Alma 34

Alma sat down and Amulek got up. Here’s his sermon, conflated from various recollections:

No one can say they haven’t heard about Jesus, the Anointed One. Old news. Don’t plead ignorance.

But you’ve asked how to get faith when you feel so put upon. He told you to be patient, plant the word in your hearts, experiment with it, and so on. You’ve wondered if Jesus will really come and I think my brother has shown you that he will and that Jesus is the only place you can get the right words to plant as seeds in your hearts.

He quoted Zenos (redemption comes through God’s son) and Zenock and Moses for further proof texts.

Let me put in my two senines worth. I know the Anointed One will come, subsume the world’s sins through his love, and reconcile everyone to their maker. How do I know? Well, first, God said it in the brass plates. Second, it works for me theologically. Let me explain.

God and his children need to reconcile. If there is justice, people must die for their cosmic criminality. They’re also thickhearted, wayward, and plummeting downward in their general character. Another reason God, a principled guy, should doom them all.

Now, he has this notion of animal sacrifice as a temporary fix: you kill what you love and it curbs your selfishness. But for a lasting and infinitely valid sacrifice he has to reverse roles.

A substitution theory or concept won’t fly. At least not the way we consider justice. Will our law allow a man to take the punishment for his brother’s crime? No way. If you murder, you have to die, not someone else in your place (begging the question as to whether killing to make up for killing even works).

God stands by the laws he gave Moses. But he needs a bigger idea to sweep up the mess the world and he have left to the future—while not negating his earlier plan. He hates backpedalling.

So he’s renegotiated his earlier demands for blood sacrifice to make them all symbolic of a single sacrifice that he himself makes: his son gets killed instead of one of your animals. Brilliant, if highly unorthodox. That updated sacrifice will count for everything and everyone who needed a sacrifice to meet God’s demands of, shall we say, regenerative justice (i.e., it meets his demands but also changes the observers’ hearts by its generosity and grandeur). With this method he saves everyone who invokes his name. It’s a quirky bait and switch, in which he makes you assent to justice but then makes mercy mow right over justice. The mercy then causes more faith, which causes better behavior, which diminishes the need for mercy. You’ve heard of “spiraling out of control”? Call this “spiraling into control.”

If you don’t subscribe to this process you have to stick with justice, which, trust me, won’t help anyone.

My hope for you is that you will subscribe to it, get on the spiral of mercy-faith-change-lessmercy-morefaith-morechange-etc., all the while asking his help to keep the process moving. A little psalmette in the form of a checklist here:

Call God up for mercy. He loves that.

Downplay your ego and keep praying.

Call him at work—agricultural or mercantile, the same.

Call him from home. Call him about your home.

Call him about the people you hate or who hate you.

Call him about any devil who disrupts your pursuit of wholeness.

Call him about what you’re eating, that it won’t make you sick.

Call him about your stuff, that you’ll get more of it. (Hey, worth a try.)

But just remember: “call” is an understatement. You have to pour your soul out in private, in the closets you hide in, the woods you escape to.

Even when you’re neither calling nor pouring, keep a mental tether to divinity all the time. No cordless relationship to God. You need help. So does everyone else in your address book.

Another thing: you absolutely have to give money to poor people, visits to sick people, clothes to raggedy people, and so on. If you’re not addicted to social action, you can pray all night and day and still book a room in hell for the universe’s duration, which is quite possibly all the duration there is. Prayer doesn’t work for hoarders, unless you’re crazy hoarders. Those folks need a different kind of help.

If you love gold too much you’ll turn into the dross they throw away when they’re making gold. If the world doesn’t scrape you off its feet, God will.

We missionaries all have the same message. Just like the scriptures. If you hear holy text or read it, please act on it. Stiffening your emotions against it won’t do. Today is the day to stop. If you do, God’s plan will gradually unfold in your hearts.

We talk about having “the time of your life.” A good phrase. Because that’s all we ever have. We work and play, survive till we die. Then the judgment. “No time like the present”—another apt phrase. Don’t procrastinate. You don’t know what can happen from moment to moment. No one can. Not really. There is now, plus your memory of other nows. But that’s it. You can’t say, let me wait till I’m in crisis, then I’ll improve. Your soul persists from day to day, straight through to eternity. It’s your essence. Don’t wait for your “new life.” There’s only one. And this is it.

If you procrastinate, you effectively hand your soul to the devil on a platter. He caps it and carts you off. No one comes back after that.

God lives inside of good hearts. That’s his home. At some point, when they’re ready, those good hearts go to live in the homes he’s built them. Our souls will get a new wardrobe too: all white, which contains all the colors that exist.

My heart is right with God. But it still aches. And you’re the cause. I can teach you, but you have to work out the details for yourselves with God. Start by not denying God’s plan in Jesus’ coming. Stop fighting the spiritual feelings you get when Jesus is spoken of. Beat down your egos to ground level. Wherever you are at any moment, let thankfulness settle in your minds, thankfulness for the stream of goodness that flows through your lives, even when you are most troubled. Ask God to keep the devil at bay. Satan always exacts a cost, but gives nothing in return.

Finally, be patient, even with the people who block you at the synagogue doors. If you hate the haters, you’re no better than they are, right? Patience, in this case, is a form of hope that you’ll outlast the crooked hearts of golddiggers.