Half Truths, Part 2: God Helps Those Who Help Themselves

 Friends, we’re now in part 2 of 5 of a sermon series that I’m basing on a book called Half Truths, written by a Methodist pastor named Adam Hamilton. In this book, Hamilton has us look at five Christian cliches that serve a purpose, and can help in limited doses, but that also tend to do harm.

This week we’re looking at “God helps those who help themselves”. Of the five cliches Adam explores in the book, this is the one that folks are most certain must be in the Bible somewhere. A study done in the early aughts by the Barna Group revealed that most folks on the street–8 in 10–think this phrase is in the Bible, and many swear it’s one of the Ten Commandments. When pressed further on where in the Bible this phrase must be, respondents to that Barna Group study said “uh…did Jesus say it?” Even when respondents had no idea where in the Bible this phrase shows up, they still insisted it was very important to Christian faith. You gotta pull yourself up by your own bootstraps, right?

In case you didn’t see this coming, “God helps those who help themselves” is not in the Bible. It’s not in the Ten Commandments, it’s not in “all that stuff Jesus said” (so, you know, the Gospels), Paul didn’t write it, the prophets didn’t urge us to heed it as advice, David didn’t pen it into song lyrics in the Psalms, Solomon didn’t immortalize it as wisdom in the Proverbs, it wasn’t sticking out of the forbidden fruit Adam and Eve ate, like the little paper in your fortune cookie. It ain’t in the Bible. 

In fact, this phrase predates Christianity altogether. Aesop wrote it in his fable “Hercules and the Waggoner”: “the gods help them that help themselves”. This is 500 years before Jesus, in the context of polytheistic hellenism. Hardly the heart of “the Jesus stuff”. 2,000 years after Aesop, a British politician named Algernon Sidney repeated the phrase. And then Ben Franklin included that advice in Poor Richard’s Almanac in the year 1736, and it exploded in popularity. Remember what I said last week, about how many of our Founding Fathers believed in something called Deism? This is a prime example of that philosophy. Franklin believed in a God who created the world, and us, set it all in motion, and then flew off to a nice retirement resort in Cabo. A Deist, like Franklin, believed that of course you’d have to help yourself first before God would even put down his Pina Colada, get out of the hammock, and make eye contact with you. Because that God doesn’t intervene. You’re on your own.

And if you happen to like the Deist way of thinking, you’d have been in good company in the 1700s. If you bump into the likes of Ben Franklin, Thomas Jefferson, or George Washington someday in heaven y’all can tell each other all about it. But that’s not the only way to understand Divine intervention. It wasn’t what Wesley believed, it’s not what I believe, and I’d argue it doesn’t line up well with what Jesus taught. 

Mind you, like with all of these cliches, there’s always a granule of truth in them that allowed them to become popular in the first place. In the case of “God helps those who help themselves”, it’s certainly true that God empowers us to action. We see this consistently through Jesus, both in his healing miracles and in his parables. In this morning’s Gospel lesson we get the latter. Jesus, thinking on the fly, comes up with a relatable story about the boss at a big business where lots of people owe money, and one of the managers at such a business. If you can tolerate my editorializing, think of the big business boss as the CEO of Sallie Mae, and the manager as someone who keeps tabs on your student loan payments. The CEO of Sallie Mae says this manager isn’t shaking down enough broke millennials for their monthly payments, so he’s getting canned. Jesus makes it clear: bullying people to repay unjust debts to collect money you don’t even need is wrong. The manager is getting fired because he wasn’t doing a good enough job of oppressing the poor. He isn’t exactly on the right track just yet, but he’s veering off the wrong one. He’s listening to his conscience, to the still small voice of God within him. Wrapping up his work at Sallie Mae before he packs up his desk and leaves his key, this manager decides the right thing to do is use his small amount of power to help people erase their debts, so he calls his customers and they say “Oh God, why is Sallie Mae calling?” and he tells them to go edit their promissory notes and cut their debt in half. The real twist comes at the end of this story, when the boss, the CEO, praises the manager for using his power to do good, and for teaching everyone something valuable about the dangers of hoarding wealth, especially when you’re picking the pockets of people who have nothing to give you. There’s a few different examples of these kinds of parables throughout the four Gospels, where, in Jesus’ telling of the story, the big bad boss character sees the light by the end of the story. Jesus was a realist, but he also taught us all to believe that, just because we don’t see the mighty come off their thrones and help very often, doesn’t mean they can’t, or that they never will. Our works of mercy are enough to change hearts. Kindness matters.

Jesus teaches us to figure out what we’re capable of doing, and then go do it. He also asks us to discern what we really want. We see this repeatedly in his healing miracles, he doesn’t give sight to the blind or mobility to the paralyzed just because he can see they lack those abilities. First, he talks to them. He asks their name. And he asks them what they want, and if they’re ready to receive it. He wants us to invest in our own healing. He asks us to own our part, and do the work. He abides by a philosophy that our Catholic friends call “ora et labora”, a Latin phrase that means “pray and work”. 

But he doesn’t mail out bills for services rendered afterward. He doesn’t follow up with any of the folks he heals, and he doesn’t look into whether their lives are so changed by their healing that it was worth it for him to stop and make a miracle happen. He freely extends grace. Grace, by definition, is an unearned gift. Or, put differently, grace is when God helps those who can’t, don’t, and won’t help themselves. In the words of 20th Century journalist and social justice activist Dorothy Day, “the Gospel forever takes away our right to discriminate between the deserving and the undeserving poor.” “God helps those who help themselves” runs the risk of that discrimination, of a judgment that doesn’t belong to us. It’s our duty as followers of Christ to help the poor, end of sentence. “God helps those who help themselves” also dismisses our responsibility to help when we’re able to by putting all the onus on God to intervene and the person in need to take action. We have a very important part to play. As Pope Francis put it: “You pray for the hungry, and then you feed them. That is how prayer works.” And far from a “pull yourself up by your bootstraps” mentality, the love ethic of Jesus was more consistent with the teachings of Dr. King, who once said, “It is a cruel jest to say to a bootless man that he should lift himself by his own bootstraps. It is even worse to tell a man to lift himself by his own bootstraps when somebody is standing on the boot.”

Like most of the cliches we’re going to look at in this series, “God helps those who help themselves” would be good advice if it were shorter: God helps. If we must say more, God helps, and then we help. And then a person who needs help gets their power back, and starts helping themself. And then God helps. And then we keep helping. And as long as we live in a world where the folks around us worship wealth and leave their neighbors in dire straits, we have plenty of helping to go do, so it’s high time to ora et labora.

Amen.