Peace, Not Quiet.

Exploring the intersection of sacred and secular.

One reason my faith has become so politically outspoken owes to the attention the hardline conservatives get from the media, which leads people to believe that this is the most active form of Christianity in the nation. It’s popularity isn’t because this movement represents Jesus as much as it is that this is America’s civil religion. I think this civil religion is as spiritually corrosive as our addictions to individualism and transactional relationships are to our cultural ethics.

Until I began writing The Myth of a Dying Church recently, I didn’t appreciate how deeply entrenched my work to create an alternative dialogue to this harmful trend really is within me. I laid the groundwork to identify and debunk what I now call the American Christic Cult as a teenager, when my Southern Baptist friends started getting baptized in middle school and asking me in earnest if I was saved. Even when I told them I was baptized as an infant, and maybe especially when they found out I’m Lutheran, they were worried about my soul!

“But are you saved?”

The question was fascinating as it was frustrating. Fascinating, because I was certain my answer was “Yes,” which somehow felt wrong. Years later, I finally realized that I found it frustrating because I knew instinctively the answer this question was supposed to be, “No.”

Seriously. 

“No” offered my friends the opportunity to do what they believed was their duty, to lead someone to Jesus. Asking this question is an attempt to be faithful to what they’ve been taught in church since childhood. So because my friends believed what their elders said, that saving souls is their work, they did their best to keep me from going straight to hell just like their mama said. 

If you were to die tonight, do you know where you’d go?

This simple question became ubiquitous with the Billy Graham Crusade, I’m convinced, because it’s equal parts really clever, and that Billy Graham was so unfailingly earnest in his concern for people’s souls. I don’t agree with all of his theology, but his Follow me is still inspiring simply because he had a way of saying it that still speaks to something deep within. The trouble is that the claim this brand of theology makes is that Jesus’ death and resurrection pays the entirety of our debt to Sin if we accept it. And if we don’t, God will send us to hell where we’ll suffer for all time.

It turns out that the Question is less benign than it appears. I wrestled hard with this paradox, that God gifts us grace through Jesus’ death and resurrection, yet somehow God remains so angry at us for our Sin that we still need to beg God for the forgiveness that was supposed to be ours already.

Saved by Powerball

The analogy I heard so frequently back then went something like, 

God sent Jesus to die for our sins and pay our debt in full. It’s as if God hands us a winning lottery ticket, and we have two options. We can hold onto it and put it in a drawer forever, and the ticket is still a winner and can always be cashed, but it does us no good in a drawer. We can also decide to cash it, and when we do, all God intends for us becomes reality! 

Don’t get me wrong, there’s a beauty in the agency we receive in this rendering. I’ve also known a lot of people over the years who spent their entire lives cashing their ticket, yet never feeling relief from their winnings. We may have won the lottery, but we can lose it all if we backslide. And if we sin too much we may just have to cash it again. 

It’s as if the ticket itself contains only Terms & Conditions, but no actual numbers until we die.

Is this grace?

At twenty-three, I wrote over a hundred pages to finally reach my own answer to whether this is grace. That answer was and remains, “No.”

Salvation is a Lawnmower

If it’s God’s desire to love and redeem the entirety of creation, and God truly is omnipotent, then why are we so worried we can thwart God’s will with our own fickle ineptitude? In Without Sin, which I’ve intended to edit and publish for twenty-five years, I wrote that salvation isn’t a gift like a lottery ticket, it’s a gift of service.

Salvation is God’s act of grace freely given to creation. It’s as if God sees that our lawn is desperately overgrown, and being the Gardener God is, mows our lawn. And not being a slacker, God trims our bushes and paints the house, and installs energy efficient windows while at it. Then, God walks in and leads us outside to say, “Hey.  I mowed your lawn and did some other stuff, and you never have to worry about it ever again.” 

We could shrug it off. We could respond with gratitude that deepens with time because of the magnitude of this gift. We could also shake our fist and yell at God, asking how very dare someone mess with our stuff and we never asked for this, and so on. 

We could certainly make that choice, but we’d still be shaking our fist in our perfectly manicured yard that we’ll probably eventually come to appreciate anyway.

So what?

This is a hard moment, and we have a lot of anger and baggage as a culture right now. Our lives are full-to-bursting with fear and worry, as well as joy and love.

What would it look like to stop shaking our fists at God, ourselves, or each other for just long enough to realize there’s probably a lot more here to appreciate when we aren’t yelling at folks who are trying to help us?

Eric Wolf is a local Lutheran pastor, and he’d love to buy you a coffee, tea, or beverage of your choice to tell him about your faith, your ideas about meaning, or whatever “sacred stuff” means to you. Reach him at [email protected]!