On Salvation: Luke's Story of Lazarus and the Rich Man

On Salvation: Luke’s Story of Lazarus and the Rich Man

I was recently discussing Luke’s story of Lazarus and the rich man with a small group of people at a local retirement facility. You’ll find that story at Luke 16:19-31. In it a rich man lives in luxury while a beggar named Lazarus suffers at the rich man’s gate longing to eat the crumbs that fall from the rich man’s table. Both of them die. Lazarus rests in the bosom of Abraham. The rich man suffers in the agonies of Hades. Abraham refused to relieve the rich man’s suffering saying that he received good things in his lifetime while Lazarus suffered. This story is one of the very few places in the Bible where people appear in an afterlife that involves reward and punishment. In it Lazarus is rewarded but not because he is said to have been righteous or moral or because he had the proper faith but only because he suffered during his life on earth. The only thing we know about the rich man’s behavior is that he lived in luxury and did nothing to help Lazarus, the suffering beggar lying at his gate. The moral of the story is relatively clear. God blesses the poor and calls us to do what we can to relieve their suffering. There are lots of nuances in this story that we could discuss, but what I’ve given you here is enough for what I want to say about it.

One of the people with whom I was discussing this story at the local retirement facility was someone I hadn’t met before. She identified herself as Free Methodist. All I know about the Free Methodists is that their theology is extremely conservative. I believe that they read the Bible as the literal word of God. In the course of our discussion this woman wondered if Lazarus were a Christian. Somehow I managed not to laugh at the question, although it is absurd for anyone with any sophisticated Christian theology at all. First of all Luke attributes the story to Jesus, and in Jesus’ time there was no such thing as a Christian. Jesus didn’t call people to be Christians, he called them to a new way of understanding and following God in a thoroughly Jewish context. The story says nothing at all about Lazarus’ faith. It doesn’t even say he is Jewish much less Christian. So reading anything into the story about his faith would be rank speculation. The question is absurd and hardly worthy of an answer.

Yet that question is grounded in a conservative Christian theology that has been and is wide-spread and immensely destructive in the world. I can think of only one reason why this good woman would wonder whether Lazarus were Christian. In the story Lazarus is saved. He goes to the bosom of Abraham, which we can take as an image of a blissful life in heaven after death. I am sure that this woman has been taught and has accepted the notion that only Christians are saved. Therefore, since in the story Lazarus is saved, he must be a Christian. In order to be true to what she believes Christianity to be this woman had to find a way to understand Lazarus as Christian. To her the question of Lazarus’ possible Christianity is not absurd at all. It fits perfectly with what she has been taught and apparently accepted about the Christian faith.

Yet the story of Lazarus and the rich man brings the theology behind the woman’s question into doubt. Yes, in the story Lazarus is saved and the rich man is condemned. Yet Lazarus isn’t saved and the rich man isn’t condemned because of any faith they may or may not have had. Lazarus is saved only because he suffered in his life on earth. The rich man is condemned only because he lived well during his life on earth and did nothing that we know of to help those who suffer. These characters’ faith, if they had any, has nothing to do with their respective fates in the story. Salvation doesn’t come to Lazarus because he believed the right things about Jesus Christ. It doesn’t come to him because, as the women I’m talking about put it, he took Jesus into his heart. Salvation comes to Lazarus only because he suffered in life. It seems that dynamic is something the good woman at my gathering could neither accept nor even comprehend.

The story of Lazarus and the rich man is only one passage in the New Testament that suggests that Jesus wasn’t at all about getting people to believe in him and thus be saved. Jesus was about how people live, not about what happens to them after they die. The story of Lazarus and the rich man uses imagery about fate after death not to make a point about fate after death but to make a point about how we are to live this life. The story makes a point similar to Matthew’s “insofar as you have done it to the least of these you have done it to me.” Done what? Not tried to make them Christian. After all, it wouldn’t make much sense for people to be called to make Jesus Christ Christian. Rather, Christ calls us to feed, clothe, and visit those in need. He calls us to acts of charity and lives committed to social and economic justice. That is what the story of Lazarus and the rich man teaches, not that you have to believe certain things to be saved.

This woman’s question about Lazarus being Christian is not only grounded in a fundamental misunderstanding of what Jesus was about. Perhaps even more dangerously it is grounded in Christian exclusivism. It assumes that Christianity understood as accepting certain propositions about Jesus of Nazareth to be true (or “taking Jesus into your heart”) is the only way to salvation. There are passages in the New Testament that can be read to support that conclusion. Whether those passages actually mean that is an important question but one I won’t go into here. My point for now is that the largest and most vocal parts of the Christian tradition have for centuries proclaimed that Christian exclusivism is God’s own truth. For these people belief in Jesus Christ is the only way to salvation.

That conviction has had disastrous consequences both in predominantly Christian regions and around the world. At its worst it has led European nations to force conversions to Christianity at gun or spear point. Even in its least offensive form it has made Christians feel superior to people of other faiths or of no faith. It has led efforts such as those at the old Indian schools in our country to disrespect native languages, cultures, and faiths and to efforts to convert native people not just to Christianity but to Victorian cultural and sexual norms and prejudices. It has been a major factor in European and American anti-Judaism, a centuries-old hatred that culminated in the Holocaust. It has caused Christians to disregard and reject the contributions of non-Christians to world culture. All in all Christian exclusivism has been a very bad thing in world history.

Moreover, it just doesn’t make any theological sense. It posits that God has created only one way to be right with God, a way that happens to be our way. All other ways supposedly lead not to God but to perdition. Extreme Christian exclusivism even says that all the people who lived before Jesus Christ are damned because they didn’t believe in Jesus. It says that everyone who has lived in parts of the world where Christianity is hardly heard of and in which it is strongly countercultural are damned because they don’t believe in Jesus. Really? That’s how God has structured the world? No, that is not how God has structured the world. It can’t be how God has structured the world. Only a God who hates and is willing to condemn most of the people who ever lived would structure a world that way, yet even Christian exclusivists say that God is a God of love for all people. Their favorite Bible verse begins “For God so loved the world.” John 3:16a. It simply is not possible to reconcile Christian exclusivism with a God of love.

So let’s be done both with the notion that what God wants from us is certain cognitive assumptions about Jesus, and let us be done with Christian exclusivism. These things are killing Christianity in the world today because their falsity is becoming more and more obvious. Salvation isn’t about belief. It isn’t even primarily about life after death. Salvation for the follower of Jesus Christ is found in this life in conforming one’s life to the will and ways of God as revealed in and through Jesus. In Jesus’ parable Lazarus isn’t saved because he believed the right things. He is saved because God loved him despite or actually because of his suffering. To that truth let all the people say: Amen!

Religion: Emotion or Reason?

Religion: Emotion or Reason?

About a month ago my wife Jane and I were on a wonderful car trip through the southwest of the United States. We spent three nights in Williams, Arizona, a town about 55 miles from Grand Canyon National Park. It was our base for our visits to the park. On the morning we were scheduled to leave Williams headed for New Mexico, for reasons I need not explain here (we’re both OK), we ended up in an urgent care facility in Williams. We had to wait about two and a half hours to see a doctor. As we sat in the waiting room someone was playing a radio. On the radio a woman was preaching in a very evangelical style. She was vociferously proclaiming the typical evangelical message: You’re all sinners and you’re in for it in the next life unless you take Jesus Christ as your personal Lord and Savior in this life. What struck me about her preaching was less its totally unoriginal content than how emotional it was. The theology she preached was more than a century old and tissue paper thin, but it was clear that the purpose and effect of her preaching was less to convey a well thought out theology than it was to convey emotion. What she said did what her evangelical theology always does. It started by reducing Christianity to a fear-based religion, then offered relief from the fear it engendered through personal pietism, personal faith. It distorted Jesus’ message of personal and social transformation in this life to a message about God requiring some purely personal commitment in order to gain heaven in the next life. It draped that message in emotional pleading and emotional appeal. It struck me more powerfully than it ever has before that this woman’s kind of Christianity, which sadly is the Christianity most people both inside the church and outside it know, succeeds not because it is grounded in solid theology but precisely because it appeals to people’s emotions. It is nearly purely emotional Christianity presented in a nearly purely emotional way.

Perhaps those of you who have read my books or followed my posts on this blog can see how different my Christianity is from the emotional Christianity of that woman on the radio in Williams, Arizona. I know full well that I am a very head-oriented person. All through seminary I heard it so often that I got sick of it: “Tom, we know you’ve got all the head stuff. Where’s the heart?” Indeed when I appeared before what was then the Churches and Clergy Committee of what was then the Washington North Idaho Conference of the United Church of Christ seeking approval for ordination in the UCC the Committee approved me but asked me to submit some more writing to show that I actually do have a heart. I think the perception of me as exclusively head-oriented comes from people who don’t know me very well. Underneath my rationalistic exterior I’m actually quite a sentimentalist. Still, my approach to my Christian faith has indeed always been quite philosophical. I wrote my book Liberating Christianity mostly because I believed, and believe, that Marcus Borg, the most widely read proponent of a revised, post-modern Christianity, is (was—he’s now passed away) philosophically superficial. I firmly believe the statement I heard once somewhere that the heart cannot love what the head cannot accept. My entry into Christian theology and indeed into Christian ministry began with a study of Paul Tillich, the greatest philosophical Protestant theologian of the twentieth century, and of Douglas John Hall, a less well known but brilliant Canadian theologian who is also very philosophical—he studied with Tillich at Union Theological Seminary in New York City. Before I could commit myself to the Christian faith I had to find a way of understanding it firmly grounded in solid ontology and epistemology. I had to find a way to understand the faith other than the literalistic way  in which it is still mostly understood today. I found that way in Tillich and Hall. Without that philosophical theological grounding I never would have become a convinced Christian, much less an ordained Christian pastor.

So one could conclude that there are, broadly speaking, two different ways of understanding faith. One is emotional. It appeals less to a person’s thinking than to a person’s emotional reactions. The other is what I will call rational or reasonable, but I need to explain what I mean by rational and reasonable. I don’t mean merely logical. I don’t mean rationalistic in the way so much western thought became rationalistic during the Enlightenment of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. I mean grounded in reason, but I mean reason in the broad sense in which the Germans use the term. I mean grounded in solid, well thought through philosophical and theological concepts. By reasonable or rational I mean a faith grounded in the academic disciplines of the higher criticisms including philosophy and all of the tools of contemporary intellectual analysis. I mean a faith grounded in those criticisms but a faith that goes beyond cognitive analysis to a deeper understanding that isn’t purely emotional but that isn’t merely analytical either. I mean a faith that respects and values human reason but that transcends it. I mean a faith that understands the limits of human reason. I mean a faith that understands that truth is much more than mere facts. If you really want to understand what I mean by it read Liberating Christianity. That’s where I set out what I mean most fully and systematically.

So are these two ways of understanding the faith the only possibilities before us? I don’t think so. One of the great insights of German rationalism, especially as developed by Hegel, is that history progresses through dialectics. The movement of human understanding comes primarily from a synthesis of two previously existing understandings. I think Christianity must become a synthesis of the emotional and the rational. I suspect that my preaching and pastoring have been insufficiently emotional, but I don’t mean by that that we should reduce Christianity to the faith of that woman on the radio in Williams. Rather I mean that Christianity must address and appeal to the whole person. Head and heart. Body, mind, and soul. A Christianity with paper thin theology cannot meaningfully address the existential dilemmas of today’s world, but neither can a Christianity that is purely rationalistic, one that operates only in the head. Christianity must be grounded in both thought and emotion. It must express and appeal to both thought and emotion. I’m not at all sure that I am able to form that synthesis. Like I said, I am a very head oriented person. Yet there must be people out there who can do it and who are doing it. They, I believe, are the ones to show us the way forward.

A Sermon on American Racism

Today, October 14, 2019, I saw that a couple of viewers of this blog had seen my sermon "A Sermon on American Racism" that I gave back in 2014. Sadly it is more relevant today than it was five years ago. I think it's good work worth paying attention to, so I'm reposting it here.

Really? I Don’t Think So

Rev. Tom Sorenson, Co-Pastor

August 17, 2014

Scripture: Matthew 15:21-28

Let us pray: May the words of my mouth and the meditations of all of our hearts be acceptable in your sight O God, our strength and our redeemer. Amen.

New York City police strangled Eric Garner to death. Los Angeles police shot and killed Ezell Ford as he lay on the ground. Ferguson, Missouri, police shot and killed Michael Brown. All three of these victims were unarmed Black men. They are just recent examples of police violence against Black men that got some publicity. Various Internet sites report that a Black man is killed by police or vigilantes every 28 minutes in this country. Remember Trayvon Martin? He’s just another one we heard about. Police violence against Black men doesn’t always result in death. Recently in Seattle a Westlake Mall security guard maced a Black man while ignoring white law breakers. Remember Rodney King? I used to work at Catholic Community Services in the Central District of Seattle, where the population is mostly Black. One day I was looking out a window from which I could see our parking lot. There was a Seattle police car there, and a Seattle police officer was talking to a Black man he apparently had pulled over. There was no struggle. The Black man wasn’t threatening the police officer. Nonetheless, a second police car showed up. Then a third. A co-worker who also saw what was going on said “It’s the Central District.” These are but a very few examples from America’s shameful and sinful culture of racism.

Most of us are white, and I need to ask those of us who are: Do we get it that Black Americans are afraid of the police and have good reason to be? Pastor Jane tells a story from a seminary class in which the teacher asked how the students would react to the police knocking on their door. The white students said they’ be curious and want to cooperate and help. The Black students said they’d be suspicious. Those Black students weren’t being irrational. They weren’t being paranoid. They were reacting out of their experience and the experience of Black people generally, just as the white students were reacting out of their experience and the experience of white people generally. Of course no generalization is true of every member of any group of people, and certainly not all police officers are a threat to Black people, but it is still true that on the whole Black Americans experience the police differently than white Americans do. They experience them in significant part as a threat. That’s because the police represent society at large, and our society at large is racist. It was in its origins. It still is.

Our society is racist, but just how does racism work? That’s a crucial question for us Americans today. Here’s a good answer to that question from an African-American pastor. The Rev. Tony Lee, identified in an article on The Huffington Post’s religion page as an African-American pastor of an AME church in Maryland, says that the problem of young Black men dying at the hands of the police  is an example “of daily antagonisms felt by black people on the street.” He said “This is part of a wider school-to-prison pipeline and the ghettoization and de-humanization of black bodies.” There’s the crux of the problem in one word—dehumanization. American racism does nothing less than deny the full and equal humanity of Black people. That’s how racism works.

It doesn’t just work that way in our country. We see it at work in our passage from Matthew this morning. In that reading Jesus has an encounter with a woman identified as Canaanite. That means she’s not Jewish. It means she’s from a different people than Jesus is. In this story Jesus calls the Canaanite woman a dog. Hard to believe perhaps, but Jesus calls another human being a dog. The way Matthew tells this story, for Jesus, at first at least, the Canaanite woman who asks him for help isn’t even human. When he calls her a dog he makes her less than human. He gets over it by the end of the story, but in the story he denies the full humanity of the woman with whom he’s speaking.

That’s how racism works. For a racist a member of the other race isn’t fully human. That’s how human cruelty usually works, especially when it’s practiced on a huge scale. For the Nazis the Jews were less than fully human. How else could they slaughter so many millions of them? For American racists Black people aren’t fully human. How else can we lynch so many of them? How else can we deny them equal opportunity in employment, housing, health care, and especially legal justice? If a leader wants people to brutalize another people that leader has to start by dehumanizing the people he wants brutalized. Back in the 1960s we called Vietnamese people “gooks.” I did it myself. We were killing Vietnamese people in huge numbers, so we dehumanized them. Dehumanizing them made it easier for us to kill them. It made it possible for those of us who weren’t personally directly involved in killing them to live with the way our country was killing them. Racism dehumanizes. That’s its primary sin. It makes human beings less than human. It calls people dogs.

Jesus got over it in our little story, thank God, but how he did raises an important issue for us. In the story the Canaanite woman basically outwits Jesus. When he calls her a dog she says yes, but even the dogs get the crumbs that fall from the table. Jesus is impressed, calls her a woman not a dog, and gives her the help she has requested. In the story the dehumanized one brings about a change of consciousness in the one doing the dehumanizing. I’m really glad Jesus gets over his dehumanizing of this woman in our little story, but we need to be really careful about how that happens. You see, the racism of white Americans isn’t a problem for Black Americans to solve. It is a problem for us white Americans to solve, as our colleague the Rev. Dr. Marsha Williams, a Black pastor in our Conference, recently reminded us. Jesus’ failure to recognize the full humanity of the Canaanite woman was really his problem to solve, not hers. So let’s take this story as a warning, not as a model.

Speaking now as a white person and to those of you who are white, if our racism is our problem to solve, how do we do it? I have no magic answers to that question. We’ve all grown up in a radically racist culture. Yes, racism isn’t as bad—or at least isn’t as overt—as it used to be, but our culture is still radically racist. You don’t get over a history of centuries of virulent racism in a few decades, maybe not even in a few centuries. So getting over American racism is not a simple task, and there are no simple means of doing it. This morning I want to suggest just one basic but indispensible step.

You white folk among us, how many of you, how many of us, understand that we have white privilege every moment of our lives? We’ve all got it whether we’re aware of it or not. If you’re not doing anything wrong, like speeding say, do you get nervous every time you see a police officer? No? That’s white privilege. When you apply for a job do you think that you have to be much more qualified than the applicants of another race if you stand a chance of getting hired? No? That’s white privilege. Have you been turned down for rental housing on some obviously made up excuse? No? That’s white privilege. If you’ve ever been involved in any kind of court case civil or criminal, have you thought the court was going to rule against you just because of the color of your skin? No? That’s white privilege. We white people have it, every last one of us.

It is so easy for us white Americans to convince ourselves that racism is a problem of the past not of our present. Heck, we’ve even got a Black President, right? So how can our society be racist? Well, whether we like Obama as a President or not I trust we’re all glad that his race didn’t stop him from getting elected, but one election doesn’t wipe out racism. Lots of people still voted against Obama quite without regard for his politics just because he’s Black. Moreover, it’s so easy for us to point to Obama as proof that we aren’t racist, then go on with our usual racism with nothing really changed. It is white America’s denial of its racism that is the biggest obstacle to overcoming it.

We’re not going to solve American racism here this morning. Far from it. We can however stop lying to ourselves. We live in a racist culture. It’s not our fault that we do, but we do. Overcoming racism has to start with us becoming more aware of that foundational fact of American life. We white people have to start admitting our white privilege. And we have to stop dehumanizing people of color. I’m sure we would all say yes, of course, Black, Red, Yellow, and Brown people are all human beings. We’d all say it, but do we really get what it means? Do we really get what true equality means? When you see a Black person on the street who you don’t know can you really say to that person Namaste, the God in me greets the God in you? Maybe we’d all answer yes; but when I hear that yes part of me wants to say Really? I don’t think so. I think we’ve all got racism in our bones because we all grew up in a racist culture. The only way we’ll ever get over it is to start by admitting it. So let’s admit it, shall we? Maybe if enough of us do fewer unarmed Black men will die at the hands of the police. Amen.

This Unwell President

This Unwell President

I am not a mental health professional. I am neither a psychologist nor a psychiatrist. I make no claim to being able to make a professional diagnosis of anyone’s mental health, not even Donald Trump’s. Yet one need not have had professional training in mental health issues to notice a mental health deficiency when a person’s words and actions are just plain abnormal. When a person speaks and behaves in obviously abnormal ways any intelligent, observant person can draw some well-founded conclusions about that person’s mental health. Sadly, President Donald J. Trump’s words and behavior are so obviously and extremely abnormal that it is apparent to me and to any observant, reasonably healthy and informed person that he is psychologically unwell. I want here to consider some of the ways in which he appears to me to be psychologically unwell. Those ways include at least the following:

He lies with almost every public word he speaks. He does not operate within the categories true and false. He operates (or at least appears to operate) within the categories “I think it’s beneficial to me” and “I think it’s not beneficial to me.” Whether what he says is true or false is irrelevant to him; and what psychologically healthy people perceive as true is so often not beneficial to him that he utters falsehood after falsehood. It matters not to him that what he says is untrue. It matters not to him that one of his falsehoods can easily be shown to be false or that one of them has already been shown to be false. All that matters to him is that he believes a statement to be beneficial to him.

His disregard for truth and falsehood is one way in which Trump fails to deal constructively with reality. Another way in which he will not deal with reality is the way so many of his statements against people and facts he doesn’t like address (and attack) the person who has said something he doesn’t like rather than addressing the truth or falsity of what the person has said. That is, he constantly engages in ad hominem attacks rather than rather than addressing what a person has actually said. The problem is not only that ad hominem attacks are a classical logical and rhetorical errors. A deeper problem is that his constant use of them suggests that he is incapable of actually dealing with reality at all. At the very least it suggests that he is unwilling to deal with reality. There are many reasons why a person may be unable or unwilling to deal with reality. She may be afraid of actual reality. Or perhaps his reality actually is very different from other people’s reality as is the case with people suffering from dementia. Or perhaps a person avoids reality by resorting to ad hominem attacks simply because he either doesn’t understand their logical and rhetorical fallacy or because he thinks they will be more convincing to people he wants to convince than dealing with reality would be. Donald Trump may well be avoiding reality because reality as other people perceive it is often so harmful to him. Perhaps he thinks (sadly probably correctly) that his badly informed or misinformed but fanatical supporters will find ad hominem attacks more convincing than actually addressing the facts would be. Moreover, Trump’s ad hominem attacks are often so vicious and so factually ungrounded that they seem more to be lashing out from a place of deep psychological insecurity than anything else. In any event his refusal to address actual reality certainly seems abnormal to me and perhaps to a lot of other people as well.

Beyond that, Trump is a narcissist. By that I mean that he cares only about himself. He may also be a sociopath or have borderline personality disorder. By that I mean that he seems utterly incapable of caring about anyone but himself. Of course it takes a huge ego for anyone to think they could be president of the United States. It may be the most difficult and the most sensitive job in the world. But having a big ego or an overabundance of self-confidence doesn’t have to mean that a person cares only for him or herself. Yet in the case of Donald Trump that seems to be precisely what it means. He repeatedly uses the power and prestige of his office for his own personal and political aggrandizement. To him being president is more about him than it is about the country of which he is chief executive.

Finally let me return to a point that I at least suggested above in my comments about his constant ad hominem attacks on his critics. Donald Trump simply comes across as psychologically unstable. He lashes out apparently without having considered the consequences of what he says and does. He operates from emotion not from considered contemplation of the matters before him. He sees no need actually to be informed about the matters he addresses. He seems to become uncontrollably angry at times. He seems incapable of considering that people who disagree with him or who criticize him are simply acting in good faith because they have a different view of a matter than he does. Our political system depends on a give and take between different political, economic, and social perspectives. Donald Trump seems incapable of working within that system. It’s not always easy for me to do either, but I at least understand that our political processes involve disagreements between people of good faith. Trump can’t see that anyone who opposes him is acting in good faith. Criticism threatens him, so he goes into emotional outbursts that can hardly be the products of a well-developed, healthy psyche.

All of these points along with several more that could perhaps be raised establish that President Donald Trump is not psychologically well. He is so psychologically unwell that Vice President Pence and the Cabinet would be well justified in removing him from office under Amendment 25 to the US Constitution. They won’t do that of course. Trump put them in the positions they hold. The benefit from his presidency and aren’t about to give those benefits up. Still, Donald Trump is psychologically unfit to be president.

We have two ways of getting rid of him, impeachment or the election of someone else to the presidency next year. Impeachment is preferable because it could happen more quickly and because it would be a statement by Congress that Trumpism is not our norm. It could be a reassertion of traditional American political values. It could be a solid defense of the Constitution that Trump has sworn to protect and defend but which he violates daily. Either way, the important thing is that we be rid of him absolutely as soon as possible. The future of our nation and of the world demands no less.