Chapter 62. Good People but Unbelievers

My theology continued to be shaped by surprising, unlikely teachers.

I attended a funeral. Not that I knew the kid – in fact, I had never met him – but out of respect for his mother who was one of my co-workers. It was an astonishing service. There was a very large representation of young adults present. This was not a church crowd or an Adventist college crowd. Their dress, bling, hair and body language all suggested a harder, edgier identity.

When time was given for people to speak about Billy, a number of these young adults spoke. Listening to them you would have thought Billy was a saint. When a guy was kicked out of his apartment by his girlfriend, whose couch did he end up on for months? Billy's. When someone needed to get bailed out of jail, who did he call? When you totaled your car and needed to borrow wheels to get to work so you didn't lose your job, who would give you their keys? And it wasn't only the kids who painted this picture a couple of older people also spoke of Billy's consistent ethic of care. I left the service with the happy assurance that Billy was a genuinely good person, the obvious hints of substance abuse notwithstanding.

A few weeks later Janet stopped me in the hall. We talked about her son. Well, actually we talked about her grief. She didn't know what to do with the insuperable weight of it. It's not that her son had died. That was horrific enough. It was that she had no hope. She would never see him again. She thought she could handle the loss if only she had hope for the future. But that was not available. He hit an oak tree going who-knew-how-fast when he failed to make a ninety degree turn on one of the snakey roads coming over the mountains from the coast. He would have died instantly. There was no time for a last minute conversion.

“How can you be so sure you won't see him?”

“Well, you know, he wasn't safe to save. He had been really heavy into alcohol and drugs. He had cut back on that. In fact, he was really doing pretty good, but he wasn't a Christian. He grew up in the church but he rejected Jesus and the church and God. So he wouldn't be safe to save.”

I was taken aback by her words. It was a new use of the idea of “safe to save.” Graham Maxwell popularized the phrase in Adventism. As I understood it, he taught that the dividing line between those who would live eternally and those who would be annihilated was just this: were they safe to save? Could God safely give a person eternal life? I think the principal concern was, would the person go back to rebelling against God and harming people? The entire point of the drama of history was to prepare for an eternity where people would have freedom without any risk they would revert to sin.

I thought the point of this construct was to offer hope. It did not require that people achieve perfection before death or the Second Coming. It appeared to me to obviate need for people to perfectly master the salvation formulas of evangelical Christianity. However, this mother linked it with the traditional Adventist notion of a dauntingly high standard of practice and belief. Her son obviously did not meet that Adventist standard of wholehearted, publicly declared faith in the saving merits of Jesus. He just as obviously did not meet the classic stipulation of Ellen White: overcoming every hereditary and cultivated tendency to evil. So he wasn't safe to save. Doomed. Damned. Unquestionable, irrevocably.

 

While he was alive, she had prayed and hoped. But now what could she do? How do you live with no hope?

I asked her about some rumors I had heard about her son. Were they true?

“Yes. He really was a good kid. After his father left me, all the kids were supportive, but Billy came every week and maintained the pool and the yard. I don't know what I would have done without him. I couldn't have afforded to hire someone, and it was too much for me to do alone.

“And yes, when his dad had that accident, his girlfriend moved out a week later. And Henry was bedfast. He couldn't even get up and go to the bathroom. Billy moved in and waited on him hand and foot for six months. Can you believe that?”

“What about those stories the kids told at the funeral," I asked, "about Billy lending them money or letting them crash on his couch? Was that all true?”

“Well, you know, Billy had all these friends from Academy. None of them go to church any more. A lot of them are into drugs and alcohol. They're a mess. Billy was a mess, too, for a long time. But even when he was drinking so much he could not hold on to a job for long, he was always helping his friends. More than once one of his friends would end up on Billy's couch for weeks at a time. Everybody knew that if you were in trouble, call Billy. Yes. That's true.”

“Then you can hope to see him again.”

“How? He rejected God and the church. He hadn't been to church in years, except when he came sometimes with me on holidays, just to make me happy. He never went for himself.”

“Janet, you know the story of the sheep and goats. It's the most famous passage in the Bible about Judgment Day. In that story, when God announces who's in and who's out on Judgment Day what does he base the decision on? Does he ask people if they believe in Jesus? Does he do a urine test? Does he check their church attendance record? No, he checks one category: compassion. Did you feed me when I was hungry, give me clothes when I was naked, visit me when I was in prison?

“From what I heard at the funeral and from what you are telling me now, Billy clearly passed that test. So I'm planning of having you introduce us when we get to heaven.”

“Do you really think so? Are you sure?”

“I have no question at all. Unless you've been making up stories and unless all those people at the funeral were just saying nice things that weren't really true, Billy is going to be at the head of the line, heading into the kingdom.”

“But he wasn't a believer. What about that?”

“It is a truism in Christianity that if a person claims to be a believer but acts like the Devil, we say their actions speak louder than their words. Jesus said as much in Matthew 7. Even people who are so religious, they are working miracles and prophesying, if in the rest of their lives they're acting like wicked people, all their religious words and religious work are irrelevant. We know what they really believe by the way they behave. I believe the opposite is also true. If someone insists they don't believe in God or Jesus, but when you check out their behavior it looks like they're a believer, I think we can trust their behavior over their words. Your son was a believer, no matter what he said. He acted like a believer. He acted like he believed Jesus since he was doing what Jesus told us to do.”

“You really think so? Really?”

“Yes.”

I could see her thinking new thoughts. I could see hope sprouting or at least germinating. It was going to be resisted by decades of dogma that insisted people like her son were damned. But I was quoting Bible verses she knew. I was appealing to images that were as deeply rooted in her mind as the words of condemnation and exclusion.

I went on to write sermons developing this idea further. It seems to me best to view salvation as something that comes through God's grace. Neither human behavior (classically, works) nor human opinion (classically, faith) is the engine of salvation. Humans receive grace. How? The Bible offers a variety of pictures of receptivity works. Baptism, the Lord's Supper, Sabbath keeping, and, of course, verbal declarations of faith are all ways for us to more fully and richly receive God's grace. All of these expressions are expected of a Christian. You can cite passages that explicitly support the necessity of each of these. So the church appropriately presents these as normative. But God is quite able to handle the exceptions like the thief on the cross and like Billy.

Billy's rejection of church and God was quite understandable. His dad had been an elder in the church and made a great show of religion. Then he dumped Bill's mom for someone younger and fresher. During Bill's teen years, at almost the same time his dad was chasing a shorter skirt, a pastor and the youth leader at his church became involved in scandalous affairs. Then the Bible teacher at the Adventist academy Bill attended went off the deep end, first theologically then psychologically. Almost every man Bill knew who would have appropriately served as a model for God violated Bill’s trust. When Bill turned his back on God and the church, he was rejecting pretense, hypocrisy and non-integrity. He refused to believe in the god of shyster religiosity. I think God would approve.