It Doesn't Make Sense
Why we have so much trouble understanding the Father's provision
Welcome to a new section of Under the Eyes of God called One More Thing Before I Close, where I’ll be sharing occasional long-form essays on Monday, based on my sermon from Sunday.
This is a space for me to either explain more than I have time to do on a Sunday morning or expound more on a specific aspect of the message that isn’t entirely relevant to my main point. I’m writing this mainly for those in my congregation who find these extra resources helpful, so thank you to those from my church for being here!
“It doesn’t make sense,” was the report of a young woman in our pre-service prayer on Sunday morning.
As we gathered to pray, we discussed how the Father takes care of our needs: the sermon topic for that morning.
In response, this woman shared an experience she and her husband had on a recent trip to a relatively poor nation.
They came upon a street cart vendor who sold a handful of $4 meals to tourists each day. The cart owner explained that when his son was born, he needed a significant surgery costing thousands of US Dollars.
Somehow, in that time, he was able to sell a few extra meals each day and received money from friends who didn’t have much themselves. Miraculously, he paid for his son’s surgery and carries around with him the letter confirming payment to this day.
Then he said to them, “God provided.”
“It doesn’t make sense to us,” the woman explained.
I found this statement illuminating because it shines a light on a fundamental issue American Christians face about money: God’s provision does not make sense to us.
Yesterday’s text for my sermon, Luke 12:22-34, reads in part:
And don’t be concerned about what to eat and what to drink. Don’t worry about such things. These things dominate the thoughts of unbelievers all over the world, but your Father already knows your needs. v. 29-30
Yet, in a culture where, even in the church, personal economic responsibility is lauded as the highest and most important of the virtues, it becomes hard to imagine a scenario where one receives what they need from an outside source that they did not work for.
A Divine Right to Money…and Control
American evangelicalism and its earlier Protestant predecessors came to these shores, predominantly from England and Germany, with a theology that assumed financial prosperity and entrepreneurship went hand in hand with God’s favor.
Eugene McCarraher, professor of Humanities at Villanova, observes that part of what the Protestant Reformation did was rework the “sacred” around material and market metrics. Writes McCarraher, “[they] espoused a systematic theology of the divine right of capitalist property.”1
In many ways, he argues, money and material possessions have become the sacred symbols of a new religion that uses Christian language filled with health and wealth language.2
We can see one of the most extreme versions of this logic applied to the so-called “Prosperity Gospel,” in which we are told to just give God more (i.e., to that specific preacher or ministry) and God will bless us with financial blessings. In fact, when we think about how we use the word “blessing” in our vernacular, it is most often, if not always, associated with some kind of material abundance.
In addition to McCarraher’s observations about money becoming a new religion, we also live in a world influenced by what is called Neo-Liberalism. Thinkers such as Friedrich Hayek and Ludwig von Mises shaped an imagination for an economic system where no ethic or religious virtue would interfere with what they thought to be a perfectly objective system.
The hope was to create an economic system that “naturally” sorted out the best from the worst. “Winners” would rise to the top and “losers” would be crushed, unable to keep up. This is so much of why we feel we are doing something wrong when we do not have as much money as others, or cannot afford that trip, or don’t have a larger investment portfolio. “Winning” in a purely fiducial sense has been turned into a moral virtue, and, in the church, a sign of Christian maturity.
So when someone says the Father providing does not make sense, I get it.
Since we have been raised in a society that tells us to pull ourselves up by our bootstraps and make that money, if we can’t, we believe it is God’s will that we suffer.
Now I’m not advocating for laziness. That’s an unfortunate criticism that often comes back at people who make the kind of observations I mention above. God gave us work, and it is good. It gives us purpose. But it does not define us or give us a sense of security, which is what Neo-Liberalism and the “Protestant work ethic” attempt to do.
We have been raised being told we can make ourselves into whatever we want. We’ve been handed a thin illusion of control over what is actually a quite uncontrollable world.
A Cheerful Giver
We are almost insulted that we might need God’s help. That we might not actually be in control.
We cannot fathom someone making less than $20 a day, having everything they need provided for them. It smacks of laziness, “Can’t they do anything else?” We often wonder curiously. How on earth could they afford a surgery like this while living on so little?
Because of the illusion that we are the ones who are supposed to provide and make a way for ourselves in the world, it is so hard to accept that our Heavenly Father is a cheerful giver.
The Father has given us life. Our very existence is only happening because of the Father, yet we are still in disbelief that God is so pleased to provide everything we need.
I challenged our congregation yesterday to enter into Jesus’ practice of Generosity and Sacrificial Giving. I am convinced that as long as we hold onto what our culture says is most valuable, we will never be able to see how valuable we are to the Father.
It will never make sense to us that “it gives our Father great happiness to give [us] the Kingdom” unless we learn to let go of what we think makes sense.
Eugene McCarraher, The Enchantments of Mammon, 20.
Interestingly, later in McCarraher’s book, he criticizes Communism for an equal obsession with goods and possessions but from the opposite direction. He sees the entire scheme, Capitalist or Communist, as two sides of the same materialist-obsessed coin.