Reading: John 3: 11-17
Today I want to talk about the word, “salvation,” and already I can see your eyes start to glaze over. And so this part of the problem, I think. Many of us don’t know how to speak of salvation. Many of us are uncomfortable with the question, “Are you saved?” Some of us don’t quite like how the term is used by others, yet we are not quite sure how to use the term ourselves. John Cobb wrote a book, Reclaiming the Church: Where the Mainline Church Went Wrong and What to Do About It. In it he said that we suffer from being unclear and uncertain about our message. He writes:
Perhaps our most serious weakness at present is that we share no clear idea of “salvation”…we do not know what we are saved from or to.
Many of us recoil from the term because we don’t like the restricted way it is used. Most often, to be “saved” is used in a personal, exclusive, even arrogant sense.
Marcus Borg says that Christianity has a crisis with its language now and that for may people, words like “salvation” have become an obstacle “sometimes so large that taking Christianity seriously becomes very difficult.” The language has become distorted. “Salvation,” for example “now refers to life after death; it is about going to heaven. But in the Bible it is seldom about afterlife; rather, it is about transformation this side of death.” (Speaking Christian, p.15)
And so he says that the language of Christianity needs to be redeemed, set free, and reclaimed from its captivity.
Barbara Kingsolver’s novel, The Poisonwood Bible, is about a Baptist missionary, his wife and four daughters in the Congo. One of his daughters, Adah, was born without the use of part of her brain. Consequently, she limped and rarely spoke. We hear her thoughts, however, as she reflects on the all too common funerals of children in their little village. The men carry the wrapped body in a hammock slung between two sticks with the grief-stricken women following. We hear Adah think:
Down the road past our house they go, into the forest. Our Father forbids us to watch. He doesn’t seem to mind the corpses so much as the souls unsaved. In the grand tally Up Yonder, each one counts as a point against him.
According to my Baptist Sunday-school teachers, a child is denied entrance to heaven merely for being born in the Congo rather than, say, north Georgia, where she could attend church regularly. This was the sticking point in my own little lame march to salvation: admission to heaven is gained by luck of the draw. At age five I raise my good left hand in Sunday school and used a month’s ration of words to point out this problem to Miss Betty Nagy. Getting born within earshot of a preacher, I reasoned, is entirely up to chance. Would Our Lord be such a hit-or-miss kind of Saviour as that? Would he really condemn some children to eternal suffering just for the accident of a heathen birth, and reward others for the privilege they did nothing to earn? I waited for Leah and the other pupils to seize on this very obvious point of argument and jump in with their overflowing brace of words. To my dismay, they did not…
Miss Betty sent me to the corner for the rest of the hour to pray for my own soul while kneeling on grains of uncooked rice. When I finally got up with sharp grains imbedded in my knees I found, to my surprise, that I not longer believed in God.
I suspect that some of you may have had similar experiences. Some of you have encountered images of God that were hard to swallow. Many others, I suspect, have left the church altogether. But where did this current and predominant image of salvation come from?
Well, it’s not that difficult to trace. Mostly it comes from a rather literal reading of the biblical story:
First we start with the world created all at once, perfect and complete. The whole creation was then ruined by the fall, the story goes, through one simple act of eating from the wrong tree. The once perfect and whole creation was not broken and disrupted.
God began the process of healing the broken world through Abraham and his clan. Later, through Moses, God continued to fix the broken world through the exodus. The Hebrew people killed the pascal lamb and spread its blood on their doorposts, saving them from the angel of death and destruction. The law was then given to lead these fallen people back into a state of grace.
Finally, there developed a sacrificial system in the ancient world to help overcome this chasm between the fallen creatures and the Holy God. On the Day of Atonement, called Yom Kippur, there were two rituals. One was the public confession of the people’s sins, which were ceremoniously heaped upon the back of a goat.
The scapegoat was then run out into the wilderness and was believed to have carried the sins of the people with it, thus purging them of their sins. The second ritual was the sacrificial offering of the lamb which was carefully inspected to be sure it was physically perfect. There could be no scratches, no blemishes, and no broken bones. Human life, so alienated from God, so fallen into sin, had to come before God under the symbol of something was perfect.
Now, those first generations tried to express the experience of Jesus, and so they used this imagery from their Hebrew past. In their reinterpretation, the blood of the pascal lamb has shed his blood on the cross, which came to be thought as the doorposts of the world, thus breaking the power of the angel of death. Some 60 years after his death, in the Epistle to the Hebrews, Jesus was described as the perfect offering long sought for in the Yom Kippur atonement ritual. God, it was said, sent his son “to pay the price of sin,” as the perfect, unblemished sacrifice, making all further sacrifices unnecessary.
Now, I want to make a couple observations at this point. This image of Jesus and salvation is making less and less sense to modern ears because it has been taken so literally and because we are so far removed from that ancient Hebrew world. This strange sacrificial imagery has been lifted out of its historical context. A human father who would nail his son to a cross for any purpose would be arrested for child abuse and murder. Yet when we literalize this image, we seldom pause to recognize the ogre into which we have turned God.
In addition, we also limit the many aspects of salvation. It is true that salvation has to do with eternity. I like how John Cobb puts it:
…we belong to God and that whatever happens to us in this life, the belonging continues. We participate everlastingly in the divine life. What we have been matters forever to God. Our efforts are not lost even when they do not attain their hoped-for ends.
But salvation also has to do with the here and now, with healing and wholeness experienced on earth. And it has to do not just with individuals but with the whole world. Salvation is inclusive! Everything and everyone is reconciled and saved, wrote Paul in the letter to the Colossians.
In the Hebrew Scriptures salvation was always in this world, not in a future heaven:
- In the 13th century B.C.E. salvation was the exodus and deliverance of the Israelites from slavery and bondage.
- In the 6th century B.C.E. salvation was the return from exile and captivity in Babylon spoken about by Isaiah.
- In the Psalms salvation was being rescued from danger and entering into a new kind of life, a covenant relationship with God.
And in the New Testament, salvation is almost always about entering a new way of living, a new kind of life, not some future, far-off heaven. Again, it’s about deliverance from blindness to sight (to enlightenment), from fear to trust, from sickness to well-being. These are all metaphors for a new way of being that is whole and healed. To be “saved” is to be healed or made whole in this present life.
Brian McLaren says that we have turned salvation into “an evacuation plan into the next world.” But that’s not the biblical understanding at all. It’s primarily about the transformation of our lives in this world.
Another word that is most closely associated with salvation is basileia, often translated as “kingdom.” Jesus envisioned a saved world that he referred to as the basileia theou, or the “kingdom of God.” It is also sometimes translated as the “reign” or “realm of God.”
So there’s also always a political/social dimension to salvation. It has to do with entire nations, indeed, the entire world, moving from injustice to justice, from violence to peace.
Stanley Hauerwas, who taught theology at Duke, said,
A hallmark of Christianity is that salvation is not individualistic—it’s not something one person receives for himself or herself. Salvation is the reign of God.
And so salvation is not an evacuation plan, but a transformational plan! It means to participate in the healing process of the world. To be saved it to be a part of this. Cobb writes,
In picturing a saved world we can begin with images that come to us directly from the ministry of Jesus. It is a world in which all sins are forgiven; all diseases, healed; all the hungry, fed; all prisoners, freed; all the lonely, visited.
Another way to look at salvation is to see that, in Jesus, God and the human life flowed together, and the Spirit that was present in him also brought forth the healing Spirit in others. In Jesus we can see how God is at work in the world, saving the world, calling forth wholeness in our lives; how God is working within us, calling us and directing us to overcome the pain of our past to a new way of living. We are awakened to new possibilities, live-giving opportunities.
When we read about the story of Jesus, we can become aware that in the presence of Jesus, barriers that divide on person from another seem to fade. Jesus showed love and compassion for all groups of people regardless of their beliefs and backgrounds. He bridged the gap between Jew and Samaritan, and Jew and Gentile. He crossed the cultural barriers that defined women as subhuman and children as not worthy of God’s concern. He made human contact with those who were ritualistically impure and unclean. He cavorted with sinners and tax collectors. He even showed love and compassion toward his own killers.
Jesus demonstrated a desire for healing, wholeness, and salvation that was inclusive, for the world. It was a realm where I find my salvation in the salvation of others, in the salvation of the whole.
There’s a wonderful story from Annie Dillard about an encounter between an Inuit Indian and a missionary priest. The Eskimo says, “If I didn’t know about God and sin, would I go to hell?” The priest thought for a moment and then concluded, “No, not if you did not know.” So the Eskimo says, “So then why did you tell me?” You can see this inconsistency here about the message, right?
One of the best definitions I’ve heard of salvation is to be in union with God. To be saved is to be in union with God. And notice that this union is something that God does, completely independent of anything we do, and most of the time, we are completely unaware of this union.
And when we look at salvation in this way, everything and everybody is already saved! Because everything is in this constant union with God. This is a very biblical understanding of God, by the way. There’s no place we can go, nothing we can do, nothing that can happen to us where God is not present to us and within us. Nothing can separate us from this union that we have with the Divine.
So this image of salvation as “a ticket to heaven” really is a distortion. Because the truth, is seems to me, is that you don’t need a ticket. You’re already there! Now that’s good news! And so, we’ve been there all along and didn’t even know it!
Now becoming away of this is quite another matter. Living as if this union—our salvation—is true is quite another thing. You could say that becoming aware of this is a kind of salvation, itself, bringing a kind of healing, peace and wholeness. Becoming aware that we are already saved—already in union with God—is a continual process, a life-long task. I think that this is what Paul was talking about when he said “work out you salvation with awe.” (Philippians 2:12)
And so we are left simply to realize this union with God, to experience it, and to live out this hidden reality. In this sense salvation is continually being realized and unfolding in us and the world.
So in summary, this thing we call our salvation—our deliverance, our healing, our transformation—
is not just in the future, but is for this world, here and now,
is not just for individuals, but is cosmic, for the entire world,
and in the ultimate sense, the most real sense,
is something that already exists and that we already have.
May we each discover our hidden wholeness as we work for the wholeness and salvation of the world.
May we be a beacon of God’s saving love for all people and things.
And may we, in Cobb’s words, “boldly proclaim an inclusive salvation, the salvation of the world.”