Week 6 Journal Entry for CPE--Fair Warning: It's a bit of a rant again

As I finish up week six enter and enter into week seven of CPE, I have been pondering the meaning of forgiveness and salvation. I know how we merit (or shall I say receive) salvation and I understand forgiveness as professed through the Confessions of the Lutheran Church but what I do not understand is why others do understand this. I have had on numerous occasions patients and family members say, “One must earn salvation” or “one must earn God’s forgiveness” but in reality scripture says the opposite. Now one could argue the Epistle writer, James’s, idea that “Faith without works is dead”. However, I would argue that our faith causes us to do good works and these works are not a prerequisite for our Salvation. We are simply justified by God’s grace through our Faith and by nothing else. But yet so many people, whether they are; Lutheran, Catholic, Methodist, Non-denominational, you name it, believe one must do good things in order to earn God’s love. It annoys me and upsets me that our society teaches that we have to do work in order to receive something in return. If we work hard and receive nothing in return we are either not working hard enough or we are lazy and do not deserve help. What the hell? Where is the love in that? Where is the humanity in that? Are we all not human? Have we lost the ability to see one another’s pain and exhaustion? Why can we not take care each other and expect nothing in return? The early church did it and, according to Acts, everyone was happy. Today this philosophy is seen as taboo. President Obama received the most flack on his campaign because he wanted America to develop more social concerns; he want to create programs where the needs of humanity were met before the needs of profit and production—the opposite of capitalism.

Sorry for the rant but it needed to be said. I just want to know why it is so hard for us to accept God’s forgiveness and salvation. It is clear in the scriptures how this is done but yet we refuse to go back to the scriptures to find it. We all have the power to forgive and we need not do anything to receive our salvation. The real question is how do I get this message across the patients I see everyday? To quote a famous commercial, “The world may never know.”