Strange Blessings

Genesis 37:1-28

August 13, 2017

The set-up to the Joseph story sounds like an old TV soap opera: favored children, jealous siblings, murderous plots. It does not, at least to me, sound like a script whose moral is be faithful and you will prosper. Thus I’ve always found it curious that this story is one of those regularly trotted out by purveyors of the prosperity gospel, that most American of heresies.

You know the ones – the Joel Osteens and Creflo Dollars of the world – who promise you that God not only wants you to prosper but that God will see to it that you do prosper if only you’ll say the right prayers, believe the right creed, and, oh by the way, send in a donation today.

I’ve always thought that, at least, the prosperity preachers knew how to make themselves prosper. More than that, I’ve long understood that they share a simple, narrow view of what it means to prosper and thrive in this life. Prosperity looks like a 17,000-square-foot home and a net worth of $40 million or so if you’re like the Rev. Osteen.

Osteen skews pastor-compensation averages kinda like Michael Jordan skews University of North Carolina alum income averages!

Now I make no bones of the fact that I am a Christian socialist, but it’s not so much the net-worth figures that bother me about those who promise you your best life now. No, what troubles me is the strange, yet consistent way they misunderstand what it means to be blessed by God.

Sure, the Genesis account of Joseph’s saga says that Joseph prospered, or, more accurately, in chapter 39 we read that “the Lord was with him; and whatever he did the Lord made it prosper.”

Sometimes I think that peddlers of the prosperity gospel just do word searches and use any text where some variation of prosper shows up. Then they’ll use that text to show their followers how God blesses those who trust Him – and God is always male for these guys (the vast majority of whom are, themselves, male).

But if I’m reading the Joseph story and you try to convince me that his life is what it looks like to be blessed, then I’ve gotta say this is some strange blessing. To begin with, his brothers hate him. Let’s guess – based on more than 54 years of living as a brother – that the scene by the pit that the older brothers cast him into is not the first dust-up in Joseph’s 17 years.

This trouble has been brewing for a long time to boil over into murderous rage and the decision to cast a brother into a pit and leave him for dead. No matter how you spin it, that just doesn’t sound “blessed” to me.

Then Joseph gets sold into slavery. Again, I’m having a hard time understanding that as blessed. Pretty soon he winds up in trouble and in jail, and, again I’d like to know, “what part of this is blessing?” When does the blessing begin?

Believe, say the prosperity pastors, and there’s gonna be so much blessing that pretty soon you’re going to get tired of all the blessing. Oh, and that might just serve to remind us that the gospel of prosperity tends, also, to wind up blessing people like us and cursing those distant from us. It’s not much of a step from being blessed with wealth, to being blessed with power, to being blessed with the authority of God to nuke someone who doesn’t share that blessing. Yeah, we’re going to get tired of all this blessing pretty soon.

I don’t think so. In fact, I think there’s a fundamental misunderstanding of what it means to be blessed that lies at the root of the prosperity gospel. Oh, as an aside, this matters because the heresy of prosperity is probably the most powerful stream in American Christianity in our time. It’s not just the TV preachers. It’s the heart of the theology of the evangelical movement as a whole, and you’ll hear pieces of it in many Mainline Protestant pulpits, too.

There’s an interesting relationship between “being blessed” and “being privileged.” Here’s what I mean, and, again, this is why this matters. To be blessed by God, according to prosperity theology, means, ultimately, to be – or to become – affluent. But if we equate affluence with blessing, then that means the poor are cursed by God. That just doesn’t ring true to the whole of scripture – not to mention the fact that such a worldview leads to all kinds of messed up social and economic policies.

Moreover, it’s a pretty short trip from seeing affluence as blessing to seeing so many other characteristics that get associated – in pop culture and, often, in actual demographic fact – with affluence: whiteness, first and foremost; but also being male and being straight. You can see where this is heading, right?

So many of the indications of “blessing” are, in fact, marks of unearned privilege. But if we call them “blessings from God,” then we do not have to be accountable for them, nor are we accountable to those who are, alas for them, not so blessed … not so rich … not so white. When we let go of accountability to others it becomes easy for indifference to turn to antipathy. In the end, we all stand in the same darkness.

As the great Howard Thurman said:

"Hatred destroys the core of the life of the hater. Hatred bears deadly and bitter fruit. Hatred cannot be controlled once it is set in motion. The logic of the development of hatred is death to the spirit and disintegration of ethical and moral values.

Jesus rejected hatred."

Now that remains mostly a socio-economic critique reflective, I confess, of my socialist convictions. But let’s look at the principle Christian text on blessing – the one we sang a few moments ago. The Beatitudes from the Sermon on the Mount in Matthew’s gospel provide the clearest picture of what it means to be blessed by God, as Jesus understood the Divine presence.

To be poor. To mourn. To be meek. To be persecuted. To be a maker of peace in a world of violence.

Turns out, Joseph was blessed. These are strange blessings, indeed.

Even though I hold firmly to strong convictions about what constitutes a just economic order and a fair distribution of the world’s goods, I’m still a self-centered SOB. There’s certainly a part of me that wants the kind of blessing the prosperity pastors peddle. I want God to prosper me such that my grain silos are always full and I can have the toys I want. Right? Who doesn’t want that, to some degree?

But when I look at the things I’ve come to see as the great blessings of my life, they tend to be more like Joseph’s. My brothers never sold me into slavery – though I’m sure there were moments along the way when they were tempted.

But we did grow up with a father who suffered from a serious mental illness. Dad’s disease had a whole lot of profoundly negative consequences for us, but I have found deep blessing both in learning from his and my mom’s resilience in the face of illness, and also in learning, first hand, a hugely important sympathy and empathy for those who struggle with mental illness and for their families. I have walked the same path, and it has been a strange blessing.

I didn’t get tossed out of a job in the pharaoh’s household and into jail, to be sure. But I did get decently and in order fired from a pastoral position in Pittsburgh Presbytery. I never sought that, and it felt like anything but a blessing 15 years ago when it was all falling apart. But, as the old spiritual puts it, I wouldn’t take nothing for my journey now. It has been among the most important difficult blessings of my life.

I certainly never experienced anything remotely close to being part of an oppressed minority, but I did live through what felt like really hard and unfair dislocation as a schoolboy living through desegregation of public schools in the 1960s. That strange blessing – that felt like anything but being blessed when I had to leave friends behind to change schools as an 11-year-old – eventually gave me deep appreciation for the work of people of faith who led the fight to create a more just and equitable world out of the Jim Crow south of my childhood.

Clearly, we still have a long way to go to get close to the Beloved Community, as events last weekend in Charlottesville and Barcelona clearly remind us.

The blessings of the Divine don’t look like big houses, private jets, and individual wealth. The blessings of the Divine look like life in community – messy, challenging, and rooted and grounded in the purposes of Divine love. How have you been blessed? What blessings do you seek? May God bless us – everyone. Amen.