Fourth Presbyterian Church: A Light in the City

January 23, 2022 | 10:00 a.m.

Things Jesus Never Said:
“God Helps Those Who Help Themselves”

Joseph L. Morrow
Associate Pastor, Fourth Presbyterian Church

Psalm 103
Mark 2:1–12

John Aldridge never spent much time thinking about being in need. But one day, Aldridge was minding his own business, hauling in just another catch of lobster on the midnight shift, when disaster struck his small fishing boat off the New England coast (“A Speck in the Sea,” Paul Tough, New York Times Magazine, 2 January 2014). A miscalculation, a slip of his feet, and he was thrown out in the frigid waters of the Atlantic Ocean in the early hours of the morning. What followed was a harrowing ordeal alone on the sea, through which he would need saving and a lot of healing if he were to make it through this calamity.

Seized with terror, two distinct thoughts crossed his mind. The first was rather sobering: ”This is how it ends for me.” But the second was tinged with hope: “No negative thoughts. Stay positive. Stay strong.”

As I consider the course of our days and the conversations I’ve had with many of you in our congregation, these two thoughts strike me as an accurate description of the dilemma in which so many of us find ourselves. We are carrying much, and for different reasons we feel like we are just holding together. It could be another round of COVID patients in the hospital, reluctantly telling patients no on their surgery. Or looking for a job that is life-giving and not life-draining. Or wondering about the well-being of isolated loved ones. Or wondering how our democracy will hold, or how we’ll tackle the looming problems of climate change. Wondering whether we’ll get a break before we break.

And if not during these ever-slippery times, then at some time in our lives we find ourselves between thoughts of our demise and our redemption. On the tight rope between the two, we try to lean into the “no negative thoughts, stay positive, stay strong,” because in moments when help seems impossible to find, these are the thoughts that allow us to save ourselves.

Somewhere in the Galilean countryside, a paralyzed man unable to move a limb hangs in the limbo between the demons of despair telling him of his demise and what his friends have been whispering in his ear: stay positive.

And that positive talk brings us to the subject we’ll explore today: Will God somehow save the day for us? Or must we somehow first come to our own rescue? Is the old adage true–does God only help those who help themselves?

The saying can be traced back to Benjamin Franklin, the American diplomat, inventor, and signer of the Declaration of Independence, but it has become so much of a mantra in our society that it almost doesn’t matter who first coined the phrase. It feels as true as scripture, because we are in many ways a nation of strivers, and strivers seek to help themselves.

One of those strivers found their way here, as a young boy in the modest home of textile workers in a small town in Scotland. At the age of twelve his family fell on hard times financially, borrowed some money from an uncle, and moved to the United States, specifically to Allegheny, Pennsylvania. In the 1800s, around the time Chicago was becoming a boom town, Allegheny was home to a new industrial revolution complete with steel mills, smokestacks, and enterprising people seeking to make a fortune or flourish in their own way.

His name was Andrew Carnegie, and while his name is on schools, charitable trusts, and even a famous concert hall, he began in Pennsylvania as a teenage laborer working his way up to and eventually becoming a steel and railroad executive and, during his time, one of the wealthiest persons on the globe. A story like his became a model for the self-made person, who pulled themselves up from their own bootstraps, rising from rags to riches, from obscurity to prominence. For Carnegie it wasn’t solely to brag about his own ability. His story pushed back against cultures, particularly in Europe and North America, of heredity wealth, where the status of your parents and grandparents dictated the contours of your life, where it was who you know rather than what you know that determined your fate.

By contrast, Carnegie and his kind emphasized ambitiousness, thrift, and intelligence as a kind of manual for prosperity that anyone could follow. In fact, one of Carnegie’s most influential essays was later titled “The Gospel of Wealth,” using that word gospel as a kind of seal of authority, giving his dos and don’ts a kind of religious reliability for success.

Here’s the kind of guidance you’ll hear in its pages: “In bestowing charity, the main consideration should be to help those who will help themselves.”

Sound familiar?

Then he goes on: “To provide part of the means by which those who desire to improve may do so . . . to assist but rarely or never to do all.” “Those worthy of assistance, except in rare cases, seldom require assistance.”

How badly do we want to make ourselves worthy of assistance? Worthy of a rescue, worthy of a healing, and perhaps worthy of love, whether God’s or someone else’s. Worthiness is something we try to demonstrate through our hustle, our willingness to burn the midnight oil or wake up at 4:00 a.m. We try to prove it by making ourselves presentable with fashions that speak to the confidence we want to exude. We try to make ourselves worthy by studying up, saying the right words, quoting the right authors, putting on a happy face to hide our anxiety and fear that we will never be enough.

The gospel of wealth that promises to help those who help themselves is not all that different from the gospel of self-help that oozes out from best sellers on the New York Times list, or the carefully curated pages of Instagram, or the motivational videos we can find on YouTube. This is a gospel that, as one sociologist has put it, is about success being “actively and aggressively” pursued through hard work, being a good and moral person, doing what we know is right, relying on no one but ourselves (Robert Wuthnow, American Mythos: Why Our Best Efforts to Be a Better Nation Fall Short). It’s all part of our national love affair that I call the “Do It Yourself Life”—that we are can piece together a good and worthy life on the basis of our own strength and determination, purchasing what we need from the marketplace of self-improvement.

But my fear is that when we find ourselves with our backs against the wall that sometimes the DIY life and gospel of self-help does harm. It backfires when we simply tell others who are falling behind to just keep at it or tell ourselves to toughen up when our body, mind, and spirit is broken down. It’s as if we were back in that Galilean house with Jesus, telling the paralytic, “You know, all this could have been avoided if you just put money into your disability account. You know, if you just strengthen one muscle for five minutes a day, then perhaps in a month you could start moving those limbs.” As if the paralytic, our loved one, or even we haven’t been trying hard enough.

But that’s not to say there isn’t any way that we might help ourselves. Last week when we choir offered us a stirring and haunting rendition of the freedom song “We Shall Overcome,” I was reminded of how it would rile up the sentiments of my sometimes-contrarian father. Now don’t get me wrong: he loved the music of the civil rights movement and could be moved by it as many are, but you have to understand he was a religious skeptic. While he was comfortable with the Sunday shout, he was always pining for what the church was going to do on Monday morning. And whenever he heard this song, he was fond of saying, “Well, Joe, if they didn’t get to marchin’ that song would have just been a pretty song.”

In other words, all the beauty of those words—“we shall overcome one day”—would fall flat if it weren’t for people who ready to “walk hand in hand” as the song says, out of the comfort of the sanctuary and into the gritty world outside to live, risk, and maybe even die to make them true. And being the religious person I am now, I realize that what my father, and those like him, are trying to instill in us as people of faith is that we must take the initiative. Rather than serve God with our prayers, we must be willing to literally step out on faith to do as the prophet Isaiah commended:

“Loose the chains of injustice
and untie the cords of the yoke,
to set the oppressed free
and break every yoke.
. . Then your light will break forth like the dawn,
and your healing will quickly appear.” (Isaiah 58:6, 8)

But we would be quick to miss the forest for the trees if we believed that the power to walk out of the sanctuary and actively heal a broken world is mustered by one person’s resolve or strength alone. We know what animated the civil rights movement and drives the achievements of many social movements to this day is the power of community. There would be no Dr. King without a Reverend Howard Thurman to mentor him or a Fannie Lou Hamer to broaden his views on women and political empowerment. And none of us alone has the courage or the perseverance to tackle the great problems before us. But we are steadied and buoyed by the willingness of others to stand by us when our faltering feet need steadying. When we need to be reminded of our worth.

And so all those stories of success that come to us in the gospels of wealth and self-help usually only tell one side of the story. They decouple triumph over adversity from the other people in their lives who made it possible. This doesn’t just cheat us out of a more interesting story; it actually undercuts the moral basis for our success, because if the presence and support of others is what secures our achievements, then we have a social and moral obligation to the well-being of those communities. Our individual lives are entangled in a web of social relationships that enable success.

Which brings us to the most puzzling feature of our scripture passage. Why in the middle of this story of healing is there all this intense debate about forgiveness? “What is easier, your sins are forgiven or take up your mat and walk?” In the eyes of most people both feats are nearly impossible. Who can heal someone who is beyond healing? Who can forgive but the one who was offended? Who is this poor Galilean prophet to attempt to do either one?

But Jesus is merely pronouncing what has already been done—not simply because Jesus said it but because of the demonstrated faith of four people who were so driven, not about their success as much as the plight of their friend, that they would cut through the roof to see him healed. And in the process an ailing man, isolated and seemingly on his own, was reknit into the welcoming bonds of community. If sin is banishment, this forgiveness is return. If this forgiveness is a social act, perhaps healing is too.

Four individuals proved with every footstep the poetry of Dr. Maya Angelou when she said,

Lying, thinking
Last night
How to find my soul a home
Where water is not thirsty
And bread loaf is not stone
I came up with one thing
And I don’t believe I’m wrong
That nobody,
But nobody
Can make it out here alone.
(Maya Angelou, “Alone”)

When John Aldridge felt alone, adrift at sea, hundreds of volunteers came to his aid, combing the ocean for his whereabouts. Ultimately a rescue swimmer, having been dropped in a harness from a helicopter, hauled him into a basket clipped to a helicopter to be lifted to safety and restored to life.

When it comes down to it, the biggest problem with the phrase “God helps those who help themselves” is not that God or we play a role in our salvation; it’s that the sentence is only about me and God. In reality, if we take our cues from these stories we don’t have to prove our worth to ensure God’s promises of rescue. The community is God’s gift, without which our self-help is ineffectual.

Let me suggest a better phrase: “God helps us and invites us to help each other.” Now that, friends, is no half-truth or misleading story. It is 100 percent the gospel. We are not alone. Thanks be to God. Amen.