The Gospel According to Extreme Makeover: Home Edition

Extreme Makeover Home Edition, what are you?

1) Prosperity gospel and militant capitalism?

2) Metaphor for the kingdom of God?

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Critique

The recipients of ABC's televised generosity tend to be poor good Samaritans. They are foster parents with ten children and 900 square feet. They are handicapped. They are widows and widowers. They give, and apparently expect nothing.

Their problem is not spiritual or relational, but merely material. The homeschooling mother does the best she can with a little kitchen table. The parents of paralyzed children have no special care features in their tiny house. These are good people; they deserve better stuff.

And better stuff they get. In the course of a few days, they go from grindingly poor to fabulously wealthy (in house terms, anyway). American companies like Sears rush to donate. A jacuzzi replaces the broken tub. The dank family room becomes a hotel-like lobby almost the size of their former home. No longer will they toil in poverty! Their good deeds have earned them a role in the American dream.

And our eyes glisten, because their troubles are over. Good has triumphed. Injustice has been banished. The widow and the orphan are fed, not with the bread of sufficiency, but with the feast of American excess. A metanoia has occurred; the lost have been reclaimed.

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Defense

Who were we if not poor and helpless?

And what could we do without undeserved favor?

And what is that favor if not as excessive as it is unearned?

Comments

[Jeff]

You be asking some powerful and provocative questions!

[Abby]

How amazing that we live in a country where the question of poverty v. wealth is about HOW MUCH we have. I like to think that it is possible to see God in any given situation. Even if it is only a glimpse of hope and optimism on Sunday night TV.

[Alecto]

OK, try this. Once when I was very young and had a baby and a farm mortgage and an unemployed husband and an unfinished degree and couldn't even get a job waiting tables (because I'd never done that) I saw a sign on a message board outside an equipment rental place. I don't even remember what it said, just that it was nice and meant to make people feel nice or not alone or hopeful, and it hit me hard. Between that sign and the next three miles to the next waitress interview something integral shifted in me and I believed. I got this job and put food on the table and I'm in a far different place today. But there was that moment (there were plenty others). I thought of it like this: God can give you food and water if you're starving or maybe God will throw you a pizza and a beer (because He believes that you can) and you will suddenly feel better and get up off your butt and make something different happen. The sign was my pizza and a beer and it worked like gang busters. So I wonder, even though I blanch at home make-overs for the desperate given the need we seem to have to live vicariously through the lives of others - maybe this new house is another form of God's pizza and we have precious little to do with it? What the family does? That's the question, isn't it?

[DB]

I think there may be something to that. My only concern is when people begin to think that is all there is: bigger and better stuff, a more and more comfortable life.