Jitterbugging for Jesus

He’s a nice guy, I’m sure.

I spent a lot of time and way too many budget-busting dollars prowling around American bookstores back home and loading up my suitcases with books. I found that some things in American bookstores never change.

Take Joel Osteen. Please.

Book stores–secular and Christian book stores–love this guy.

Can you say sales?

Can you say $$$$$?

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I’m not a big fan of Osteen and what is often described–and rightfully so–as his “Theology Lite.”

As TV preachers go, he’s certainly a “success” in that he has millions upon millions of faithful TV viewers, not to mention kazillions of buyers of his books and tapes and such. Every bookstore I tramped around in back home had his books and tapes and stuff prominently displayed in the Christian and Religion sections.

But my many issues with Osteen start with the issue of his gargantuan Houston church not having a cross anywhere to be found in it or outside of it. It seems to me that a Christian church with no cross is like a football field with no goal lines or goal posts and, for that matter, no out-of-bounds.

This omission of a cross, however, fits with Osteen’s “prosperity theology,” where the message essentially is that if you just do good and positive Christian kinda stuff, God will richly bless you not only spiritually but materially. You’ll be blessed with a good job, nice car and teeth that never need cleaning or whitening.

God is that good.

Look at Osteen himself–he’s such a good guy and preaches such happy gospel love that God has blessed him and the Mrs. with kazillions of dollars and possessions. They have prospered like nobody from prosperity theology.

What is left out of the Osteen message, however, is that bad and horrible things happen to even good people who worship at the altar of the church of Osteen. I think it was Jesus–or was it beer lover Martin Luther–who said that the rain falls on the good and the righteous alike.

Forgive me for being critical here, you legions of Osteen fans and admirers. I’m sure he’s a genuinely nice guy, just like the guy he presents himself to be to all those kazillions of fans and admirers who watch his TV show and buy his books and tapes and stuff.

But here’s one hitch: Jesus wasn’t always a nice guy. Had he been as nice as Joel Osteen seems to be–and had he preached the kind of really nice guy, “prosperity gospel” that Osteen preaches, he never would have been tortured and nailed to a cross to die a horrible death.

So maybe it’s fitting, after all, that Osteen’s “church” has no sign of a cross.

I just have to say that I think Joel Osteen is a great salesman who is selling a sweet self-improvement message that no doubt makes people feel good about life and themselves–at least until something really, really and really bad happens to such good people.

Osteen is not a preacher nor even a teacher of the true gospel of our Lord and savior Christ Jesus who in referencing Psalm 22 cried out like a very human being from the cross, with blood trickling down from head to toe, “My God! My God! Why have you forsaken me?”

Pastor Angus at First Methodist Church in the capital city of Belmopan, Belize, making the sign of the ashes at the church’s evening Ash Wednesday service I attended.

The official religion in the time of Jesus taught that the Messiah would be a heroic figure of the sort who would ride into town on a big white steed wielding a sword and doing the Superman thing on oppressive religious authorities, not to mention the Romans who held power over the religious authorities and everybody else.

The disciples themselves were conditioned to expect this sort of Messianic savior, which is why Peter reacted strongly against the cross. The gospel according to Mark says this in chapter 8:

“[Jesus] then began to teach them that the Son of Man must suffer many things and be rejected by the elders, the chief priests and the teachers of the law, and that he must be killed and after three days rise again. He spoke plainly about this, and Peter took him aside and began to rebuke him.”

Someone condemned to die on the cross was considered “cursed by God” according to the law of God as spelled out in Deuteronomy 21: 22-23. Get out your bible and look that one up, you who yearn to be students of the cross that is nowhere to be found in a famous Houston megachurch.

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The Lenten journey to glory is through the cross. There’s just no two ways–horizontal or vertical–around the importance and significance of the Christian cross, which, by the way, is not so much costume jewelry to be worn with your Easter bonnet.

Not that I have a serious issue with Christian crosses worn as jewelry and I love women in Easter bonnets.

But Christian crosses missing from buildings supposedly sanctified as churches–and Christian theology without the cross–with that I have bones to pick.