September 29, 2013 | 9:30 and 11:00 a.m.

Not as Planned

Joyce Shin
Associate Pastor, Fourth Presbyterian Church

Psalm 1
Deuteronomy 28:1–14
Luke 16:19–31

“Child, remember that during your lifetime you received your good things, and Lazarus in like manner evil things; but now he is comforted here, and you are in agony.” Luke 16:25 (NRSV)

Forgive us when,
like spoilt children,
we treat your generosity
as our right.

From a prayer by Jan Berry

Recently my daughter came home from school with two writing assignments. She was assigned to write one story about a time when she felt like a fish in a tree and another story about a time when she felt like a fish in the sea. I wondered about what she would write. I also wondered about what I would write if the assignment had been given to me. When have I felt like a fish in a tree, in an environment that didn’t make sense to my natural instincts or inclinations and that held me back from being the best me I could be?

Though certainly I could write any number of stories about feeling like a fish in a tree, what came to mind was the way I felt as a little girl in my Sunday School class, as an adolescent in my church youth group, and as a college student in a small Bible study group. In all these settings, I felt like a fish in a tree. The feeling began when my loving Sunday School teacher taught us about heaven and hell and that Jesus was the only way to get to heaven, and I silently wondered if she could possibly be wrong. The feeling grew so that by the time I was a teenager, I verbalized my skepticism that a loving God would condemn to hell everyone who did not believe in Jesus Christ as Savior and Lord. I remember asking my youth group leaders, “What about all the people in North Korea, including my relatives, who, under communist rule, weren’t even allowed to learn about Jesus?” The feeling of being a fish in a tree continued into my college years when I questioned more things about the Bible, how it was being interpreted, and what it might possibly mean for us today. Getting the feeling that the other college girls in my Bible study group were starting to pray for me, I decided to leave the group, and that was OK.

I have a feeling that if I were to ask you the question “Have you ever felt like a fish in a tree when you were in church?” you might quite frankly say yes. In fact, you might be able to tell your faith autobiographies in terms of the times when you most felt like the church—a stance, a structure, a rule, or a teaching of the church—wasn’t making sense of you, your values, and commitments and was even hindering you from living faithfully. I suspect also that many of you, despite your disagreements with the church, may have returned to the church and even made the church your home because some part of you, like some part of me, has recognized that living faithfully is not something that we can do on our own apart from others.

In her recently published book on prayer, author Anne Lamott sums up three kinds of prayer in three simple words: help, thanks, and wow. In her meditation on prayer as asking God for help, she reveals something of her own struggle, stemming from a childhood in a home in which her parents would never dare to ask anyone for help, much less God. It was not a home in which people prayed. Not ever feeling like she could ask her parents or anyone else for help and always having to rely on herself alone to fix things that were unfixable was, she said, “crazy-making” (Anne Lamott, Help, Thanks, Wow: The Three Essential Prayers, p. 14). Learning to pray, learning to ask God and others for help, was for her an essential lesson in learning to have faith—to trust in someone other than herself.

Learning to live faithfully, I suspect, is something with which many of us struggle. It is hard to place our trust in God, to view the world as a benevolent place, to have the peace of mind that comes with the belief that all will be well. It’s hard to act as though we aren’t self-sufficient, to recognize that our lives aren’t in our complete control. As hard as we work, as much as we strive, as much as we plan, accomplish, and earn, it is even harder to undergo those things that are not within our control. And that’s when our faith is needed and tested. Living faithfully is nothing other than placing our ultimate trust in God instead of in ourselves, in our plans, in our efforts and achievements.

The scripture we read from the Gospel of Luke makes this very point. If we’re not careful, we might miss it. We might miss it, because on first hearing, the parable seems to be about something else. It seems to be about a rich man and a poor man and the afterlife that each receives. It seems to be a parable that shocks everyone because it turns on its head the prevailing view of Jesus’ day, a view that Jesus contested and corrected for its wrong-headedness and the social injustices it upheld. It was the view that the rich go to heaven and the poor go to hell. Because of scriptural passages like the passage from Deuteronomy that Calum read for us this morning, a gospel of wealth had become firmly established in Judaism.

If you will only obey the Lord your God, by diligently observing all his commandments, . . . blessed shall you be in the city, and blessed shall you be in the field. . . . Blessed shall be the fruit of your ground and the fruit of your livestock, both the increase of your cattle and the issue of your flock. Blessed shall be your basket and your kneading bowl. (Deuteronomy 28:1–5)

Given that prosperity was considered a sign of God’s favor and, conversely, poverty a sign of God’s condemnation, you can imagine how shocked people must have been to hear Jesus tell a story in which the rich man ended up in hell and the poor man in heaven. The contrast between the two men’s situations both during their lives and after their deaths couldn’t have been greater. The contrast between their afterlives and their earthly lives couldn’t have been starker. But most shocking, in both cases, was the contrast between what the two men must have thought would happen to them when they died and what did happen to them.

You can imagine how stunned the poor man was at his reversal in fortune. Having lived a life of hunger, illness, and neglect by others, he must have been stunned to find himself comforted and in the company of Abraham in heaven. You can imagine too how shocked the rich man must have been to end up in Hades, tormented and in agony, begging for relief. This was certainly not what he had planned. Nothing he did in life would have prepared him for this.

And therein lay the problem. The rich man had lived his life as though he were the master of his fate. Nothing about him whatsoever hinted of any need. With wealth and power at his disposal, he had everything he needed and could make plans for his future. And don’t we find him, even in Hades, making plans and directing others as though he can solve this problem, if not for himself, then for his family? He asks Abraham to send the poor man, raised from the dead, to his brothers to warn them so that they can avoid being sent to hell in the afterlife. He really thinks that sending someone from the dead would definitely get his brothers’ attention and motivate them to plan their lives accordingly so that they at least would earn their way into heaven.

In telling this parable, Jesus warned not against wealth per se, but against what he considered the real danger to be and to which he thought wealthy and powerful persons were especially susceptible. Wealth and power, he warned, could be spiritually fatal if they contribute to creating or reinforcing an illusion, the illusion that all things are under one’s control. In telling this parable, Jesus made the point that not everything is within our control, and to be sure, heaven and hell are definitely not within our control. From the poor man in the parable, whose name, Lazarus, means “God helps,” the message is clear: God desires us to place our ultimate trust in God rather than in ourselves and in our achievements. God desires our faithfulness.

To treat heaven as though we on our own can earn it would be, as Anne Lamott would say, “crazy-making.” Living every moment as though each action and thought were to be evaluated on a moral report card would be enough to paralyze anyone. Historians tell us that anxiety about heaven and hell and over what people should be doing about it plagued the psyches of people who lived in Europe during the Middle Ages. Such preoccupation with the afterlife may have impaired their ability to advance new technologies or sciences. The church exacerbated the problem by coming up with an elaborate system of rules by which individuals, through confession and penance, could acquire for themselves a place in heaven and, through the payment of indulgences, could acquire for their loved ones transport out of purgatory and into heaven.

So moved by the anxiety they witnessed in their day, church father John Calvin and other Reformers condemned the church for misleading Christians into the false belief that their ultimate spiritual fate rested in their own hands, instead of God’s. Out of pastoral concern for his flock, Calvin developed his teaching of predestination to emphasize that our salvation or damnation is completely in God’s hands, not at all in ours. For Calvin, a world in which everything ultimately rested in God’s benevolent hands was a much more trustworthy world than one that rested in human hands. Of course, the theory of predestination presented its own quagmires, which many theologians have addressed over the past 400 years.

It’s hard to say whether today we are any more or less anxious than people living in the Middle Ages. There is a lot of literature out there that calls ours the “age of anxiety.” It has been argued that the rapid advance of technology and science in our age heightens anxieties. While the church may no longer have in place elaborate systems for enforcing moral behavior, we are no less fanatical about being in control of things.

In a book entitled Things Might Go Terribly, Horribly Wrong, psychologists Kelly G. Wilson and Troy Dufrene write about anxiety not only as a disorder that can be clinically diagnosed, but as something that all of us, to some extent, experience, because all of us “share a common fate in suffering” (Kelly G. Wilson and Troy Dufrene, Things Might Go Terribly, Horribly Wrong, p. 41). To suffer is an existential reality that none of us can escape, and therefore, anxiety is part of the human condition.

Since none of us can escape it, scientists have tried to understand it. Behavioral scientists have developed a vocabulary to understand some of the psychological dynamics of anxiety. They talk about “punishers” and “reinforcers.” A “punisher” is a change in the environment that, when it occurs, will make a behavior less likely. A “reinforcer” is a change in the environment that, when it occurs, makes the behavior more likely to occur. Human beings, we know, are motivated to act by all sorts of things: rewards, good grades, recognition, a promotion, money, a bonus. We can add to this list the promise of heaven or the prospect of hell. Throughout much of history, religion has treated hell and heaven as punishers and reinforcers.

In the parable Jesus told, he rejected the use of heaven and hell in this way. When the rich man begs Abraham to allow his hellish fate to be reported to his family members, Abraham rejects his request. Abraham simply states that God’s commandments and the prophets are all that anyone needs to live faithfully. Nothing further—neither reinforcement by promises of resurrection or of heaven nor punishment by the threat of hell—is needed to live a faithful and moral life. Religious institutions do not need to build elaborate systems of enforcers and punishers to motivate moral behavior.

The precious promise of heaven that Jesus taught throughout his ministry was given to all who placed their ultimate trust not in the power of their actions to save themselves and their loved ones, but in God who alone can save. It may seem hard to receive this promise, because it requires us to let go of our illusions of control. But when we do, may we finally find our anxious minds at peace.