My family is still fairly new to the Episcopal church, and having grown up in more evangelicalish churches, there are still a lot of differences that we are still learning to appreciate. The idea that throughout the service, all of the prayers are written down, predetermined, with only a few blanks to fill in specific to our congregation. This is a massive change from the church I'm used to, where a member of the congregation or a worship leader would lead a prayer coming from his own words that could last for several minutes, infused with many requests and oftentimes messages to the congregation. (Please note that I am not attempting to condemn or claim that this improvisational prayer is any less significant or correct, I am just comparing what I grew up with to what my church does now.) As such, we are having to relearn prayer.
I've also been dealing with a lot of conflicts about the nature of and purpose of prayer. Since Rachel Held Evans went into the hospital and everyone on Twitter started saying prayers, especially when we started to see things getting worse, my already skeptical views continued to solidify. If God answered prayers according to our requests, Rachel should have been healed. If God answered prayers according to the faith of those who prayed, Rachel should have been healed. If God answered prayers according to our persistence, Rachel should have been healed. Instead, Rachel died. If we view prayer as bringing our requests to God, but knowing that God is going to make his own decision anyway (or that he is impotent to do so), then it seems to be completely void of purpose. There has to be something different to it, and something different to why we pray.
We have a 2-year-old son who joins us during the latter part of service every week. While he spends most of his time on the pews playing with cars and drawing on paper, we really want him to have something to engage him in the service. Also, we want him to learn to pray, even if we don't know why or what it should look like, so we were already doing simple prayers at bedtime. Our church says the Lord's prayer every week, so we thought this would be a good entry point. We now do the Lord's prayer with him every night, having him repeat after us in bite-sized chunks. He surprised us a couple of weeks ago by suddenly saying the whole thing without any prompting. When we get to church and start saying the prayer, he enthusiastically joins in, albeit a bit delayed (which results in him saying "Amen" out loud after the rest of the congregation, which is unbelievably adorable).
The Lord's prayer was part of the lectionary this week, too, so it inspired me to write about it. I will concede that the passage in the lectionary also includes Jesus basically saying ask God and it will be given to you. I don't
know how to square this with the doubts that Rachel's death cemented in
me without doing a lot of mental gymnastics. Thus, I am going to ignore that point today, not because it is unimportant or wrong, but because I legitimately do not know how to handle it.
Taking all of the above into account, I decided to give my own take on it as an attempt to give the words a little more meaning to me. In writing this, I decided upon the "May we" format, mainly for the construct of expectation. If I say to
someone "may you find peace today," I tend to mean something along the
lines of "my desire is for you to find peace today." It comes across as
a more passive hope or desire rather than directly asking "Please do this." It's more of a conversation and a statement of mentality than it is a request. I also like the "we"
construct, as it indicates the desire is for all of humanity as well as
us individually to embrace these hopes.
So having said all of that, here is my attempt at doing the Lord's prayer in my own voice (which is a little more long-winded, as I'm already long-winded, and I'm doing my best to speak in plain terms).
Dear God,
You are divine and set apart from everything else in our life.
May we declare your presence and power on the earth the same as we do in the life to come.
May we enact your desires on this world to make it reflect the life to come.
May we be satisfied with enough to make it through this day, leaving worries about tomorrow to you.
May we have the wisdom and grace to forgive our oppressors and enemies in the same way we wish to have our own actions of oppression, hatred, and destructiveness forgiven.
May we be freed of the distractions and worries that attempt to take our focus off of your desires.
May we recognize that creation is yours, not ours, and may we treat it accordingly.
May we recognize that your power is great and trust in it when it seems defeat is inevitable.
May we recognize that victory over death is yours and live accordingly.
May all of these desires come to fruition.
Monday, July 29, 2019
Wednesday, July 10, 2019
An Analysis of the Rich Man and Lazarus
“There was a rich man who was dressed in purple and fine linen and who feasted sumptuously every day. And at his gate lay a poor man named Lazarus, covered with sores, who longed to satisfy his hunger with what fell from the rich man’s table; even the dogs would come and lick his sores. The poor man died and was carried away by the angels to be with Abraham. The rich man also died and was buried. In Hades, where he was being tormented, he looked up and saw Abraham far away with Lazarus by his side. He
called out, ‘Father Abraham, have mercy on me, and send Lazarus to dip
the tip of his finger in water and cool my tongue; for I am in agony in
these flames.’ But
Abraham said, ‘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. Besides
all this, between you and us a great chasm has been fixed, so that
those who might want to pass from here to you cannot do so, and no one
can cross from there to us.’ He said, ‘Then, father, I beg you to send him to my father’s house— for I have five brothers—that he may warn them, so that they will not also come into this place of torment.’ Abraham replied, ‘They have Moses and the prophets; they should listen to them.’ He said, ‘No, father Abraham; but if someone goes to them from the dead, they will repent. He
said to him, ‘If they do not listen to Moses and the prophets, neither
will they be convinced even if someone rises from the dead.’”
Luke 16:19-31 (NRSV)
This parable has always been interesting to me because unlike most parables, I have seen this one taught and referenced for multiple different reasons. It's an interesting passage because we can read so many things from it, but it's also a potentially dangerous passage because we can read so many things from it.
Heaven/Hell
In Hades, where he was being tormented, he looked up and saw Abraham far away with Lazarus by his side. He called out, ‘Father Abraham, have mercy on me, and send Lazarus to dip the tip of his finger in water and cool my tongue; for I am in agony in these flames.’
Besides all this, between you and us a great chasm has been fixed, so that those who might want to pass from here to you cannot do so, and no one can cross from there to us.
This is the primary reason I seem to come across this passage. I am somewhere between an annihilationist and universalist when it comes to my afterlife theology. I do not believe in eternal conscious torment (ECT). Whenever I read discussions about the afterlife, those that believe in ECT often come to this passage to support their position. Indeed, we have all of the elements needed here to see ECT. We have conscious torment, and we have an indication that no one can go from Heaven to Hell and vice-versa, which seems to eliminate any post-death reconciliation (which is a common approach to universalism). I will concede that this is a very effective passage for defending the ECT belief on the afterlife.
I do see ways to view this that don't necessitate adopting ECT, though. First, the purpose of this parable was not to teach about Heaven and Hell. Verse 13 in this chapter is where we get the famous You cannot serve God and wealth line. In verse 14, the Pharisees are called lovers of money. At the beginning of the chapter, we had a parable about a rich man with a dishonest manager. Money and wealth seem to be a theme that has been leading up to this.
Further, this view of the afterlife is not one found in the Old Testament. It, however, was developed during the Second Temple period of Judaism, so it was a common view held by the audience at that time. (See the wikipedia entry on Sheol). Jesus is likely just using a known construct to tell his story rather than try to describe the actual mechanics of the afterlife.
The last thing I'll mention on this is that my views of the afterlife are found throughout the Bible. I actually believed ECT until I read through the entire Bible, which converted me to annhilationism (and I've since drifted towards universalism). The truth of the matter is that there are passages in the Bible that seem to defend any number of afterlife views, and if we want to hold fast to a particular view, we have to perform some pretty hefty distortion of other passages. This is one of those verses that non-ECT believers have to wrestle with, but that doesn't mean that because this one passage seems to point towards ECT, that the whole Bible does. This passage does not necessitate adopting ECT.
Money/Wealth
There was a rich man who was dressed in purple and fine linen and who feasted sumptuously every day. And at his gate lay a poor man named Lazarus, covered with sores, who longed to satisfy his hunger with what fell from the rich man’s table; even the dogs would come and lick his sores.
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.
These lines strike me as interesting because it doesn't explicitly charge the rich man with anything other than receiving good things in life. There are ways to read this that would indicate that the rich man should have cared for Lazarus, and that is why he is being punished, but that is never explicitly stated. It's just that their fortunes were reversed in the afterlife. I don't have a lot of analysis here, I just find the lack of explicit condemnation interesting. Were I telling the story, I would make a direct connection between his lack of mercy and his agony.
Of course, we do have to ask what he wants his brothers to be warned about and what he claims they will repent of. It's not any significant stretch to assume that this is indeed about living lavishly in their wealth while not taking care of the suffering in front of them.
My social justice side does love this part of the passage (if not the Hell part). My read on it is that this rich man and his family all live lives of riches and ignore the poor in front of them. Rather than give any mercy to the poor, they make the poor beg and scavenge for anything. As a result, the rich are now suffering, and those that they didn't have mercy on are now living lives in happiness. Their fortunes are reversed. Especially in light of our current political reality, that sounds nice to me (though if I think about it too thoroughly, I start liking it less, as my life is probably a lot closer to the rich man than to Lazarus).
However, the part that really resonates with me is this line:
If they do not listen to Moses and the prophets, neither will they be convinced even if someone rises from the dead.
I'll touch more on this in the next section, because I believe this part has been severely misused, but my take on it is that Moses and the prophets were abundantly clear on how important it was to care for the needy:
Isaiah 1:17:
learn to do good; seek justice, rescue the oppressed, defend the orphan, plead for the widow.
Amos 5:11:
Therefore because you trample on the poor and take from them levies of grain, you have built houses of hewn stone, but you shall not live in them; you have planted pleasant vineyards, but you shall not drink their wine.
Ezekiel 16:49:
This was the guilt of your sister Sodom: she and her daughters had pride, excess of food, and prosperous ease, but did not aid the poor and needy.
These are just a tiny sampling of passages all over the prophets. I could post whole chapters of Amos and Isaiah. The Levitical laws have many rules about caring for the immigrant and alien. The year of Jubilee was instituted to relieve families of permanent oppression (something that would be nice to see in present day). There were rules about caring for the immigrant and the alien. This concept of caring for the poor and needy was not new with Jesus.
So if we had enormous swaths of the Hebrew Scriptures that dictate caring for the needy, then all of the rich man's family should have been well aware of how important that mandate was. If they were able and willing to ignore all of it, then they weren't going to listen to anything. Their mind was made up, and nothing would change that. We see that a lot with the modern evangelical support of politicians and policies that demonize the poor, demean the needy, dehumanize the oppressed, and exalt the rich. Fox News and power has supplanted the Bible as the source of truth, and no amount of evidence seems to change that.
Belief/Doubt
If they do not listen to Moses and the prophets, neither will they be convinced even if someone rises from the dead.
When I have thought of this parable throughout my life, this part frequently comes to mind. The reason for that is that this portion has been weaponized against doubt. It wasn't until very recently that I even considered that this line could be referring to not listening to the prophets about caring for the needy. This passage has always been about doubt to me.
I'm honestly not sure how much of this is self-inflicted and how much of it has shown up in teachings over the years, but I've always read that as "if they didn't believe in God even with the words of Moses and the prophets, nothing will convince them." This has been used to support why non-Christians deserve to go to Hell (this is often coupled with Romans 1:19-20 ). This line has been used as a reason we don't see miracles today. It's been used as a way to question the salvation of someone with doubts. As a result of that, it has the effect of causing doubters to question their own salvation. It's a dangerous verse when used improperly, yet that's the only way I've ever heard (or read) it.
I feel like my approach in the previous section makes much more sense from a storytelling perspective, and it seems more consistent with how I perceive Jesus to teach. It has a lot more to do with acting according to what the scriptures teach than pure belief.
I would love to hear other thoughts on this parable. If you come across this, feel free to give your feedback in the comments!
Luke 16:19-31 (NRSV)
This parable has always been interesting to me because unlike most parables, I have seen this one taught and referenced for multiple different reasons. It's an interesting passage because we can read so many things from it, but it's also a potentially dangerous passage because we can read so many things from it.
Heaven/Hell
In Hades, where he was being tormented, he looked up and saw Abraham far away with Lazarus by his side. He called out, ‘Father Abraham, have mercy on me, and send Lazarus to dip the tip of his finger in water and cool my tongue; for I am in agony in these flames.’
Besides all this, between you and us a great chasm has been fixed, so that those who might want to pass from here to you cannot do so, and no one can cross from there to us.
This is the primary reason I seem to come across this passage. I am somewhere between an annihilationist and universalist when it comes to my afterlife theology. I do not believe in eternal conscious torment (ECT). Whenever I read discussions about the afterlife, those that believe in ECT often come to this passage to support their position. Indeed, we have all of the elements needed here to see ECT. We have conscious torment, and we have an indication that no one can go from Heaven to Hell and vice-versa, which seems to eliminate any post-death reconciliation (which is a common approach to universalism). I will concede that this is a very effective passage for defending the ECT belief on the afterlife.
I do see ways to view this that don't necessitate adopting ECT, though. First, the purpose of this parable was not to teach about Heaven and Hell. Verse 13 in this chapter is where we get the famous You cannot serve God and wealth line. In verse 14, the Pharisees are called lovers of money. At the beginning of the chapter, we had a parable about a rich man with a dishonest manager. Money and wealth seem to be a theme that has been leading up to this.
Further, this view of the afterlife is not one found in the Old Testament. It, however, was developed during the Second Temple period of Judaism, so it was a common view held by the audience at that time. (See the wikipedia entry on Sheol). Jesus is likely just using a known construct to tell his story rather than try to describe the actual mechanics of the afterlife.
The last thing I'll mention on this is that my views of the afterlife are found throughout the Bible. I actually believed ECT until I read through the entire Bible, which converted me to annhilationism (and I've since drifted towards universalism). The truth of the matter is that there are passages in the Bible that seem to defend any number of afterlife views, and if we want to hold fast to a particular view, we have to perform some pretty hefty distortion of other passages. This is one of those verses that non-ECT believers have to wrestle with, but that doesn't mean that because this one passage seems to point towards ECT, that the whole Bible does. This passage does not necessitate adopting ECT.
Money/Wealth
There was a rich man who was dressed in purple and fine linen and who feasted sumptuously every day. And at his gate lay a poor man named Lazarus, covered with sores, who longed to satisfy his hunger with what fell from the rich man’s table; even the dogs would come and lick his sores.
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.
These lines strike me as interesting because it doesn't explicitly charge the rich man with anything other than receiving good things in life. There are ways to read this that would indicate that the rich man should have cared for Lazarus, and that is why he is being punished, but that is never explicitly stated. It's just that their fortunes were reversed in the afterlife. I don't have a lot of analysis here, I just find the lack of explicit condemnation interesting. Were I telling the story, I would make a direct connection between his lack of mercy and his agony.
Of course, we do have to ask what he wants his brothers to be warned about and what he claims they will repent of. It's not any significant stretch to assume that this is indeed about living lavishly in their wealth while not taking care of the suffering in front of them.
My social justice side does love this part of the passage (if not the Hell part). My read on it is that this rich man and his family all live lives of riches and ignore the poor in front of them. Rather than give any mercy to the poor, they make the poor beg and scavenge for anything. As a result, the rich are now suffering, and those that they didn't have mercy on are now living lives in happiness. Their fortunes are reversed. Especially in light of our current political reality, that sounds nice to me (though if I think about it too thoroughly, I start liking it less, as my life is probably a lot closer to the rich man than to Lazarus).
However, the part that really resonates with me is this line:
If they do not listen to Moses and the prophets, neither will they be convinced even if someone rises from the dead.
I'll touch more on this in the next section, because I believe this part has been severely misused, but my take on it is that Moses and the prophets were abundantly clear on how important it was to care for the needy:
Isaiah 1:17:
learn to do good; seek justice, rescue the oppressed, defend the orphan, plead for the widow.
Amos 5:11:
Therefore because you trample on the poor and take from them levies of grain, you have built houses of hewn stone, but you shall not live in them; you have planted pleasant vineyards, but you shall not drink their wine.
Ezekiel 16:49:
This was the guilt of your sister Sodom: she and her daughters had pride, excess of food, and prosperous ease, but did not aid the poor and needy.
These are just a tiny sampling of passages all over the prophets. I could post whole chapters of Amos and Isaiah. The Levitical laws have many rules about caring for the immigrant and alien. The year of Jubilee was instituted to relieve families of permanent oppression (something that would be nice to see in present day). There were rules about caring for the immigrant and the alien. This concept of caring for the poor and needy was not new with Jesus.
So if we had enormous swaths of the Hebrew Scriptures that dictate caring for the needy, then all of the rich man's family should have been well aware of how important that mandate was. If they were able and willing to ignore all of it, then they weren't going to listen to anything. Their mind was made up, and nothing would change that. We see that a lot with the modern evangelical support of politicians and policies that demonize the poor, demean the needy, dehumanize the oppressed, and exalt the rich. Fox News and power has supplanted the Bible as the source of truth, and no amount of evidence seems to change that.
Belief/Doubt
If they do not listen to Moses and the prophets, neither will they be convinced even if someone rises from the dead.
When I have thought of this parable throughout my life, this part frequently comes to mind. The reason for that is that this portion has been weaponized against doubt. It wasn't until very recently that I even considered that this line could be referring to not listening to the prophets about caring for the needy. This passage has always been about doubt to me.
I'm honestly not sure how much of this is self-inflicted and how much of it has shown up in teachings over the years, but I've always read that as "if they didn't believe in God even with the words of Moses and the prophets, nothing will convince them." This has been used to support why non-Christians deserve to go to Hell (this is often coupled with Romans 1:19-20 ). This line has been used as a reason we don't see miracles today. It's been used as a way to question the salvation of someone with doubts. As a result of that, it has the effect of causing doubters to question their own salvation. It's a dangerous verse when used improperly, yet that's the only way I've ever heard (or read) it.
I feel like my approach in the previous section makes much more sense from a storytelling perspective, and it seems more consistent with how I perceive Jesus to teach. It has a lot more to do with acting according to what the scriptures teach than pure belief.
I would love to hear other thoughts on this parable. If you come across this, feel free to give your feedback in the comments!
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