Lent 4B
March 22, 2009
St. Dunstan's
The Rev. Patricia Templeton

"Saved for Life"

Sunday morning has a language all its own, full of words that we seldom, if ever, use other times of the week. Words like repentance, righteousness, grace, incarnation. Words that I suspect all of us – including those of us who went to seminary – would be hard put to easily define.

Sometimes the strange language that we use on Sunday mornings can be intimidating, or even a barrier to true worship and understanding. One of my favorite writers, Kathleen Norris, admits that when she returned to church as an adult after an absence of many years, she found the language there downright scary.

“When I first ventured back to Sunday worship in my small town, the services felt like a word bombardment, an hour-long barrage of heavyweight theological terminology,” she writes. “Often, I was so exhausted afterwards that I would need a three-hour nap.”

Today, our second reading contains one of those words that frightened Kathleen Norris, a word that even a dictionary of religious terms calls “theologically weighty.”

“By grace you have been saved,” Paul writes to the Christians in Ephesus. “This is not your own doing; it is the gift of God.”

Salvation, being saved, may be one of the scariest words and topics our religion offers, particularly in this part of the country. Certainly almost all of us have been asked at some point, “Have you been saved?”

The question is usually asked in an accusatory and challenging tone. It is a question that makes me uncomfortable, and one that I don’t entirely understand.

“Saved from what?” I want to respond.

My guess is that if I did reply that way, the answer would be – saved from everlasting damnation and hell. And my response would be a sure indication that I was not among those saved from these terrors.

I feel much more comfortable with the comments of a young skeptic who said, “When I hear those ‘saved’ people talking and singing and shouting about how great it will be when they are dead and in heaven, I have to wonder:

“What must they think about this life if they’re so enthusiastic about wrapping it up and getting on with the next one? If that’s what salvation is, then I say forget it!”

But if we think of salvation as primarily concerned with the next life and where we will spend it, then we have missed much of the meaning of this word. Salvation, in both the Old and New Testaments, is described in physical terms, in terms of the here and now, with implications for this life.

When Kathleen Norris writes about salvation, she offers the story of her friend, Willie, who had met up with some drug dealers in Wyoming and dreamed up a get-rich-quick scheme with them.

The scheme was going well – contacts and networks for setting up the drug deals were falling into place. And then, one day, when Willie was riding with his friend, the friend suddenly veered onto the shoulder of the road. He had seen an acquaintance driving past in the other direction and was debating whether to turn his car around and follow him.

“I need to kill him,” he said matter of factly, reaching for a gun that Willie had not known was stashed under the front seat. “I need to kill him, but he’s with someone, and I don’t know who. So it’ll have to wait.”

“It was right then I decided to get out,” Willie said. “This was over my head.”

Although Willie did not describe it in religious terms, Norris sees that moment as the beginning of salvation for her friend.

“The Hebrew word for ‘salvation’ means literally ‘to make wide’ or ‘to make sufficient,’” Norris writes. “And our friend had recognized that the road he had taken was not wide enough to sustain his life; it was sufficient only as a way leading to death.”

That understanding of salvation is echoed by theologian Douglas John Hall, who writes, “I am entirely convinced that salvation as presented in the Bible does not mean being saved from our mortality, our human creatureliness; nor does it mean being saved for an otherworldly state, immortality, heaven.

“In fact, when salvation is understood that way, it distorts the whole Christian message – a message that is the strongest possible affirmation of life.”

An understanding of salvation that supports that affirmation of life comes when we look at its Latin root, salus, meaning to be whole or integrated.

This kind of salvation is a very earthy thing – the healing of people, the reintegrating of divided selves, the reuniting of people with those from whom they are estranged, equipping us for the kind of life our Creator intended us to have.

This kind of salvation does not offer quick and easy fixes. Norris’ friend, Willie, took the first step toward salvation when he suddenly realized that the road he was on led not to life, but death. But finding his way to the right path took time and effort, happening in fits and starts.

Even when we know God is present, salvation is often not easy to accept or live out. Today we hear of the people of Israel, who God saved from slavery in Egypt.

How did they respond to this gracious gift? By complaining and whining.

“Why have you brought us up out of Egypt to die in the wilderness?” they complain to Moses. “There is no food and no water, and we detest this miserable food.”

Of course, what God has done is set them on the road to salvation, saving them from torture and slavery and putting them on the path that led to abundant life.

But they, as any of us might, began longing for the devil they knew, rather than facing the unknown road ahead.

That unknown road, even when it leads to salvation, is not always an easy one. As Hall says, “We should not be surprised if we are led not into immediate light and all things positive, but into, at first, even greater darkness.

“To receive wholeness, we have to know the extent of our brokenness. To become healthy, we have to face the real causes of our illness. We cannot be satisfied with quick and easy fixes.”

What makes the road to salvation bearable is that God is with us on it, even at its darkest turns. God, who is as Paul describes “rich in mercy,” and who loves us deeply even when we are on the wrong road, will not abandon us.

There are times, of course, when scripture does speak of salvation in terms of the life to come. In today’s reading, Paul assures us that because we are saved we will be seated with Christ in heaven.

But even when salvation is spoken of in those terms, it has implications for this life.

Paul’s assurance of salvation means that we do not have to live in fear, trying to earn our way into God’s good graces and to avoid divine punishment. There is no way we can earn salvation, anyway, Paul says.

God has given it to us as a gift; all we have to do is accept the gift and trust enough to begin the journey.

Accepting God’s gift of salvation means living the life God intends us to live to the fullest. Whatever stands in the way of our full entry into this life with all its mixture of joy and sorrow – that is the sin from which we must be saved.

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Readings

Numbers 21:4-9

From Mount Hor the Isaraelites set out by the way to the Red Sea, to go around the land of Edom; but the people became impatient on the way. The people spoke against God and against Moses, “Why have you brought us up out of Egypt to die in the wilderness? For there is no food and no water, and we detest this miserable food.” Then the Lord sent poisonous serpents among the people, and they bit the people, so that many Israelites died. The people came to Moses and said, “We have sinned by speaking against the Lord and against you; pray to the Lord to take away the serpents from us.” So Moses prayed for the people. And the Lord said to Moses, “Make a poisonous serpent, and set it on a pole; and everyone who is bitten shall look at it and live.” So Moses made a serpent of bronze, and put it upon a pole; and whenever a serpent bit someone, that person would look at the serpent of bronze and live.

Ephesians 2:1-10

You were dead through the trespasses and sins in which you once lived, following the course of this world, following the ruler of the power of the air, the spirit that is now at work among those who are disobedient. All of us once lived among them in the passions of our flesh, following the desires of flesh and senses, and we were by nature children of wrath, like everyone else. But God, who is rich in mercy, out of the great love with which he loved us even when we were dead through our trespasses, made us alive together with Christ—by grace you have been saved—and raised us up with him and seated us with him in the heavenly places in Christ Jesus, so that in the ages to come he might show the immeasurable riches of his grace in kindness toward us in Christ Jesus. 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.

John 3:14-21

Jesus said, “Just as Moses lifted up the serpent in the wilderness, so must the Son of Man be lifted up, that whoever believes in him may have eternal life. For God so loved the world that he gave his only Son, so that everyone who believes in him may not perish but may have eternal life. Indeed, God did not send the Son into the world to condemn the world, but in order that the world might be saved through him. Those who believe in him are not condemned; but those who do not believe are condemned already, because they have not believed in the name of the only Son of God. And this is the judgment, that the light has come into the world, and people loved darkness rather than light because their deeds were evil. For all who do evil hate the light and do not come to the light, so that their deeds may not be exposed. But those who do what is true come to the light, so that it may be clearly seen that their deeds have been done in God.”

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