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By Verna Dozier

Lay people, as I hear them, are coming to church with the questions, “What is the right way to live? What are the right things to do?” These questions are what people are after, and they want some answers.

I think this is a basic misunderstanding. The Old Testament, as I read it, began with an awareness of a relationship with God. Many people today don’t even start there; they seem to feel that they must try to achieve a relationship with God. They miss the point. God has already acted for them; it has already happened. They are already all right, acceptable, accepted. Salvation is not at stake. The church as institution is not a way to get to be all right. God in Christ has already accomplished the work of salvation.

If the chief worry of the laity is getting into heaven, it is natural for them to regard clergy as the guardians of the pearly gates, the ones who have power to tell laity whether or not they are all right. Worrying about getting into heaven also reinforces looking at the Bible as a book of rules. We are thrown back from grace into law. “Getting into heaven” is our old way, traditionally, of saying what contemporaries mean by “finding acceptance,” “being OK,” or “getting right with ourselves.” It is interesting that our new expressions are so thin, lacking either poetry or a transcendent perspective.

If the Church is the way to get to heaven, the emphasis automatically shifts from the people of God to the Church as institution. The people of God are not all right the way they are. They need to be made all right and the institution is the means for shaping them up. When people are so conscious of how much they themselves need to be changed, they are not ready to begin to think about changing the world. They get thrown back into a concentration on their own inadequacies.

If we focus on trying to be all right, we are likely to concentrate on religious practices. We tend to have the feeling that if we do not follow certain rituals and obey certain laws, we will not get to heaven. The irony of that mindset is that the minute details become just as important as the really important things. We church people tend to care just as much about what color is hanging on the altar at a given time as about whether we are compassionate toward the poor, the sick, and the needy. We are sometimes more offended if the liturgy is not perfectly celebrated than we would be if 99.99% of the church’s budget is spent on itself.

We do not often get upset about the ingrown character of a parish’s programming, but we certainly get upset by any kind of liturgical reform. Again and again throughout the gospels, Jesus reminds people that those details really are of little importance. When I say, “I went to church every Sunday in the year,” that’s definable. I can chalk those credits up. But if the final judgment is going to be based on whether my heart is a heart of flesh or a heart of stone, that is not definable; that takes us into some insecure areas. Seeing the church as a way to get to heaven reinforces the individualism of present day Christians.

If the issue is how I am going to squeak through the pearly gates, I won’t be very interested in getting my hands dirty trying to change the systems that support injustice. If my salvation is not accomplished, I have to be very busy trying to create my all-rightness through my own efforts. Why do we insist on trying to justify ourselves? What is it that is so very persistent in us that makes it so hard to accept the fact that we’re accepted? First, our strange mixture of pride and self-hatred; and second, our misunderstanding of God. If we are accepted, and everybody else is, too, on what basis can we then claim distinction or superiority? When we see life that way, we aren’t looking at a God of unlimited and overflowing richness.