Mennonites hate the Green Prosperity Handkerchief

Found this about Don Stewart's crappy hanky from the website of a Mennonite Church (salt of the earth, are the Mennonites. Seriously, they're great, I love them). Here's yon link.

This week I witnessed an extreme example of that as I changed the TV channel to Vision TV. There was a preacher talking in front of a very large congregation, and he was waving around a green handkerchief. And many in the congregation also had green handkerchiefs. He called it a "prosperity handkerchief," and he told his congregation: "If you take this handkerchief and place it on your wallet, God will bless your finances. If you place it on a part of your body where you are sick, God will heal you." And then he turned to the TV audience and placed the handkerchief right next to the camera lens and said: "I invite you to come now and to place your hand on your television screen and touch the green prosperity handkerchief, and God will bless you." It was a classic example of the prosperity gospel, a popular perversion of God's Word, which promises material blessings to a society already richer and healthier than any other in the world. This was a very blatant example of financial idolatry. It rightly turns many people off. But is it any different if we are more subtle in our approach? We may worship the god of money with exuberant excess, but if in our hearts we quietly look to our wealth for security and meaning, isn't that also false worship? Isn't it idolatry in either case?

A Strong Warning: Therefore we need to consider carefully the words the apostle Paul wrote to Timothy: "If we have enough food and clothing, let us be content. But people who long to be rich fall into temptation and are trapped by many foolish and harmful desires that plunge them into ruin and destruction. For the love of money is at the root of all kinds of evil. And some people, eager for money, have wandered from the faith and pierced themselves with many sorrows" (1 Tim. 6:8-10). Today's text contains an even stronger warning for us, when God said to Moses, "Quick! Go down the mountain! The people you brought from Egypt have defiled themselves....They have made an idol, shaped like a calf, and they have worshipped and sacrificed to it....Now leave me alone so my anger can blaze against them and destroy them all." Idolatry is a deadly serious matter, whether we bow down to a golden calf or to gold itself. As Waldermar Janzen writes in his commentary, "It is a terrible thing, deserving the sentence of death, to betray the true Lord and worship idols" (Exodus, Herald Press Commentary).