An Open Letter to Joel Osteen

BycpowellPublished on September 1, 2017 SHARE TWEET


Texas Mega-church Pastor Joel Osteen has come under a lot of fire this week for at first not opening the church as a shelter for his fellow Houston residents and then for how long it took him to do it after the internet put pressure on him to help his neighbors in the wake of the devastating Hurricane Harvey.

North Carolina progressive Pastor John Pavlovitz, one of our favorites, has penned an open letter to Osteen, and suggesting that his behavior surrounding Harvey is not surprising in light of the phony baloney “Christian” life Osteen has been living.

Here is the whole letter:

Dear Joel Osteen,

Over the past few days you’ve faced an unrelenting wave of Internet shaming, and you’ve experienced the wrath of millions of people who watched the week unfold and determined they were witnessing in you and your megachurch’s response to the hurricane—everything they believe is wrong about organized Christianity; its self-serving greed, its callousness, its tone-deafness in the face of a hurting multitude, its lack of something that looks like Jesus.

They questioned your initial silence and your closed doors.

They watched with disdain as local Mosques and furniture stores rushed to receive newly homeless victims while you waited.

They shook their heads at the conflicting stories of a flooded church and impassable roads.
They lamented you tweeting out that “God was still on his Throne,” while thousands of your neighbors were literally under water.

They saw your social media expressions of “thoughts and prayers” as hollow and disingenuous, knowing the stockpile of other resources at your disposal.

They witnessed with disgust what they deemed as your late and underwhelming act of kindness performed under duress.

They raged at your excuse that Houston didn’t ask you to receive victims—because (whether Christian or not) they realized that Jesus’ life was marked by an overflow of generosity and compassion and sacrifice that rarely required official invitation.

As a result of the pushback and condemnation you received, I imagine you feel like this has been a rough week. It hasn’t. You’ve had the week you probably should have had, all this considered. You’ve had the week that was coming long before rain ever started falling in Houston.

For quite a while, Pastor, many people have rightly concluded that the kind of opulence you sit nestled in no way resembles the homeless, itinerant street preacher Jesus who relied on the goodness of ordinary people to provide his daily needs. They rightly recognized that mansions are not places that servant leaders emulating this humble, foot-washing Jesus occupy. They correctly saw the massive chasm between the ever-grinning, your ship is coming in, name it and claim it prosperity promise that is your bread and butter—and the difficult, painful, sacrificial “you will have trouble” life that Jesus and those who followed him lived in the Gospels.

They also see the great disparity between your coddled, cozy, stock photo existence—and the sleep-deprived, paycheck to paycheck, perpetually behind struggle that is their daily life.

And yet despite their difficulties and their deficits and their lack (the kind you have been well insulated from for a long, long time), these same folks understand that when people around you are in peril—you respond. You don’t wait for an invitation, you don’t wait to be shamed by strangers, and you don’t make excuses.

That’s why many of these ordinary, exhausted, pressed to the edge people, lined up as human chains in filthy, rushing, waist-high water to pull people out of submerged vehicles. It’s why they came from hundreds of miles with boats and at their own expense and using vacation days, to pluck strangers from rooftops. It’s why they gave money and clothing and food and blood (and some of them like Officer Steve Perez)—their very lives acting in the way Jesus said was the tangible fruit of their faith.

Many of the people whose very dollars helped build the massive, tricked out arena you call home every week, showed you how decent people respond to need. I hope you were paying attention. I hope you’re different today than you were a week ago. I really hope something penetrated that seemingly disconnected exterior and found a home in your heart.

Because someday, Pastor, the waters in Houston will recede and homes will be rebuilt and normalcy will eventually return there. And to a large degree the attention and the pressure you’ve received this week will find other places to reside, and you will return to the work and the life you’ve had before, relatively unaffected.

It’s then that I hope you’ll remember this week. It’s then I hope you’ll recall the parable Jesus tells of the Good Samaritan, who though a despised pariah in the place he found myself, responded to a stranger’s need with immediacy and vigor while the religious people walked right by. This Samaritan showed mercy, not because he was guilted into it or because he was asked—but simply because he knew that we are one another’s keepers; that we each have resources we are entrusted with, and the way we share or hoard those resources reflect our hearts.

I hope you’ll remember Jesus on the hillside feeding the multitude, not because they petitioned him and not because it was in his job description—but because they were hungry and he wasn’t okay with that.

I don’t know you. I don’t believe you’re a bad person. You’re quite likely a good, loving, and decent man—but good, loving, and decent people lose the plot, they get distracted, they get it wrong, they need to recover their why.

You had a difficult week, but you are safe and dry, and despite the criticism and pushback, blessed with more abundance than most people will ever know. That’s good news for you. I don’t hold any of that against you.

The even better news, Pastor Osteen, is that you are alive. You are still here and you have a chance now to show people that Christianity is far more than their greatest fears about it, much better than the worst they’ve seen of Christians, and more beautiful than the ugliness they’ve experienced in the Church.

You have the chance to leverage your resources and your platform and your influence to show a watching world something that truly resembles Jesus.

Don’t wait for an invitation.

Jesus already gave you one.

That is a mic-drop moment if there ever was one. Well done, Pastor. Well done indeed.

August 29th 12 years later

Warning, the following is a stream of conciousness, written while I watch TV coverage from Texas and remember Katrina's anniversary.  

Twelve years to the day, we find ourselves in a tropical storm mode, watching the Houston Texas area drowning in the rainfall from Harvey (a hurricane name that will probably be retired, like Katrina).

Watching the images of rescue from the floodwaters is having a strong negative affect on those that lived through Katrina.  PTSD is raising its ugly head in Katrina land.

Many things have changed since 2005: social media assures that we receive up-to-the-minute information and images via Facebook and Twitter; there are community portals, neighborhood web sites, and local discussion lists; cell phones are more prevalent than in 2005, text messaging helps people communicate   and find one another; there are many more  cell phone towers too.  Katrina taught us what to have ready in case of a storm: nearly everyone I know in this area has a fairly new generator, needed for long periods of electricity loss.

We have learned NOT to wait for the government to come to our rescue.
 
The Cajun Navy was born in after Katrina to help flood victims quickly and without red tape.

Cajun Navy headed to Texas
 
We will always have the memory of fear, sadness, anger, revulsion, etc.  These feelings come automatically whenever we read/see/hear about disasters.  Especially hurricanes.

Watching Harvey coverage unfold is hard, it brings back memories to August of 2005.  Not only in Southeast Louisiana, but also on the Mississippi Gulf Coast, which took a direct hit from the storm.

Biloxi Mississippi after Katrina

The city of New Orleans, 80% which was submerged due to levee failures,   is STILL being screwed over by the very people whose job it is to be sure the pumping stations are working.

NOLA after Katrina. I still think of this picture whenever I hear helicopters

Much of the city flooded on August 5th of this year due to the fact that 14 out of 24 pumping stations were not working during a strong rainstorm.   Here's hoping that most of those pumps work hard this week with Harvey coming to visit.

Of course some things never change:  the haters are still out there in droves, asking the same idiotic questions, putting people down for being poor, black, ethnic.  People are gouging the hell out of victims.  Hopefully, karma will be visiting these "people" soon.

If you've read this far and are curious about what it was like on August 29, 2005, go to this link for the now defunct Times-Picayune's coverage of the storm.  Just reading a bit of it put that lump in my throat.  So much suffering and no one could help.

The only "live" coverage we had for about a month after the storm was WWL radio,  whose on air personalities became like family members to us. 

Curious about what it was like in the early aftermath?   local reporter Chris Rose penned a  number of newspaper articles  during the months after the storm that many Katrina veterans could identify with.  The collection eventually came together in the book "One Dead In Attic".

So 12 years on a lot has changed: new buildings, new homes, new stores, new restaurants.  New Orleans' streets still suck, the crime rate is still as bad as before Katrina, but the city is buzzing in many good ways.   The Mississippi Gulf Coast is a great entertainment destination, and all new construction from Waveland to Ocean Springs is a must see (I still need to see some of it).  Slidell, where I live is still a boring Northshore town, but I like it like that, just small enough.  Every once in a while we run into people at the store or a festival and the conversation usually finds it way to "the storm".  Everyone has stories of ruin and survival.  There is a special kinship that has been borne between veterans of "the storm".

So I say "thanks, Katrina" in a different tone than I did 10 years ago.  Thanks for all the good that has happened since we walked outside on that August afternoon  and saw a whole new, scary world.  I think after all we  experienced,  we find ourselves smarter and we possess the empathy necessary to get through life.

News from Hurricane Harvey

This dog is walking around Sinton TX carrying a entire bag of dog food with him. LOL #refugee

PSA: Owner is found. He is not a stray he just got out on his street.
Dogs name is Otis.