There are two theories about what happens to us after we die. At first blush, karma and grace seem incompatible; one a theory from the East and the other from the West. How can this mystery of mysteries be reconciled? Our guest minister asked us to come and find out once and for all! Rev. Dr. Josh Snyder, Senior Minister of the First Unitarian Church of Wilmington, DE, has been serving that church since 2008.
Reading
"If Grace Is True" by Philip Gulley and James Mulholland
"I believe God will save every person.
I was recently interviewed by a newspaper journalist. I spent two hours sharing my experiences with the grace of God, extolling the loving character of God, and explaining how this love motivates Gods desire to save every person. I told the stories and made the arguments youve been reading.
A week later the newspaper article ran with this opening sentence: 'Local writer and pastor no longer believes Jesus is the only way of salvation.'
Though I don't recall using those exact words, I can't fault the reporter for coming to that conclusion. If you believe God loves and will save every person, you can't claim redemption as an exclusively Christian experience. Salvation is no longer the sole possession of a specific culture, religion, denomination, or person. Salvation belongs to God. It is what God does in the live of all his children.
The response to the newspaper article was quick and angry. The editor of the paper was inundated with negative letters. Many wrote me directly. I was attacked and scolded. Some damned me to hell while other sought my repentance. I tried to be gracious in all my replies. I understand their reaction. The reason I didn't come right out and say, 'Jesus isn't the only way,' is because those words are still difficult for me to say or hear. They seem blasphemous. People always assume I'm demeaning Jesus. That is not my intention.
One letter was especially enlightening. The writer expressed her deep disappointment in me, quoted a few Bible verses, and ended by asking, 'Without Jesus, who will pay for your sins?' Her question provoked another question, one I'd never heard or asked: Why must sins be paid for? If God is forgiving, why is any payment necessary? I was forced to examine deeply ingrained ideas and unquestioned assumptions.
Atonement, or payment for injury, is one such age-old idea. It is a theme in many religions and philosophies and is embedded in Jewish and Christian theology. It's easy to defend in Christian tradition and Scripture. It resonates with our human obsession with justice. We may doubt the grace of God, but we're convinced that sins, especially those of our enemies, must be atoned.
There is one major problem with atonement theology. It contradicts the ethic of Jesus. Jesus rejected the demand for 'An eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth.' Rather than demanding payment for injury, he commanded us to turn the other cheek. Jesus championed grace and ridiculed the meticulous justice keeping of his religious peers. He offered forgiveness so freely that, when he forgave the sins of a paralytic, his opponents complained, 'This fellow is blaspheming!' In any culture obsessed with balanced scales, grace will see blasphemous."
Sermon
As a boy I would often go over to my friend Lee's house during the day. His mom and mine had a babysitting arrangement, so I was over there a lot. He lived a bit more in the country than I did, and as a result small animals were a pretty common occurrence for us curious little boys to encounter. I remember we once found a salamander in their basement, a dark dank place where they would store the canned vegetables every summer. And there he was this three inch thing, it seemed like an alien from another world to us, scurrying behind the tomatoes and peaches. We tried to catch him, but he was surprisingly quick.
One animal that we could often catch, of course, was frogs. Particularly the little frogs, only about an inch or so long, that hung out under the porch. It was damp and cool and the frogs really liked it in there. These little ones also peaked our curiosity. Unfortunately for them, they were not as smart as the salamander, nor were they as fast. The frogs were too trusting of us and did not fully appreciate the wonder and curiosity a small child has about life and death. Here were these small frogs that even at four years old I could hold in my little hand. Fascinating. What was even more fascinating was stomping on them. It is not my proudest moment, but more than a few of these frogs fell victim to my foot for no good reason other than I wanted to see what would happen, and I had nothing better to do. As I got older I used to kill insects too.
Many years later, I think it was my tween years, I remembered killing all of these frogs as a child and I was overcome by guilt. At this later age I had become a rather devout Christian, I prayed every night to God a rather complicated prayer, actually. I began to worry that I might have incurred God's condemnation for killing these small creatures. Had I violated the "Thou Shalt Not Kill" commandment? At age 12 I was unsure. But it surely scared me enough that I felt the need to repent of my actions.
Certainly I regret killing those frogs when I was a child. Buddhism and Hinduism would say that there is a consequence for every action we take, be it good, bad, or neutral. "Action" is the English translation for the Sanskrit word "karma." Karma is simply action. Depending on the tradition and the teacher, it might be a very literal system of cosmic justice - I killed a frog and therefore in a future life those frogs will get the chance to kill me in some form. Or karma can be understood in a more metaphorical and this-worldly sense. Zen Buddhism teaches that karma is simply the law of cause and effect; not unlike what science would say. Indeed Darwin might go a step further and argue that as a kid I stepped on the members of the frog population who were too slow or stupid to know better than to move out of the way of little kid. By squashing them, I weeded out the weak links in the gene pool, thereby strengthening the overall adaptability of the local frog population. That would certainly be an effect resulting from my actions.
As satisfying as that thought may be, and for all I know it might actually be true, the Darwinian argument lacks heart. At least in this instance, it ignores the ethics of feeling compassion for beings that were weaker than myself. I was reminded of the frogs in my friend's porch a about a month ago when I was in the front lawn with my own boys. Thomas and Matthew are about the age I was when I was genetically cleansing the frog population with my right foot. As we were putting away the hose and doing various other chores to prepare for the fall, we saw leaping through the grass a small cricket. Instantly they were both enthralled with this cricket's efforts to escape them. Then after watching it for a couple of minutes, my two year old Matthew declared "stomp," as if he were the Hulk and raised his little foot to squash the cricket to death. Fortunately for it I hadn't mowed the lawn in some time, so the cricket was able to escape through the long strands of grass. Thank God for my lousy yard work! I told my boys not to kill crickets. They were fine right where they were. In the moment I hadn't realized why I had admonished them so strongly over something that was relatively minor, until I remembered the tiny frogs of my own childhood. There is something about the gleam in a little boy's eye when he realizes that he is not the smallest being in the food chain, and has the life of a small animal or insect in his power and control. In that moment it is better to choose grace rather than risk karma.
As a minister people sometimes come up to me and ask me what I think happens after we die. As if there were a course at Seminary we all take in which the professor draws the shades of the classroom, speaks in hushed tones, and finally reveals to her students exactly what happens in the next life. The fact is, I have no more or less of an idea about that than anyone else. What Shakespeare said about death, through the mouth of Hamlet, is true now as much as it ever was. Death is, "the undiscovered country from which no traveler returns."
However, in those reflective moments when I draw the shades of my study, and speak in hushed tones, and muse on what I believe happens after we die, I usually come up with some combination of karma and grace. Cause and effect are real. If you go around in your everyday life and treat people like a jerk, the odds are not too many people will like you, and may very well start being a jerk to you in return. My friend Dave Owen-O'Quill says that if you invite enough people over to your house for dinner on a regular basis, eventually you will have friends! Coke had a great Superbowl commercial a couple of years ago, in which a guy walks down the street helping people, saving their lives, capturing bank robbers, and song in the background was, "Give a little love, and it all comes back to you." I would not monetize such a system to the point where one particular good dead earns you X number of brownie points in some cosmic ledger and therefore you should expect X number of rewards either in this life or the next. Imagine the accounting of that system! But generally speaking there is something to this: give a little love and it will come back to you somehow in some way.
I noticed this phenomenon with the death of two significant celebrities. Steve Jobs died of cancer in his mid-fifties. That in itself is a sobering fact. What surprised me though was how he was eulogized. Don't get me wrong, I am in no way anti-Steve Jobs. But what impressed me was how significant a loss this was for people. And then I learned more about him. As the creator of Apple, he was the personification of what it means to innovate. Someone called him, "An artist whose medium of choice was technology." Others noted the irony of learning about Steve Job's death on their iPhone; one of his brainchildren. Indeed, Steve Jobs redefined how we think about and interact with technology. Although he didn't see much of it, it would be hard not to put him in the conversation for the "who is who" of the 21st century.
I mention Steve Jobs for the nerds, now here is one for the jocks. Al Davis was perhaps as innovative as Steve Jobs was in his particular field of endeavor - professional football. He was a player, an assistant coach, and a head coach for the Raiders. When the AFL formed to compete with the NFL, Davis was the commissioner. Davis was a rival to the NFL, and a thorn in their side for many years. It wasn't until the owners of the other AFL teams, the Chiefs and the Steelers, went behind his back that the merger with the NFL happened. This by the way, is how there came to be two conferences in football - a post-merger arrangement.
As owner of the Raiders, Al Davis was the first owner to hire an African American coach. He refused to have his team play football in the segregated south. The Raiders were the second team to hire a Latino coach, and the first team to hire a woman as a high level executive. With Al Davis as owner, the Raiders went to the Super bowl at least once a decade, and won three Super bowls in the eighties. Although by the time my generation come of age in football, Davis was a rather curmudgeonly figure, his impact on professional football, currently a 6 billion dollar industry, could not be denied.
Many people praised Al Davis shortly after his death, but I have to say it seemed a bit insincere to me at the time. I don't mean to be disrespectful, but I know that if you were to ask people a week before he died what they thought of Al Davis, it would probably have been negative. The man was a tyrant and the game had passed him by. He meddled and micromanaged to such a high degree that it was obviously hurting his team. He made some rather shady deals and trades back in his day, and the last of a long series of lawsuits against the NFL was finally resolved as recently as six years ago. While Steve Jobs didn't have that reputation, I heard that Jobs authorized his new biography, which is of course being rushed to print, because he wanted his kids to know why he was never around.
This too is something I believe: none of us are perfect. Steve Jobs sacrificed his family life to some degree or another. Al Davis was reviled by his peers and players, even though he probably didn't care. I killed a bunch of frogs as a child. OK maybe I have done a few things worse than that since, but you get my point. I don't care who you are or who you name, Gandhi, the Dalai Lama, Mother Theresa, they will all admit to some moral failing at some point or another.
As we heard from our reading this morning, that is where grace comes in. Grace is forgiving each other, and loving each other, even in the face of failure and mistakes. It does not forget or deny those failings, but loves anyway. There is a certain "in-spite-of" attitude to Grace. This was the genius of the Universalists, and it is also what made them so controversial. They believe that God loves humanity "in-spite-of" our sin and failing. They did not necessarily deny humanity's original sin, as the Unitarians did, but the Universalists believed that God's love and forgiveness was greater than our limited failings. Therefore love won, and grace was true, and as a result everyone, universally, is going to heaven.
This radical notion of universal salvation scandalized many Christians, and still does. If we are not afraid of hell why would anyone act morally? Apparently Christians are only moral because they have a gun to their head in the form of fear of damnation. The Universalists responded by saying that Jesus came to earth not to get you into heaven but to get heaven into you. In other words Christianity should not be about trying to get your ticket punched into the next world. God's infinite love and mercy should inspire us to at least strive to live with more love and mercy ourselves. Thus within Universalist theology there was a turn away from worrying about the next life, and instead a concern for how to make the present more heaven-like. We are the conduits of God's grace, they taught. We should live "grace-filled" and "grace-full" lives that are service oriented toward the happiness of others.
Karma teaches us that all of our actions reverberate throughout time and space and make up the legacy of our life. We have the choice to make that a legacy one of love and compassion or one of neglect and thoughtlessness. Of course the system isn't perfect. Despite our best efforts we do fall short of our intended action, and that is where grace comes in.
I have had a surprisingly complex relationship with those little frogs over these years. At first I took life for granted, then I regretted my actions and felt guilty. And then, just a little while ago, the legacy of those teeny tiny frogs called to me once again when I saw my children about to hurt a small insect. Immediately I knew that was wrong. I knew that I should teach my boys that it is wrong to kill small things that are innocent and weak. I probably wouldn't take a literal stance and say that the spirits of those frogs have spoken to me, but then again it is hard to deny that they were my teachers. They taught me something about compassion and mercy and grace. Through our karma, we can bring grace to others. That was the lesson they gave me, and it was the lesson I meant to pass on to my sons.
Now imagine how the life of a human being impacts those around us. If a frog can do that, how much more of an impact do each of us have on the people around us?! Let us remember the dead and learn the lessons of their life. It will be a life filled with both failure and success, just as your life and mine are. But if we can open our hearts a bit, we will find that our actions become more oriented toward grace than ever before. Amen Blessed Be.
