Giving someone a reward can be a good motivator. We see it most obviously in children, but it works on nearly anyone. ‘If you get a good school report, Mummy will take you to Adventure World’. ‘If we get through the whole grocery shop without you whining, Daddy will buy you a Bertie Beetle’. We do it because it works. When there’s a reward involved, humans become more driven. The whole concept of being paid for work is basically a system of rewards. ‘If you meet your sales targets, you’ll get paid. But if you exceed your sales targets there’s a bonus coming’. ‘If you work hard, then you might get promoted to Deputy Sub Vice Manager which brings an extra 11c an hour’ – the rewards don’t even have to be significant! They don’t even have to be real. We get a little buzz from buying raffle tickets and lottery tickets which bring only the chance of reward. That’s how much we crave rewards.
Using rewards as a motivator is primal. There’s a reason we use rewards to train dogs and sheep and cattle. It works, right? We use rewards to create order, to organise families and societies, and to achieve outcomes. Plus, there’s a corresponding benefit. If you use rewards to motivate, you can withdraw the reward as a punishment! Reward-based culture is actually kind-of civilised. It fosters stability and removes some of the need to use violence to get what you want. Like, when I was a kid if I was naughty I got a smack and if I wasn’t naughty I didn’t get a smack. It was an elegant system. But these days, smacking is frowned upon because, well, we don’t want to teach kids to go around hitting people. So instead, we use rewards, and remove the reward when the child is naughty.
So having talked a bit about reward-based culture, I need to tell you that Christianity is a not a reward-based faith, no matter how many people throughout so much of history have tried to make it that. The Christian faith is NOT that if you believe and behave correctly, when you die you will get a Bertie Beetle or a performance bonus. But many of us, including me, have had that version of Christianity instilled into us. Do the right things and think the right things, and God will give you a reward in the form of going to The Good Place when you die. Sometimes I talk to people who are dying (actually we’re all dying, but I mean people who are closer to it) and they’re looking for some reassurance. They sometimes give me an account of the various correct things they’ve done so that I can give my expert opinion on whether they will be promoted to glory or demoted to the fire. As if I would sit with a dying person and say, look, I’ve reviewed your figures and I’m sorry but we’re gonna have to let you go?
This sermon is the fourth in a scintillating and frankly baffling series this Advent called ‘Getting Ready for the End of the World’. It’s also the last, and after Christmas I’m going on holidays, so there’s that at least. We’ve looked at what the early church seemed to believe about God’s great clean-up of the world, and how close it was. We’ve considered current beliefs about the end of all things, and what our actions actually say about what we believe. And we have, inevitably, had to reflect on our own mortality and what it means to be both human and Christian. Advent is certainly a cheery time for such reflections, particularly in this year of global pandemic.
Now, most of us here aren’t anti-semitic. But there are two anti-semitic tropes that Christians trot out with regularity. The first is that the God of the Hebrew Scriptures – the God of the Old Testament – is a nasty, mean God. But the God of the Greek Scriptures – the New Testament – is a nice friendly God. Now this is a heresy, it’s called Marcionism, and we dealt with it in the first few centuries of Christianity. But it keeps popping up, and I often hear people say it rather blithely, as though it doesn’t dismiss three millennia of religious evolution and the faith system of a whole people. The other anti-semitic trope that Christians often repeat is that Jews were the chosen people, but they basically failed at it, so God had to send Jesus to sort things out. This is called supercessionism and it’s one of the ways that Christians have been able to justify treating Jews like trash – basically, they had the chance but they didn’t recognise Jesus as the messiah so now they get to suffer.
But one of the reasons these unhealthy beliefs can flourish in our churches, is that we imagine that being called by God is a reward. That for those who called into the church by baptism or into the family of Jews through birth and circumcision, it’s some kind of a prize. And, we even fall into the trap of thinking that what happens when we die, or what happens in the New Creation when Christ returns, is a kind of merit certificate, acknowledging all the good work we have done during our lives. It’s codswallop, but how many of us have fallen into that trap? How many of us think sometimes that because we pray or go to mass or give to charity or believe fervently in Jesus, then God is going to look after us?
But in the scriptures and in Jewish and Christian history, that’s now how it works. God doesn’t call peoples or individuals in order to give them nice things. Normally, when God calls someone, God makes their life more difficult. Like Mary, right? ‘Ah, Mary, blessed are you amongst women, by the way you’re pregnant and you are going to have a bugger of time as a parent, then watch your kid get murdered. All the best, God.’
And think about your own life. I know that our faith is a source of strength and comfort to many of us, but if faith is primarily about making you feel safe and comfortable, I suspect you’re doing it wrong. Faith in a God who calls us to follow disturbs our settled lives. It upsets our complacency. It makes us do things we wouldn’t otherwise do, and often that means sacrifice and suffering, letting go and giving up. This isn’t a good sales pitch, it’s terrible marketing. But it’s the truth. Following Jesus will not make you happy and get you nice things, either now or in the world to come.
As we get ready for the End of the World this Advent, I wonder if we can escape from the clutches of reward culture? I wonder if we can get away from the toxic belief that we if we just do the right things and tick the right boxes, we’ll meet our key performance indicators and God will give us what we believe we so richly deserve?
Because, and this flies in the face of our conditioning, there is no personal reward for you or for me at the end of it all. The prize is nothing less than the transformation of the whole universe, from brokenness to wholeness. That’s the promise of the return of Christ at the end of the age. Everything is restored. That’s actually the reward – not a trophy for you or me because we were sufficiently religious. But everything healed, and a place where everyone has a home. That’s the reward. That is what is on offer. That’s what you get. I think that’s a great reward, but reward culture, which is inherently competitive, thinks that’s very unfair.
I wonder if, when we hear that there’s no personal rewards, no prizes, no trophies, no bonuses, no applause when this is whole thing reaches its fulfilment, I wonder if like Mary, we have the courage still to say ‘Here am I, the servant of the Lord; let it be with me according to your word’.
The Lord Be With You