Mercy, Not Justice

Recently, I went to pray with the family of a deceased elderly patient. I'd met one of the children a few days previously when I went into the room to introduce myself to the patient and this particular (middle aged) child. The patient was polite but firm, no that patient didn't need a Chaplain. So, here I am a few days later with all the children praying with them upon the - not unexpected - death of a parent.

"Tell me about your parent" I asked. The children told me that the parent had been angry with God on account of the tragic death of another one of their siblings a number of years ago. Then one of them asked me a question that I've been asked once before in my short tenure as a Chaplain: could God accept their parent into heaven if that parent had been angry with God over the death of that child? And then one of them said "We want you to pray for mercy, not justice."

Justice? I passionately believe in God's justice. But I'm not so sure that God's justice has a lot to do with the "sending to hell" of a person whose heart is broken. And that's what I said: "I don't think that God condemns a person to hell for having a broken heart." Now, I have no idea if this particular individual was "going to heaven" but I'm certain in my own heart that they aren't going to be "sent" to hell against their will for not being able to get over their grief.

I also noticed that, when I said that, all the children started crying and they all thanked me afterward.

Here is one place where I think popular notions of salvation and what it means to be a Christian do Jesus and Scripture a disservice. Popular Christianity has turned "faith in Jesus" into some kind of an intellectual assent that has nothing to do with Justice. So, we name people as "just" who assent to certain ideas about Jesus. And they don't even have to actually try to change their lives according to Jesus' teachings; all they have to do is assent to certain ideas about him. And we name as "unjust" people who don't assent to certain ideas, even those whose heart is broken. And we are certain that such people are "unjust" even if they visit the sick and imprisoned and feed the hungry.

This accounting-version of what it means to be a Christian also does a disservice to the concept of "Justice". Any honest reading of Scripture on the subject of "justice" will demonstrate that the biblical concept of justice is not some kind of complicated, abstract, doctrinal mental Olympics. Scriptural justice is very similar to plain, straightforward, everyday justice: don't harm others. Don't steal, don't exploit, don't take advantage just because you can. And it's also more than that: God's people are called beyond the don'ts into the realm of the do's: Do help, do give a hand up, do empower.

Faced with an unjust person whose soul cries out to God: "I harmed, I killed, I stole, I was self-centered, and I'm proud of it. I don't want anything to do with repentance and I don't want anything to do with You. Eternity in Your presence would be hell" I believe that God will grant the person's wish to be outside of the Kingdom for all eternity.

I do not, however, believe in a God who sends a broken-hearted parent unwillingly to eternal torture on grounds of "justice".

If God's mercy is ultimately smaller than the best mercy that we humans can conceive of, then ours is indeed a very small god.

Christian Economic Life - Post 3: Human Rights

I wanted to think a bit about human rights in the context of Christian economic life. This might seem like a digression, but I don't think it is because a lot of the debate about what kind of economic system is just often seems to center around the concept of human rights.

The first problem I have is about talking about human rights is that, theologically, I don't believe in them. According to Christian theology everything that human beings have is mercy or grace, including our very lives. The Lord gives and the Lord takes away, blessed be the name of the Lord. Therefore, if we are speaking strictly in Christian theological terms, we can't really speak about "rights".

However, I'm not ready to dismiss the concept of human rights out of hand. I suspect that, no matter which position one takes in regard to economics, all of us would have an instinctive problem with the "tough luck" approach. "You are poor, despite working 18 hours a day, tough luck; in the eyes of God you have no rights." Or "You worked hard for that money, but we're taking it away from you in order to help others less fortunate than you; tough luck, in the eyes of God you have no rights." I suspect that at least one of those statements will rankle you!

For me, the concept of "human rights" is a secular expression of the Arminian (and catholic) theological belief that "God is no respector of persons" (to use the KJV/AV language).

Theologically, I believe that God wants all people to come to him, regardless of rank, status, skin color, community affiliation, sexual orientation, gender or any other characteristic that people can think of. God does not love aristocrats more than peasants. He does not love rich people more than poor people. He does not love men more than women. As the African congregation I served in London often said at the beginning of the service: "Whoever you are, you are welcome here. Whatever you nationality, tribe, language, skin color or gender, everyone is welcome in the house of God."

This message seems like something so natural to many of us in the United States, that we don't even question it. Yet, it was certainly part of Jesus' original Good News, because it was taken for granted in the Greco-Roman culture that the gods did prefer some people to others and that - for example - aristocrats, men, and the freeborn were ontologically better people than peasants, women and slaves. My African readers can correct me if I'm wrong, but one of the reasons this message was so powerful in the London African congregation was that, back home, different tribal groups were often viewed as being ontologically better than others. This congregation understood this part of the Good News because the opposite reality had been part of their life experience.

I think that this theological conviction that "God is no respector of persons" can very adequately be expressed in secular language by the idea that all people are endowed with certain inalienable rights. It is actually the matter of "What are these rights?" that is probably going to be the big bone of contention. I'll try to start thinking about that in the next post.

Blame, Shame and Learning

I want to pick up on some thoughts from a sentence that I heard this morning. The sentence is: "I am less interested in placing blame than I am in learning what went wrong so we can fix these problems"* (please see the disclaimer below)

This is a worthwhile sentiment which can also be a tricky one and those who read this blog-post today will likely recognize the very "tricky" context in which it was said. The most obvious objection to this sentiment is does this mean it's perfectly OK to be sloppy, incompetent or uninterested in doing a good job? If you are not pulled up for being sloppy, incompetent or uninterested, how will you learn to do better next time? And what about those individuals who may end up unintentionally victimized by your incompetence? Don't they deserve the satisfaction of seeing you punished?

I acknowledge these objections. I acknowledge the fact that sometimes individuals have responsibilities that, for whatever reason, they are uninterested in fulfilling and which they deliberately shirk. I acknowledge that there should be consequences for irresponsibility and that people who are deliberately and willfully irresponsible should not be constantly let off the hook.

But the thing is that things do go wrong in life. There are many times when failures are systemic and the failure is not really a matter of an individual being uninterested or incompetent. Sometimes there can be systemic failure even with everyone doing their job correctly. And yet we still love to try to single out an individual on whom to place the blame, whether or not they could reasonably be said to have caused the problem or even had the power to stop it.

We are often more interested in finding a scapegoat to punish than we are in learning from our mistakes and fixing the system. I think I might go out on a limb and suggest that more often than not, we are satisfied when we have found someone to punish and we don't even bother trying to learn anything from our mistakes. Wouldn't it make a lot more sense if we put the majority of our efforts into learning from our mistakes?

I've just started a new job and there is a lot of detail involved in the training. Yesterday, a co-worker worked with me for a few hours and she caught many of the mistakes I made. And this is how I really learned: I made a mistake, she caught the mistake, asked me what was wrong, I removed the mistaken item and placed it in the correct place and moved on. I learned from this because *I* physically corrected my own mistakes. I learned from this much more than I would have learned by watching my co-worker do the job.

I think that there is theology here too. Christianity tells us that God is a God of grace, mercy and forgiveness. God is like my co-worker: catching our mistakes, asking us what we did wrong, asking us to correct our own mistakes and then helping us to learn from our mistakes so we can move on into a new future. God is not like many of us; God is not just waiting to blame and punish us with no care or thought about whether or not we have learned anything.

I want to live in a world where I can learn from my mistakes. What about you?

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* Disclaimer: I am not trying to comment specifically on today's news item about the failure to catch "the Christmas bomber". I am also not trying to signal blanket or uncritical approval for everything President Obama said, says or will say. I am not interested in a partisan conversation here; I'm interested in the idea and the attitude behind this statement.

Too Compassionate?

Many people get the message, one way or another, that God is both angry and vindictive and that one of the things he gets angry at is wishy-washy Christians who don't lay down the law and demand that others are scrupulous in their obedience to God.

I found this post by Rev J extremely helpful. (Hat tip to John at Come to the Waters)

Another thing my mentor said that will stick with me forever is that he has seen nothing in the Bible about people getting into trouble for having too much compassion. He said, “When I die and I meet Jesus I can see him upset that I judged too much but I cannot envision him telling me he is angry because I had too much compassion.”

Learning, Growing and Goofing

I don't mean 'goofing off' as in 'wasting time.' I mean 'goofing' as in 'sincerely trying and getting it wrong.'

Will made an excellent comment in a previous post when he wrote about going to a leadership conference:

I heard from a guy talking about how we tend to focus on our weaknesses rather than trying to grow our strengths. I wonder if when we (or those teachers in our churches) focus on what we are doing wrong almost exclusively if we hear a message that God is more of a hatchet man waiting for us to do something wrong rather than praise us, and even more encourage us, in what we do right.

Sometimes we can learn by listening to the experience and the warnings of other people. Other times, the only way we can learn is to do our best, to try something and to get it wrong. This process is part of being human and, I think, it's also a big way that human beings learn.

I think that sometimes I live by a 'better safe than sorry' approach to God. I assume that God's biggest demand of me is that I don't put a foot wrong, that I don't goof up. But when you think about it, shouldn't 'grace' help us to dare in the service of God? To dare to be prophetic? To dare to do things differently? And, if we get it wrong because we sincerely tried to serve God, won't God forgive us? Certainly if we believe that he is a God of mercy and a God of grace, we can believe in God's forgiveness.

Confessing Weakness

This morning, as I try to do on a Wednesday morning, I attended the service of Holy Communion at my local Anglican Church and I prayed the familar words of the prayer of confession from Common Worship:

Father eternal, giver of light and grace,
we have sinned against you and against our neighbour,
in what we have thought,
in what we have said and done,
through ignorance, through weakness,
through our own deliberate fault.

It was the phrase "through weakness" that hit me this morning.

I've always thought that confessing having sinned through weakness was saying that one had done something like broken one of the Seven Deadly Sins. For example a prayer on the order of, "Dear Lord, forgive me for having got angry at my Christian sister".

But this week, there have been times when I felt that I'd tried to do the right thing, that I honestly didn't know what to do for the best, and that I'd "missed the mark". It occured to me this morning, that I was forgiven for these sins of weakness too.

The Lord is merciful and gracious, slow to anger and abounding in steadfast love. (Psalm 103:8)