| Cathleen Falsani

What’s a sermon worth? About $190, scalpers say

Everyone knows the hottest ticket in Chicago for the month of May is U2’s four-night stand at the United Center.

But you may be surprised to learn about the unlikely fellow who’s rolling into town a few days before the Irish rockers and has sent equally rabid fans scrambling for tickets to see his, um, show.

His name is Joel Osteen. And he, too, is a rock star — of sorts.

The same way the Dalai Lama, Billy Graham, Deepak Chopra, and the Pope are.

Osteen, 41, is a charming, leading-man-handsome pastor known to millions of television viewers around the globe for his weekly television program broadcast from his 25,000-member Lakewood Church in Houston, Texas.

On May 5 and 6, Osteen, who is sometimes called “the Smiling Preacher” and resembles a cross between a young Warren Beatty and infomercial king Tony Robbins, brings his national “Worship Tour” to the Allstate Arena in Rosemont.

I learned of Osteen’s eagerly anticipated arrival from a reader who, in a fit of righteous anger, sent me an e-mail decrying the scalping of tickets for what he thought were the sold-out worship events.

“Have these people no morals? No conscience?” Tony of West Chicago wrote. “They are selling $10 tickets for an event dedicated to God and prayer for a hundred bucks or more!! Truly sinful.”

I’ve long thought “thou shalt not scalp tickets” should have been a part of the Decalogue. That and “thou shalt not jump the queue.”

A little online investigation showed that tickets for Osteen’s “Worship Tour” at the Allstate Arena — with a face value of $10 ($13 if you count Ticketmaster’s sadistic “convenience charge”) — were listed on ticket clearinghouse sites all over the Internet for as much as $190 a pop.

Outrageous, indeed. The mark-up is almost as much, relatively speaking, as those listed for tickets to the U2 shows at the United Center where $49.50 floor seats are going for $400-plus, and plum $165 seats are being offered for $1,400.

But why was a preacher charging for tickets to his worship service in the first place?

It doesn’t quite seem like something Jesus would do.

Billy Graham never charges for entry into his crusades and rarely distributes tickets, according to a spokesman for his ministry. And even Benny Hinn, the embattled, too-slick-for-his-own-good televangelist/healer, handed out free tickets for his three-day crusade that packed the United Center last June.

I was beginning to wonder if Osteen, whose book Your Best Life Now: A Faith-based Approach to Living with Enthusiasm has been on the New York Times’ bestseller list for 17 weeks, was trying to make a buck off of spreading the Good News.

A pay-to-pray kind of a deal.

Not at all, according to Don Iloff, a spokesman for Lakewood Church.

“It’s not a moneymaker for us,” Iloff told me Thursday. “It costs $750,000 to put on the event. Do the math. Even at $10 apiece it doesn’t begin to cover it.”

Osteen didn’t want to have tickets at all, and certainly didn’t want to charge for them, but after several non-ticketed events at arenas in Atlanta and California last year where thousands of people were turned away at the door, local law enforcement got nervous with the disappointed crowds, and the pastor had little choice, Iloff explained.

The first ticketed stop on Osteen’s “Worship Tour,” basically a traditional two-hour worship and sermon service, was at New York City’s Madison Square Garden last fall. “They called us at Madison Square Garden and said, ‘You must ticket this event. It will be mayhem if you don’t,” Iloff said.

Well, why not free tickets?

“We really hated the idea of charging,” he said. “We only charged at the Garden because they asked us to.”

If tickets are free, somebody could come in and ask for 100 tickets for their church and then only show up with 30 people, Iloff said, and 70 people who really wanted to go would be shut out.

“Ten bucks is no big deal and people appreciate the fact that they know they have a seat,” and don’t have to worry about arriving hours ahead of time to get a decent seat, he said.

That some people are illegally scalping the tickets or that brokers have them listed for exponentially inflated prices upsets Osteen.

“I shared it with Joel and he was very unhappy that anybody would pay that kind of money to get in. It’s just not right,” Iloff said, adding that Osteen’s ministry is holding back a number of $10 tickets that will be available for walk-ups at the arena each day.

Still, not a few Chicagoans are willing to fork over $100 or more to make sure they can hear the young pastor preach up close and personal — or at least as personal as you can get in an arena with 19,000 other worshippers.

“We’ve seen significant demand for his events,” said Jeff Fluhr, CEO of Stubhub.com, a leading online clearinghouse for concerts and other events. “It’s kind of the U2 of religious speakers.”

While he wouldn’t say how many tickets Stubhub, which has nearly 200 tickets listed for the Allstate dates ranging in price from $45 to $190, has sold for Osteen’s worship gigs, Fluhr said business is brisk.

According to Iloff someone once said, “Joel Osteen is to Christianity what Michael Jordan is to the NBA.”

That may be. I’m sure many people will flock to the arena in Rosemont simply to see the messenger, in this case a charismatic preacher who, among other messages, often tells his faithful that they need to abandon their “poverty mentality.”

I can’t help but look at it another way.

The sold-out arenas and ticket scalping — legal or otherwise — means thousands of people are willing to sacrifice their hard-earned money to listen to the gospel message.

And that, in supposedly secular 2005, is a scandal of a different kind.

You might even call it a revolution.

(P.S. As of late Thursday (3/4), Ticketmaster.com still had tickets available for both Osteen events at the Allstate Arena for the original $10 price.)

In today’s church pulpits, divorce doesn’t rate as sin

Hey, remember when divorce was a sin? Not just a sin, but the sin. The big, controversial, sexy one. The one everyone was preaching about and arguing over. The one that threatened to destroy morality, culture, and, eventually, humanity as we know it.

I started to ponder the demise of divorce, and the rise of same-sex marriage as the sin du jour as the “parental warning” flashed across my television screen before the opening sequence of “The Simpsons” last Sunday night.

Fox apparently felt the need to let parents know that the ensuing episode would contain some content they might find inappropriate for their children. The episode in question was about fictional Springfield, USA, allowing same-sex marriage as a ploy to attract tourists. Oh, yeah, and Marge Simpson’s sister, Patty Bouvier, comes out as a lesbian.

Upon hearing Patty’s news, Homer said: “Yeah, big surprise . . . Here’s another bomb: I like beer!”

That Homerism pretty much summed up the way I felt about Fox’s parental warning. By the way, for all you moms and dads who are out of the loop, “The Simpsons,” despite its bright colors and animation, is not intended for children. Neither is “South Park,” nor “Drawn Together.” And those puppets that make prank calls on Comedy Central: They’re not Muppets.

But I digress.

The “Simpsons” episode, titled “There’s Something about Marrying,” got me thinking about what would have been considered scandalous — or at least vaguely risque — television programming when I was a kid. What would my mother have not wanted me to watch without being warned ahead of time?

“Happy Days.” Circa 1975.

One episode in particular comes to mind. It aired almost exactly 30 years before the same-sex “Simpsons,” on Feb. 25, 1975, and was called “Get a Job.” It’s the one where Richie Cunningham gets a job fixing a fence for Mrs. Kimber, a young, “hot-to-trot” divorcee. They kiss.

Gasp!

Scandalous, sure, with 1975 eyes. But today, a plot twist like that is de rigueur on TV — primetime or otherwise.

In the mid-’70s, on any given Sunday, the evils of divorce were regular sermon fodder. Along with the evils of gambling and working on the Sabbath.

I go to church for a living. Lots of churches, all kinds, all flavors, all over the place. And I can’t remember the last time I heard anyone preach about divorce, never mind working on Sunday.

Pope John Paul II is an exception. Earlier this month, the Vatican reissued guidelines for the church’s annulment process, trying to tighten the reins on what some believe has become a slipshod operation. And in his most recent book, Memory and Identity, the Pope listed divorce among the ills of Western society.

But he used much stronger language when he said gay unions are part of “a new ideology of evil” that threatens society worldwide.

Has divorce been replaced by same-sex marriage?

This question came up recently in a conversation I had with Martin Marty, the University of Chicago professor emeritus and historian of American religion, who knows seemingly everything about the history of religion in the United States and most everywhere else. We were talking about American evangelicals and their spiritual bugaboos.

“Divorce was a sin, now it’s a tragedy,” said Marty, who was recently described by a media critic at New York University’s journalism school as a “church history rock star.” (If you’ve never seen a picture of Marty, he’s bespectacled, has a bald pate, and a penchant for bow ties. Like a bookish septuagenarian Moby.) “It’s certainly a drastic theological move.”

It’s a dramatic shift that seems to have more to do with marketing than morality.

A University of Oregon sociologist named Benton Johnson examined this very phenomenon in a study he did of both moderate/liberal and conservative churches in Oregon, by comparing what their pastors were preaching about in 1962 and 1987.

Johnson found that in ’62, nearly all of the pastors — liberal and conservative — preached against divorce, gambling and alcohol consumption and rallied behind closing businesses on Sunday.

In ’87, Johnson found little or no preaching against divorce, gambling, booze or working on Sunday. And he found deep polarizations in how pastors were sermonizing about homosexuality and same-sex issues.

“A major part of the answer lies, I think, in what these leaders believe their constituency will wholeheartedly support,” Johnson wrote in his report on the 1962-1987 study. “It would be demoralizing to oppose none of these threats; but it would be too costly to oppose all of them.”

You’d be hard-pressed to find a pastor anywhere whose family has not been affected by divorce, Marty said. And a fair percentage of churchgoing, Middle Americans have to work six or seven days a week to make ends meet.

“My son is a pastor in Davenport, Iowa, and the town economy is based on the [gambling] boats. No evangelical pastor is going to get up and say gambling is wrong. He might abhor it, but he’s not going to preach against it because his members are making their income off of it,” Marty said.

“I like to kid that when every ninth evangelical pastor’s son or daughter comes out, you’ll hear less on that subject, too,” he said.

Johnson has promised, if he is still alive, to revisit the Oregon churches again in 2012 to see what they’re preaching about 50 years later.

“What new threats, hardly imagined today, will have come along to displace the old dead issues,” Johnson ponders.

What will the parental advisories warn against in 2012?

And will culture dictate theology, or will art imitate life?