something else. Believe me, I considered it. But maybe its offensiveness, its strong language, and its counter-cultural message is there precisely to stand in stark contrast to our normal assumptions about reality. It requires us to take a fresh look at how we define success and what we mean by prosperity. Perhaps it’s signaling to us that contrary to what The Secret is telling us we actually can’t have it all. Perhaps it’s saying that you can’t have soccer practices and hockey practice for kids on Sunday morning, with a little religion on the side every couple of months, and expect their spiritual intelligence to evolve. There are costs. Maybe it’s telling us that we have to take a good look at what our money is supporting. If we’re not putting any of our money into the development of our spiritual life – if it’s getting the leftovers – then it’s telling us something about what we value.
 

Jesus says we must “hate” our father and mother and spouse and children and siblings! Sounds like he’s starting a cult, doesn’t it? Well, if he meant it literally, I’d be the first to walk the other way. I’m thinking that he’s using hyperbole to crash our cozy accommodation with culture, and the relative ease with which we capitulate to the social demands that can squelch our spirit and soul. He wants us to know that if we’re going to live by Spirit, there are costs. He uses what to most of us is an unthinkable prospect – that if our allegiance to family is getting in the way of our growth in spirit – then family is part of the cost of following the Spirit.
 

This isn’t so hard to imagine. Think of spousal abuse. If a woman’s loyalty to an abusive husband outweighed her self-respect, she’d need help to symbolically “hate” her situation enough to put an end to the abuse. One of my best friends growing up was the best athlete I ever knew. His father had him weightlifting from the age of 12. He excelled at every sport. When he finished high school he took up the saxophone and never played another sport, much to the surprise of everybody – especially his father who pushed him to excel. He told me later that he hated being a jock. You see, there was a deep protest inside of him. His creativity – which I associate with Spirit – was being stifled because of an image his father had of him. He hated what happened to him. Energetically, it takes something on the order of “hatred” to summon the wherewithal to let go of what is keeping us from the abundant life of the Spirit. In Christian language, we’d say from following Christ.
 

I’ve just offered two rather extreme examples that make it easy to understand how our allegiance to family can get in the way of the life of Spirit. But it doesn’t require an abusive set of circumstances for us to feel the need to make what was an absolute value – in these examples, family – a relative value. What Jesus is saying is that nothing, no thing, no material possession, no institution, no loyalty is more precious than life in the Spirit. All these are relative values, and when they are made into absolute values, the life of the Spirit is compromised. Let me give a personal example.
 

I may have shared before a dream I had when I was around the age of 30. In the dream, I have just acquired a furry little puppy. I’m so excited about this new life that I take it to my family home to share it with them. When I walk through the door, the family dog, a big black lab, jumps up and grabs my puppy by the throat and starts to shake it ferociously. I am aware in that moment that I have to make a decision. Either I kill the family dog and save my puppy. Or I let my new puppy be killed. I choke the family dog to death, and then realize that I cannot stay because of what I’ve done. I take my puppy and sadly walk away.
 

Trust me, my family was great. I had the greatest parents. I loved them at the time of the dream and love them now. But I obviously had a perception that in order for the new life that was emerging within me (symbolized by the new puppy) to grow, I needed to symbolically leave home. What had been an absolute value – my family – needed to be relegated to a relative value. Not because there was anything inherently wrong with my family, but because life in the Spirit transcends, yet includes, all institutional allegiances. This is what Jesus was getting at. In a first century Mediterranean culture, family ties were practically identical with religious commitment. Wives had no rights, boys were favoured over girls, men could divorce women with a piece of paper, but women had no reciprocal rights. Jesus had the audacity to distinguish between life in the Spirit, on the one hand, and institution of family and bloodlines on the other. If family doesn’t serve the spiritual life, family needs to take a back seat. Nobody said it would be easy.
 

As for the closing line about giving up all one’s possessions, again I think Jesus was using hyperbole for rhetorical impact. If one’s possessions have been elevated to an absolute status, then life in the Spirit is compromised. If we are fixated on lifestyle, the accumulation of wealth, and the status and power that culture attaches to these things, then they become our gods. Believe me, it requires enormous discipline and spiritual practice in North American culture of the 21^st century for these things not to be our functional gods. On the other hand, when all our stuff, including money, is a relative value, it can be used to support the life of Spirit. In the Kindom of God, this is money’s primarily value. It’s a gift, meant to support our life in the Spirit and to flow through us to the world.
 

This is the true gospel of prosperity – when every thing and every institution becomes a relative, not an absolute value, in the service of Spirit we know the meaning of true wealth. Breaking our attachment to what is not absolute, (but pretends to be), requires an energy something akin to what Jesus calls “hatred”. Over time we grow into the awareness that these things are not gods, and they are not worthy of, nor capable of delivering what it is we are truly seeking. But they make wonderful servants of true prosperity – which is life in the Spirit. It is a strange prosperity that the world doesn’t always understand.
 

There are many people sitting around you who here this morning who give away staggering amounts of their wealth in support of this congregation and other charities. Their accountants must think that they are part of some cult. Imagine what they could have if they didn’t give so much away. But on other hand, think of what we all could be if we were a little less attached to culture’s definition of prosperity and a little more committed to growing in Spirit.