No One's Left Behind!
The parable of the Lost Coin was the focus of today's gospel text from the lectionary (Luke 15:1-10) -- along with the Parable of the Lost Sheep. It was the focus on my sermon -- which can be found here. I find this parable -- the one about the lost coin -- very intriguing. As I worked with it in my sermon I thought of the character of God. Unlike the theology that stands behind the Left Behind series -- and a lot of traditional Christian theology as well -- I find this parable to imply that no one is left behind.
In this parable a woman scours the house looking for the lost coin -- and she won't stop until she finds it. You can almost feel the franticness in her search for this one silver coin. When she finds the coin she throws a party to celebrate -- think this with me -- she spends the other coins to celebrate the finding of this other coin. I know we must not push parables too far, but I do think that this parable is at least suggestive that God will not let anyone fall through the cracks. It surely undermines any sense of double predestination and the idea that God rejoices in anyone suffering separation -- hellish or not.
I can't say that I'm a "universalist" because I can't speak to the fate of everyone, but it's texts like these that at least are suggestive of God's overwhelming desire to bring us all into relationship with God's self. I admit I've not figured this all out. I do believe that there is something decisive about Jesus' life, death, and resurrection for the future of each of us and of creation itself (2 Cor. 5).
For me the central text of my faith is 2 Corinthians 5:17 - 20 (NRSV):
So if anyone is in Christ, there is a new creation: everything old has passed away; see everything has become new! All this is from God who reconciled us to himself through Christ, and has given us the ministry of reconciliation; that is, in Christ God was reconciling the world to himself, not counting their trespasses against them, and entrusting the message of reconciliation to us. so we are ambassadors for Christ, since God is making his appeal through us; we entreat you on behalf of Christ, be reconciled.
I think we could spend ages mining the depths of this passage -- a passage that promises that in Christ all things become new and that our calling is to bear witness to this act of reconciliation. What say you?!
Comments
But I also believe that God can and will restore everything, because anything less than that is a lack of justice. It allows "evil" to win, so long as there's one element of creation not redeemed. But I also believe, and know, that wrong behavior and wrong thoughts have consequences. And in my life, the best method of fixing those, or making amends, wasn't any outside punishment imposed, but a full awareness of how my actions affected others. Or the damage my actions caused.
That's my biggest difficulty with an eternal hell or seperation, or anything like that, because I don't see what retributive punishment solves. In many cases, it only makes the situation worse. A true hell is an internal foce, not some outside force inducing punishment, but our own moral sense telling us we've "missed the mark." And once you've experienced that, fully, how can you not want to be healed from that?
In regards to the passage, the idea of everything is already new has always been interesting. It's almost inviting us to look beyond what we see/hear/experience, and go for something deeper. If we go based on the physical evidence, things are not "new" at all, but rather seem to repeat. So perhaps we should change how we look at things.
How justice is meted out is the issue we must wrestle with -- but ultimately I believe that God will reconcile all things.
I have always had a problem with the theologies that focus on how sinful we are and how none of us can live up to God's impossibly high standards. But there is another way of looking at the idea that "all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God"--which is that none of us are perfect, all of us are capable of doing evil, and given the right conditions or upbringing we can all be worse people than we are. This is the "whoever is without sin can cast the first stone" perspective on sin. Since none of us is perfect, can God forgive just some of us but not others? I think that God's love must be universal or it is meaningless. What that means in practice in terms of an afterlife is not something I can say. Not having died, I don't know what any afterlife will be like. All I can say is that I refuse to believe in a God who doesn't love everyone unconditionally and unceasingly.
**How justice is meted out is the issue we must wrestle with **
I think this point is also important. Very few actions are ever black and white. I'm sure you're familiar with the tv show 'Law and Order.' One of the things I enjoy about that is half the time, the "perps" didn't commit a crime to be bad, but because of circumstances. They were desperate, they were protecting another person, they were protecting themselves. The criminal justice system demands retribution and yet very often, the perps are also victims, themselves. (Which is also what drives me nuts about the DAs on the show, because they always make it so black and white. And it's not). Dealing with justice isn't always a simple process.
It's like Mystical said -- none of us are perfect, and the "he who is without sin" invites us to step outside ourselves, and see the bigger picture. ANd that's how I see God's justice: it deals out what is due, but while taking the bigger picture into account. And the bigger picture has to incorporate more than a simple "right belief," because that's very black and white. People aren't like that. Beliefs aren't like that. It's very easy to say, "I believe this and this," and much harder to put that into practice when encountering "the other."
Life, as you note here is complicated. In an earlier post I pointed to Richard Beck's posts on everyday evil (Experimental Theology) which not the importance of context. Givne the same circumstances, might we not be in the same predicament? Thus, you're correct about the difficulty of meting out justice!