Year 9-7
The headline in last week’s New York Times was “Bad times are good for evangelical churches.” It reported that: “Many ministers have for the moment jettisoned standard sermons on marriage and the Beatitudes to preach instead about the theological meaning of the downturn,” which made me quickly scan the column to discover what God had in mind here. Alas, no such luck.
The article focused on the unemployed from its Wall Street sector, where, if my memory serves me right, the average annual remuneration was close to $400,000. Losing a job in that salary bracket is indeed a disaster, especially since, if their lack of foresight in predicting the money meltdown is any indication, none of them had the slightest idea what would happen to them. Their actions, however, were the direct cause that hundreds of thousands lost their homes.
So what could be the ‘theological meaning of the economic downturn’? I found a good example of this in Luke 19. There’s a story of the biblical equivalent of a moneyed man who is over-compensated, a man by name of Zacchaeus, a tax chief tax collector. Says that chapter: “He was wealthy,” and had got so rich by grabbing a healthy percentage to all taxes collected, not unlike the Wall Street crowd who packaged those toxic mortgage bonds by first levying fat fees and then sending them on a fund manager who padded them a bit more.
I picture Zacchaeus also as a man like Bernard Madoff who made off with billions on a Ponzi scheme – paying Peter by picking Paul’s pocket – all of which the Wall Street smart guys did legally. Zacchaeus, a short fellow, wanted to have a good look at this wonder-worker Jesus, so he climbed in a tree. Jesus spots him there, tells him to come down, and invites himself to dine with this wealthy manipulator. The crowd, who understandably hated this man who extracted hard earned cash from them with the help of the despised Romans, was not at all pleased with Jesus’ request, but then Jesus has never been in the crowd-pleasing business.
The upshot was that this fellow had a radical conversion and showed his repentance: “Look Lord, here and now I give half of my possessions to the poor, and if I have cheated anybody out of anything, will pay back four times the amount.”
Is repentance perhaps the theological meaning of the downturn? Did these ministers tell these new church goers to give their million-dollar bonuses to Sally Ann or another charity? I doubt it. Ministers seldom give offence: bad for the collection plate. This still leaves the question why do these people suddenly darken the church doors. They must be thinking that God is good for something. Perhaps they see God as a miracle-man who will conjure a sudden solution when they face a sudden illness or death, a job loss, a marriage break-up, or, without warning, must cope with poverty. We know that a lot of those people stayed away from any sort of religion when the bonuses were big and a nanny a necessity.
So is that what God is good for? Dietrich Bonhoeffer, the German theologian hanged by Hitler just before the end of World War 2, has something to say here. He writes that “Man’s ‘religiosity’ makes him turn in times of need to God’s power in this world. They see God as the ‘deus ex machina’, the God lowered to the stage in the classical Greek and Roman dramas by a crane. They see Him as the One to whom they can appeal in times of need and whom they view “as an anchor in the storm, a good luck charm, a religious stage prop, or a rabbit from the hat.”
Bonhoeffer rejects such ‘religiosity’. He writes that truly sharing in God is always acted out in the entirety of life, in everything we do. From composting to composing, I might add. Serving God never is something partial, something added on. To walk in the footsteps of Jesus of Nazareth has nothing to do with living a religious life, but everything with living as a full human being. This reminds me of my good Jewish friend, the late Dr Harold Goldsman, who called such a person a “Mensch.”
Bonhoeffer again: “Jesus does not call us to a new religion, but to Life ….The Christian existence does not mean being religious in a specific manner, rather it means being a true human being… Christ (whose humanity we celebrate this week) creates the human in us. It is not a religious act that makes a Christian, but participation in God’s suffering in the midst of our life in this world.”
So, perhaps the theological meaning of the downturn is that suffering with creation and fellow humans, is a necessity for Christians. If the church can make us see that, then it still has a place in society. If not…