God Has No Point System

The opening scene of the pilot episode of one of my current fave TV shows finds Eleanor (Kristen Bell) sitting on a couch in a waiting room staring at the words “Welcome! Everything is fine” painted on the wall opposite her.

A door to an inner office opens and a man in a blazer (Ted Danson) invites her in. They sit across a desk from each other, and he introduces himself as Michael. She responds by asking, “Where am I?”

Michael says that she is dead. “Your life on earth has ended, and you are now in the next phase of your existence in the universe.”

Eleanor answers, “Cool, cool. I have some questions … Am I … (pointing upwards) or is this … (pointing downwards)?”

“It’s not the heaven-or-hell idea that you were raised on,” Michael says. “But generally speaking, in the afterlife, there’s a Good Place and there’s a Bad Place. You’re … in the Good Place.”

Did I mention this is a comedy?

It doesn’t take long before the show’s central conflict reveals itself — Eleanor shouldn’t have been sent to the Good Place; she was actually a pretty terrible person on earth, and the only way to get to the Good Place is by accumulating a net positive amount of points. She is the first to realize this problem, and tries her hardest to keep from being “outed.”

What plays out over the next three years of NBC’s “The Good Place” is a hearty dose of ethics, smart metaphysical humor, and a sassy robot girl named Janet. Except she’s not really a robot, but … it’s complicated.

One of my favorite scenes is the orientation video produced for new arrivals to the Good Place. You can watch it above. I’m especially fascinated by the point system that the Good and Bad Places are based upon.

In the video, Michael explains:

During your time on earth, every one of your actions had a positive or a negative value depending on how much good or bad that action put into the universe. Every sandwich you ate, every time you bought a magazine, every single thing you did had an effect that rippled out over time and ultimately created some amount of good or bad … When your time on earth has ended, we calculate the total value of your life using our perfectly accurate measuring system. Only the people with the very highest scores, the true cream of the crop, get to come here, to the Good Place.

In “The Good Place,” going to heaven or hell depends on one’s final “score.” That might sound amusing, but it absolutely amazes me how many people live their real lives according to this reasoning. This kind of moral reckoning likely makes sense to lots of people. In fact, I would guess that a large percentage of Americans believe in heaven and hell, and most of them probably believe that the way to get to heaven is to accumulate more good actions than bad.

What shocks me even more is that so many Christians live this way, too. Throughout my career as a pastor, I have visited more than one person on their deathbed who has said to me, “I’m not worried about going to heaven. I know I’ve been a good person.”

I want to say to them, though I usually don’t say it as bluntly as this, that BEING A GOOD PERSON HAS NOTHING TO DO WITH HEAVEN OR HELL.

In fact, that’s the exact opposite of the good news of Jesus Christ. The core gospel message is that God loves us — period. We are all sinners, all flawed and broken, but God forgives us anyway, and not because of anything we have done, but on the merit of Jesus Christ’s advocacy on our behalf.

This was the central theological point of the Protestant Reformation. Martin Luther protested the clergymen who were traveling the countryside selling “good points” to folks to boost their chances of gaining heaven. Luther insisted that God didn’t work this way; we couldn’t earn our way to heaven, but could only rely on grace to get us there.

In other words, God has no point system.

Paul put it like this: “For by grace you have been saved through faith, and this is not your own doing; it is the gift of God — not the result of works, so that no one may boast. For we are what he has made us, created in Christ Jesus for good works, which God prepared beforehand to be our way of life” (Eph. 2:8-10).

The good news is that we are saved by grace, not by good works, but that we are created to be people who do good works. The good works are not a means to an end; they are the end themselves. They are what constitute a meaningful, purposeful life.

You are already loved, already saved, already held in the arms of God. Nothing can tear you from God’s arms, nothing can separate you from God’s love. You are secure.

You will be in the Good Place one day, along with everyone else.

But until then, let’s do everything in our power to make this planet, this earth, this nation, this neighborhood, God’s Good Place.

Join us at our next Faith on Tap session, Feb. 12, 7 pm at 723 Ft Worth Ave, as we take a deeper dive into “The Good Place” and what it means to be good.

Spirituality and Physicality

Picture: The well where Jesus met the Samarian Woman (John 4:1-42)

by Kurt Maerschel

Two weeks ago I returned from a 16 day tour of the Holy Land. This trip was through my pastoral education at SMU. Our group was made up of approximately 15 students and 10 lay people from various Dallas congregations who joined us on our trip.

Needless to say this was the experience of a lifetime. Before the trip I was so excited to see places of relevance mentioned in the New and Old Testament. I wanted to follow in the footsteps of Jesus and to get a feel for the locations themselves. My expectations were not disappointed. I felt I got a comprehensive overview of the sites. I was able to “touch and feel” the land.

What I wanted to write about today was this aspect of touching and feeling our faith. As Protestants and especially as Methodist Protestants, we are very heavily focused on the intellectual and abstract spiritual aspects of our faith. In Methodist tradition this has not always been that way. As you might know, Methodism is an offshoot of the Church of England, which itself is basically Catholic without the Pope. I know this simplifies everything to an extreme, but my point is that Methodism traditionally shared many physical practices as they are still common in the Church of England or the Catholic Church today. Such physical practices include the use of incense, anointing oil, and bells during the Eucharist.

I am not saying that one practice is better than the other; all I am saying is that while travelling the Holy Land, I was constantly confronted with the physical aspects of our faith. For us living in a country that is by all measures very new to this world, it is difficult to take in the historical depth of a place like Jerusalem. Not only are there layers over layers of historically significant sites, but it is also the stories and traditions which have been passed down over centuries and in some cases millennia (!!!!!) which hover over every inch of this city. Many of the places we know today as Golgotha or Jesus’s tomb or the Garden of Gethsemane, are places which have been passed down to us through tradition, from generation to generation. Almost all of these places match the biblical description of where they ought to be or what they ought to look like, but some places are in dispute. In Bethlehem for example there is the field where the Catholic shepherds saw the angels announcing the birth of Jesus Christ and there is also the field where the Greek Orthodox shepherds were made aware of the incarnation.

Our guide responded to this problem with “If you believe it, it’s true.” And I think this attitude settles these issues – at least for me – perfectly. But there is a deeper physical spirituality in this place that one can only experience over there. Faith is visible and touchable everywhere. Not only do Jews and Muslims dress up in specific outfits to make their faith known to others, but also certain Christian denominations leave no doubt to the outside world which faith they follow based on their clothing. If that were not enough, there are synagogues, mosques and churches everywhere. The houses of worship also don’t simply rest silently in their existence, as they do here for most of the time, but the Muezzin calls the Muslim faithful to prayer five times a day (starting before sunrise I may add), and the Christians are not very shy either by making the mass and Holy Communion times known to the world by the frequent use of their church bells. Day to day interactions with others might also be influenced by the faith of the other. Some people might refuse to touch a woman (such as shaking hands), some people might refuse to touch objects which might have been touched by a menstruating woman such as a shekel bill (the local currency) or a seat in public transport. Starting Friday evening everything shuts down for the beginning of Sabbath. Merchants hastily pack up their stores since they have to be closed before sundown, which occurs in the winter already at 4 pm. A holy veil of silence descends on the land. The traveler can sense that there is something “special in the air.” Even if one does not realize it is Sabbath, one senses that “something is off.” Our senses of smelling, hearing and seeing notice less movement, less exhaust fumes, and less noise throughout the city.

The craziest thing of course is when one visits the sites where Jesus walked by and taught. It is hard for me to describe the feeling when one stands in the actual synagogue where Jesus taught. There is a sudden realization “this is real!” Obviously we ought to know that it is real, but being there imbues an additional dimension of experienced faith.

Now I know that it is not possible for everyone to get to go on this trip/pilgrimage of this sort, so the question arises: “How can we experience this added dimension of physical faith in our lives here in Dallas?” This is where our Christian heritage as Methodists comes into play. John Wesley pointed out that humans not only perceive reality through their physical senses, but that we also perceive reality through our spiritual senses. The human being however is one –not two split in body and soul, but one as body and soul together. The interaction between physical and spiritual senses leads us into fulfilling our God given purpose as God created beings. Thereby the physical reality can stimulate our spiritual reality and vice versa.

For this reason I encourage you to deliberately light a candle from time to time throughout your prayer time. The adventurous among you might experiment with incense (which is available at any Catholic store). Incense has been used since ancient times as a representation of prayers rising to the heavens. Their smell and the visible smoke alter the reality around us and draw us in. If you are suffering ask someone to anoint you with oil. Sit deliberately in your garden and enjoy the sounds of nature in silence as a concert of praise for the glory of God. Sing in the church choir and let the air you release though your vocal cords become a pleasant fragrance in the sight of the Lord thereby contributing to your own and your Christian family’s edification.

If you questions about this article please feel free to talk to me in person, by email or by phone. Kurt Maerschel kurt@kpumc.org 972-835-1909.

What Churches Can Learn From Dying Newspapers

I’ve finally done something I was determined not to do, something that sounded so outrageous as to be almost blasphemous. I thought I would never change my principles, but everything came crashing down in my world a few weeks ago —

I cancelled my subscription to the Dallas Morning News.

Before you pick up that stone, please give me a chance to explain myself. I am a child of print journalism. I helped start the newspaper at Allen High School years ago, then I worked summers at the local rag, Allen American. For a period during college, I was the sports editor for that twice-weekly publication.

I chose to study broadcast journalism in college, which eventually morphed into an interest in film production, but I have never lost my appreciation and passion for the newspaper. In fact, during seminary, I was a regular contributor to the DMN’s Religion section, which was a weekly section of 6-8 pages once upon a time.

Furthermore, I, too, am someone who likes to read the paper in the morning with a cup of coffee. But those days are long gone. Lately, I’m lucky if it takes me half a cup of joe to get through the whole thing. Face it — the paper is pretty thin these days.

It started a good number of years ago, when I began to notice that many of the stories on the front page were written by the legendary reporter, “From Wire Reports.” Less and less of the copy was written by people with names who live and work in Dallas.

Then I started to recognize much of the paper’s content because I had read it the day before, online from another source! For the first time, the day’s paper started to feel like old news.

Not to mention the fact that I found the DMN to have far too little coverage of film, TV and music, and far too many recipes, gardening tips, and health-related info-ads. Unfortunately, I’ve never been interested in the comics page either.

Still, I held on. For one thing, the DMN was the best place to get local news, though maybe not as incisive and investigative as Jim Schutze and the Dallas Observer folks. And you couldn’t beat the Sports page either, unless you listened to The Ticket or The Fan, or kept up with any number of sports blogs or online sites.

The last straw came a few weeks ago, when the paper slashed its staff — again — and then promptly trimmed a few more pages from their daily product — again! The editorial and opinion section, which held down the last two inside pages of the front section, was reduced to one measly page. The only entertainment writer I liked (Chris Vognar) was sent packing, and so was sportswriter Eddie Sefko.

And I decided I was done.

This is not a proud moment for me, but the Morning News has done nothing to keep me around. I would like to support local print journalism, which I think plays a vital role in keeping government accountable, citizens engaged, and communities united. But sadly the paper no longer does those things well.

Print journalism can blame the internet or television or social media, but the truth is that certain journalism outlets have thrived in the new environment. They have adjusted with the times, and adapted to new mediums, new subscription models, and new ways of attracting talent.

I’m just sad that the Dallas Morning News has not been one of them. I still want great journalism, but I get it elsewhere now. That’s the way capitalism works — for better or for worse.

Now, let me challenge you to switch mental gears. Just as there are lots of people now canceling their subscriptions to printed newspapers, there are even more people out there who are no longer going to church. The reasons are similar.

They may have grown up going to church, and appreciating church, and having rich experiences with church. But over time, they noticed that the church was no longer meeting their spiritual and social needs. They wanted to support their local churches, which they think should play a vital role in fostering encounters with God, explaining and interpreting the Bible, and building fellowship. But sadly they have come to the conclusion that the church no longer does those things well.

Over time, people began to sense that there were more authentic ways to experience God, interact with Scripture, and enjoy Christian community. As the modern millennial might put it, “I still want spirituality, but I get Jesus elsewhere now.”

Churches can blame the internet or television or social media, but the truth is that certain congregations have thrived in the new environment. They have adjusted with the times, and adapted to new mediums, new models of ministry, and new ways of paying the bills.

As the special General Conference in St. Louis nears, the question looms large before us: Will the United Methodist Church go the way of the Dallas Morning News and print journalism, or will it find ways to thrive in the new world?

What about Kessler Park UMC?