“Saved from What?”
9 December 2012
Proper 27B
Homily preached at Trinity Episcopal Church
Ashland, Oregon
8:00 a.m. spoken Mass, 10:00 a.m. Sung Mass
A few weeks ago, a
parishioner in a small group class said, “Father Tony, please talk about that
salvation thing. My fundamentalist
relatives are always asking me if I’ve been ‘saved.’ I don’t know what to tell them—I think God is
working with me and I am getting a little closer each day, but I don’t think
that qualifies for what they’re talking about: some kind of moment when I
accept Jesus in my heart, and he takes my sins upon himself and is punished
instead of me for them on the cross, and I am saved from sin, death, and
hell. You talk about Jesus, the cross,
and forgiveness of sins, but not about such a moment or even transferred
punishment. What are we saved from, and
how?”
Today as response to
the Hebrew Scriptures and Epistle Readings we did not chant a psalm, but rather
one of the Canticles, those pieces of metrical poetry found elsewhere in
scripture and tradition that serve the purpose of a psalm. We chanted Canticle 16, the Song of
Zechariah, which begins in Latin with the words Benedictus Dominus Deus, from the Gospel of Luke. The following line hints at an answer to the
question. It is addressed to the infant
John the Baptist: You, my child, shall
be called the prophet of the Most High, for you will go before the Lord to
prepare his way, To give people knowledge
of salvation by the forgiveness of their sins.” It is important to note that in the last line,
“by the forgiveness of their sins” is used to explain how people gain a knowledge of salvation by John’s ministry, not how
they are actually saved. Paraphrased, it
says, “to make people know about being saved by God by giving them the
experience of having their sins forgiven.”
It does not mean “to make people know about salvation, about having
their sins forgiven.”
The distinction is
important, because is it preserves the original meaning of the word
“salvation,” being pulled out of harm’s way, being rescued.
“Salvation” is
originally an image from the field of battle.
It is when someone else keeps you from certain death or serious
injury. It is one of the basic images of
God in the Hebrew Scriptures:
“Can spoil be taken from a warrior,or captives from a victor?Yet, thus says Yahweh:‘Captives shall be taken from a warriorand spoil shall be retrieved from a tyrant.For I will contend with your adversaries,and I will deliver your children. …All humankind shall know thatI, Yahweh, am the One who rescues you,Jacob’s Hero, the One who buys you back.’”(Isaiah 49:24-26)
The problem facing John the Baptist
and his people was that no one had real hope for such rescue. There was no such salvation in sight.
150 years earlier, Jewish patriots
yearning to worship their God in their own tradition had revolted against the
Greek Syrian tyrants who sought to suppress Judaism. Under the leadership of a man called Judah
the Hammer (Judas Maccabeus) they had thrown out the Greek occupiers and
established a kingdom with Jerusalem as its capital. They restored the Temple. Most people thought that they were bringing
the long-hoped-for Kingdom of God at the end of time, when God would fix what
was wrong with the world, punish evil-doers, and restore and rescue the
righteous. But the Maccabees had turned
out to be a bunch of petty corrupt rulers, with the even the High Priesthood up
for purchase by the highest bidder. The
country was an easy mark for the Romans when they got interested in the Eastern
Mediterranean. And now the political
power of the Roman occupiers was mixed with the political, social, and
religious power of these corrupt ruling elites.
The elites in Jerusalem themselves
divide up over religion: the Saduccees,
or Temple party, stress strict adherence to Temple ritual and respect for the
Temple authorities. The Pharisees, not
comfortable with the corruption and
accommodation they see, stress in addition careful observance of extra rules
aimed at putting a fence around God’s law.
Others, the Essenses, flee away from
Jerusalem, and go into the desert of Judea near the north end of the Dead
Sea. They reject the authority of the
purchased High Priesthood, and try to live the Law strictly in the Desert,
recreating in their life the wandering of the Children of Israel under Moses
and justifying themselves by the passage in Second Isaiah—“In the wilderness,
prepare a way for the Lord.” They become
the community that settles at Qumran and later leaves us the Dead Sea Scrolls.
In all of this, there is not much
hope for the common people of being rescued by God. They have no hope of rescue from the Romans,
from their own countrymen who oppress them, or even from their own failings and
abuses, their own sins. The Sadducees
are part of the oppressors, and they
control the means by which forgiveness of sin under the Law of Moses is
supposed to be sought—the sacrificial system in the Temple. The Pharisees for their part say that
following the rules and prayer will get you close to God, but are mute on
whether this will bring rescue. The
Essenes are an exclusive cult limited to a few fanatics enforcing impossible
life rules, and while they say that their path will bring both forgiveness of
sin and being rescued by God from foreign occupiers, their path is not really
open to many people.
John appears and starts preaching
and baptizing just a couple of miles from the Essenes’ Mother House. Like them, he is ‘preparing in the desert the
way of the Lord.’ But where they have
ritual washings on an ongoing basis to purge impurity, and an initial washing rite to bring in
outsider Jews into their community after a rigorous period of testing and
trial, John offers all and sundry the
grace of God—“Change the way you think and act, receive this washing signifying
that you’ve done that, and then live new lives.” This is what the Song of Zechariah calls
“letting them know what being rescued by God is by having them experience
forgiveness of their sins.”
John’s preaching and baptism is a
reaction to bad religion all around. It
tries to make God’s rescuing us something real, something tangible, something
available.
Bad religion was not just a problem
of that era—we have lots of bad religion around us today: religion that makes
God’s rescuing us unavailable to whole classes of people, whether on account of
belief, race or nationality, the authority of rites managers, gender, sexual
orientation, or any other of a variety of reasons. It is religion that says “good news” is
something that no one in his or her right mind would call good news. It is religion that says salvation is only
about our consciences and inner landscape.
One of the problems that people have
today with the idea of “salvation” is that they limit it to simply salvation
“from sins.” But people may or may not
feel shame, guilt, or deep remorse for their wrong-doings. If they do, this often is seen as
pathological or morbid obsession with the past, rather than simply a
psychologically more healthy view of trying to do better next time, and not
beating up on yourself so much.
John’s baptism addressed a sense
prevalent in his community that you were perpetually unclean and unworthy of
God’s fellowship due to your inability to follow the rituals, precepts, and
rules of the religious powers of the day.
“Focus on your wrong thinking and
your wrong acting, and then turn around.”
That’s what “Repent” means. John
says “Do that, come and let me wash you, not in the Temple after a sacrifice,
not in a ritual Mikveh built and owned only by those who have their lives together
and can afford them, but in the open water of the river. Then show in your lives fruits of that
turning around.” Thus you will feel what
it is like to be rescued by God.
What
are the things we need to be rescued from?
Guilt, shame, and regret most definitely; our moral failings
surely. But we also need being rescued
from abusive relationships, unjust structures in society, addictions,
compulsions, and obsessions. We need to
be rescued from ignorance, fear, from sickness, and from death itself.
In
the traditional Christian way of talking, such rescue, such “salvation” comes
from Christ. An old argument between
different scriptural writers and theologians tells us how this is usually
seen—salvation by faith or salvation
by works. If one talks primarily of salvation from sin thought of as a moral debt that needs
to be paid, then salvation usually is described as coming through faith in the one who paid that debt. If one talks primarily of salvation from
social ills, then perhaps works is a
more appropriate channel of such grace.
But
if we take a more comprehensive view of salvation, and say that it is rescue
from all that puts us at risk, all that puts us in harm’s way, all ways
we fall short of the ideal, including sin, perhaps it is best to use another
image: salvation through love.
Jesuit anthropologist Teillard de Chardin used this image, as did the
Anglican bishop of China who died last month, Blessed Ding Guangxun (K.H.
Ting). Salvation through love echoes an image used in 1 John:
“In this the love of God was made manifest among us, that God sent his only Son into the world so that we might live through him. In this is love, not that we loved God but that he loved us and sent his Son to be the thing that makes up for where we fail. Loved ones, if God so loved us, then we ought to love each other too.” (1 John 4:9-11)
Saint
Paul writes to the Corinthians about the three things that will last, faith,
hope, and love. And he says the most
important of these is love. This is a
major reason for talking about salvation through love rather than salvation through faith or works. Faith, hope, and love are all aspects of
the same openness of heart that John the Baptist calls the people to when he
says “Change your hearts and your ways, and be washed.”
Some
people talking about the emergent Church believe that we should get rid of the
image of salvation from sins as the central
idea of Christianity and perhaps replace it with the image of enlightenment. I think, however, that this simply replaces
one limited and limping image with another one, one that specifically was
rejected by the early Church in its controversies with the Gnostics.
The
key here is recapturing a comprehensive understanding of what salvation is,
what repentance is, and seeing that love is the center of the Christian hope
and experience.
As
you continue your Advent preparations, ask yourself, where do I need God to
rescue me? Where do I need Jesus to come
to my aid? How can I change the way I
think, feel, and act to be able to receive that rescue? And how can this be part of receiving Jesus’
love and showing it to others? Take what you find in this questioning, and change your way of thinking, feeling, and acting. Then go forth and love, be God's love in the world.
In the name of Christ, Amen.
No comments:
Post a Comment