Blessing

There I sat, in the auditorium of BCI on New Year's Eve – waiting, hoping, and praying that this wasn't the real topic of the sermon.

"Please, God, no"

Five minutes into the sermon I knew that I all my waiting was in vain.

The sermon title? "God wants you rich."

Yep. I couldn't believe my ears. This was really happening and I had to sit through it.

"Okay," I thought, "Keep an open mind. Maybe this isn't really what I think it's going to be about."

But I was wrong. And as the beat of the prosperity gospel hit harder than it has ever had before, tears started pouring down my face as I listened to the unmistakable words that if you are a "good Christian" than God will lift you out of poverty. But more than that, God will make his people a people of great wealth. Literally.

Really? That's a pretty bold statement considering the neighborhood we live in – or even the country we live in where hundreds of people live with the reality of the broken system leftover from Apartheid.

This brings me to the real reason I am writing this blog: my "report" on Jesus for President for the RJ blog. Ironically, I was reading this book as we got "deep" into the heart of the December series on "Blessing." Once again I feel completely convicted by this book, but unlike the last time I read it, I do not have the Bluffton community surrounding me to try and think of practical ways to apply what we've read. Here, it's completely the opposite. It seems to me that BCI would disagree with everything Shane Claiborne and Chris Haw have to say, especially after we were told that looking to Jesus in terms of wealth is taking the bible out of context. I left the States to get out of this "God Bless America" context for awhile and found myself trapped in a similar situation. As we keep wringing people's wallets for this massive tent we keep asking for Blessing and by blessing we mean money.

Shortly after this December series started I read this section in Jesus for President and I couldn't help myself. I have to quote it here.

In Hebrew the imperative "Bless!" occurs only thirty out of several hundred times the verb barak ("to kneel" - as before a king)appears. Of those thirty occurrences, the majority are liturgical exhortations to "bless the Lord" appears mostly in the Psalter. In other words, the act of blessing is most often directed toward heaven, not solicited from it! Only four times in the entire Hebrew scripture tradition do we find requests in the imperative for divine blessing. Even more interesting is the use of Blessing in the New Testament. Of the forty-one appearances of the Geek verb eulogeoo (speaking a good word), only twice do we find it in the imperative mood. In neither case does it involve God. It does, however, involves us – and our enemies… The lesson is unmistakable: we would do much better to ask God's blessing on the world and to bless God by loving out enemies.

So often we do things that make sense to us and ask God to bless our actions and come alongside our plans, rather than looking at the things God promises to bless and acting alongside of them. For we know that God's blessing will inevitably follow if we are with the poor, the merciful, the hungry, the persecuted, the peacemakers. But sometimes we'd rather have a God who conforms to our logic than conform our logic to the God whose wisdom is a stumbling block to the world of smart bombs and military intelligence (pp 199).

Okay, I guess I should clarify some things. I do believe that God did not intend for people to go hungry or to die because of lack of medical treatment, etc but I believe that God has already provided the means for which to feed the hungry, clothe the naked and care for the sick: the church. During this New Year's Eve service, the scripture that was used was from 2 Corinthians 8:9. "For you know the grace of our Lord Jesus Christ, that though he was rich, yet for our sakes he became poor, so that you through is poverty might become rich" We completely ignored the fact that the rest of the verse here is talking about meeting each other's needs and being like the early church right after Pentecost. If we become rich in the same way the world becomes rich than how does that make us different? How can we bless the world and God if we are exactly the same?

Needless to say, I think I felt my heart breaking that evening.

Jesus, I am tired of ignoring you…