The Road to Redemption – How Are People “Saved”? Part 1

    "Have you been saved?" Those were the first words used to greet a member of my former church when he went to visit a Presbyterian church closer to his home. He drove quite a distance to get to our church and when a new congregation planted itself closer to his home, he decided to try it out. As he walked through the front doors of the new church, the first person to meet him asked if he had been saved. The question so unnerved my friend that he had no idea what to say…so he mumbled something excused himself and headed for the sanctuary. The next week when he was back with us, he wanted to know how he should have answered. Though we might not have encountered quite the same situation, chances are many of us might have wondered as well how to answer the question…so we will take a look at what this being saved thing is all about.

     In its most basic sense, the word "saved" implies that one is saved from something and to something. One is saved from an onrushing train (your car moves off of the tracks) to safety (to the roadway clear of the train). Within Judaism and Christianity there are several traditional ways in which this "saved from" and "saved to" language has been used.

    Within Judaism saved has most often referred to being physically saved from illness or death. In early Judaism (before the exile to Babylon) there was no sense of eternal life and so to be saved was a very real saving of one's life here and now. As a belief in eternal life began to take hold, being saved meant being saved from an eternity in the shadowy netherworld of Sheol (the place of the dead) to a resurrected life back on earth following God's redemption of the righteous (those who obeyed the Law of Moses).

Within Christianity the earliest way in which this language was used was that people are saved from sin into new life. The understanding here is that sin leads us away from the life-giving ways of God and into the death dealing ways of "the world." By following Jesus (usually expressed in terms of believing in Jesus) our path is altered and we leave behind the ways of death, which harm us and others, and we enter a new path which leads to a way of life which positively impacts the world on God's behalf. The end result, very much like with Judaism, was that the saved were resurrected into God's renewed world.

The most frequent use of "saved" in the American religious tradition was and is that people are saved from hell and to heaven. This is the theme of every evangelical crusade that has set up a tent or filled an auditorium. The underlying belief is that if someone makes a profession of faith in Jesus, one is saved from eternal punishment in hell and into eternal bliss in heaven. Chances are this is what the person meant when he asked my friend if he was saved. My favorite example of this view of salvation comes from the Crystal Cathedral which once had a TV promotion where a person could call in, tell the operator that they had professed faith in Jesus and the caller would be sent a ticket to heaven.

A summary of the biblical sense of salvation then is that humanity, including the Jews as God's chosen children, had abandoned God's plan for the world (to love God and neighbor) and had chosen instead a destructive self-centered manner of life. Somehow this self-destructive path needed to be altered so that as humanity awaited the coming Kingdom of God, they would more and more demonstrate God's love to the world. This is why Jesus, as would any good Jew, spent so much time talking about life here on earth, rather than about heaven. Salvation for Jesus was connected with how one lived one's life in the present moment, not as a way to earn salvation, but as a way of demonstrating that one was in fact being saved (changed more and more into a God-centered individual). At the same time salvation did contain an after-death component which impacted how one might spend eternity. Next week we will spend some time with this eternal component.

The Road to Redemption: Proclaiming the Good News

    Evangelism is a practice with which most of us as Presbyterians are not overly comfortable. In my former congregation we even jokingly referred to it as the "E" word because so few people wanted to talk about it. My impression is that evangelism is not kindly thought of because of the images it evokes. The images can run the gamut from street corner preachers, to strangers who ask if we have been saved, to revivals where guys in white suits make the threat of hell so real that you can feel your clothes being singed. These images make us nervous for a number of reasons: we don't like people invading our personal space; we have a more expansive view of God's love and grace; or perhaps we are actually Presbyterians who believe that salvation is the work of God and cannot be accomplished by manipulating the hearts and minds of others. For these and perhaps many other reasons, we as modern Presbyterians tend to shy away from the whole idea of evangelism.

    The problem with this view of evangelism is that Jesus said the following, "All authority in heaven and on earth has been given to me. Go therefore and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, and teaching them to obey everything that I have commanded you. And remember, I am with you always, to the end of the age." (Matthew 28:18-20) In other words Jesus asked his followers to go and tell the world about his life, death and resurrection; to make people part of the community through baptism; and to teach them about following his commandments, which can be summed up as love God and love neighbor. The early church was more than willing to do this because it understood that in Jesus the very Kingdom of God had come into the world and that God wanted everyone to be a part of it. This was good news. This is the Good News. This was the message that Peter, Paul and early Jesus followers proclaimed to the world; Jesus died, rose again and in him there is life and life abundant in the in-breaking Kingdom of God.

    Within the New Testament the Book of Acts is the story of this Good News telling within the Roman Empire. Though we read mainly about Paul's missionary journeys, there are numerous others who traveled with him (Timothy, Luke, Barnabas among them) in order to invite people into the Kingdom. In Paul's letters we are made aware of churches that were founded by unknown Jesus' followers who had heard the Good News and shared it with others. As I pointed out in some previous articles this Good News was good news because the Kingdom of God was a wonderful alternative to the Kingdom of Rome. In the Kingdom of God there was equity and equality; compassion and care; and love and hope. Women and slaves were particularly attracted to the church because the church made it clear that they were as loved by God as was any other person. This is why today in places like India the church is growing the fastest among the lowest castes that have been oppressed for thousands of years. The good news for them is that they are valued in the eyes of God in Christ.

    So how do we share the Good News? For some people the answer is to tell family and friends about what Christ has done in their lives. Good News telling is a one-on-one event. For most of us that have not received the spiritual gift of one on one Good news telling (and the Apostle Paul makes it clear that Good News telling is a gift that not everyone has) the easiest way is to invite people to visit Everybody's Church. For if they choose to come, they will hear the Good News read and proclaimed, and they will see the Good News being lived out through mission, inclusion and community. The church family becomes the incubator in which the Good News comes alive as people experience Christ through the love and compassion of the community. The bottom line then? There is no need for white suits, threats or revivals. All that is required is for us to invite others to experience the love and grace of God in Jesus Christ, which we have already come to know.     

The Five Part Story – Part Five – We Follow the Way of God’s Love

    The Biblical story, as I have pointed out in previous articles, is organized as a meta-narrative. It has a beginning, a middle and an end. It has a problem (sin) which needs to be solved. It has adventures and great heroes (Abraham, Moses, David among them). It has a savior (Jesus of Nazareth) who rescues humanity and begins reclaiming them for God. And it has a conclusion which describes the restoration of God's good creation (the book of Revelation). The issue with scripture however, is that it is very easy to miss this overarching story. Readers can easily find themselves bogged down in the details of the Temple, the list of Kings, the minutia of the Law of Moses or the theology of the Apostle Paul in his letters. In order to help people understand the meta-narrative, our staff developed the Five Part Story.

    Part One is that God loves the world. This is the foundational belief upon which entire story rests; that God as creator desires that creation fulfill its potential to be a place of peace, justice and love. Part Two is that we wandered far from God. Human beings wandered away from the life giving ways God set before them and chose instead to follow ways that led to death and destruction. Part Three is that Jesus is the way to God. In the life, death and resurrection of Jesus of Nazareth a path is opened which makes it possible for human beings to once again live into the life giving ways of God. Part Four is that the Spirit leads us to God. The Holy Spirit takes the potential of living into the life giving ways of God and makes that potential a reality. The final part of the story is that we follow the Way of God's Love.

    This final part of the story may come as a surprise to many Christians. I say this because the end of the story for many Christians is heaven. In other words the end results of God's love, Christ's death and the Spirit's work all lead to a final end…eternity with God in heaven. That would indeed make for a nice neat conclusion but, as was noted above, that is not the ending the scriptures offer us. The end for scripture is a new heaven and earth on which men, women and children live fully, and eternally, into lives which demonstrate love of God and neighbor. Thus the end of the story is that we are to follow the way of God's love such that we demonstrate the fullness of being God's children.

    This ultimate end to the story then helps to determine how we live in the interim as we head for the completion of God's work. We are to live in the interim as those doing our best to follow the way of God's love as shown to us by Jesus of Nazareth. Stories such as the Jesus eating with sinners and tax collectors (Luke 5:27-32), the Good Samaritan (Luke 10:29-37) and the rich man and Lazarus (Luke 16:19-31) offer us glimpses of what this Jesus-like life ought to look like. In the Gospel of John (15:12) Jesus tells his disciples that "This is my commandment that you love one another as I have loved you." This same idea (loving one another) is continued in the letters of John. (1 John 2:7-12; 4:7-12)

Paul addresses this in the "ethics" portion of Romans (12:1-2) where he writes, "I appeal to you therefore, brothers and sisters,
by the mercies of God, to present your bodies as a living sacrifice, holy and acceptable to God, which is your spiritual
worship. Do not be conformed to this world,
but be transformed by the renewing of your minds, so that you may discern what is the will of God—what is good and acceptable and perfect." He continues in 12:9-13. "Let love be genuine; hate what is evil; hold fast to what is good;
love one another with mutual affection; outdo one another in showing honor. Do not lag in zeal, be ardent in spirit, serve the Lord.
Rejoice in hope, be patient in suffering, persevere in prayer.
Contribute to the needs of the saints; extend hospitality to strangers." For the Apostle the outcome of all of Christ's work is that we become capable of and willing to let the love of God shine through us in what we say and do.

    You and I are part of this Five Part Story; the greatest story ever told. The challenge for us is to be intentional about following the way of God's love in response to all that God has done for us.

Part Four of the Five Part Story: The Spirit Leads Us to God

    Over the past two months we have been discussing the issue of salvation. This discussion came immediately after our examination of Part Three of the Five Part Story; that Jesus is the way to God. The basic understanding of salvation is that God applies the work of Jesus on the cross to human hearts such that those hearts are transformed. This transformation allows human beings to move from self-love to loving God and neighbor. In that way people experience salvation in this moment (becoming the persons God designed them to be) and for eternity (they enter into a never ending relationship with the living God). The question becomes then how does God continually realign human hearts so that, in the face of the siren calls of the world, they continue to love God and neighbor more and more.

    The answer is that it is the work of the Holy Spirit that does this. For many of us Presbyterians the Holy Spirit is a concept/entity/person around which it is hard to wrap our heads. We are much more comfortable with God (creator) and Jesus (savior) because they are easier to imagine. The Spirit on the other hand often seems much more like "The Force" in Star Wars; a force which permeates everything and everyone. This view of the Spirit, while somewhat helpful, does not do justice to the complex, personal nature of the Spirit in scripture. The Orthodox view of the Spirit is that it is one "person" of the Trinity. The Nicene Creed (381 CE) puts it this way, "We believe …in the Holy Ghost, the Lord and Giver of life, who proceeds from the Father, who with the Father and the Son together is worshiped and glorified, who spoke by the prophets." In other words the Spirit has a life of its own…it blows where it wills. With all of that having been said let's take a look at how the Spirit leads us to God.

First the Spirit leads us to God by changing us. In Romans 5:1, 5 we read, "Therefore, since we are justified by faith, we
have peace with God through our Lord Jesus Christ…because God's love has been poured into our hearts through the Holy Spirit that has been given to us." What Paul wants us to understand is that the reconciliation we have with God is the product of the Spirit's work of sending the love of God into our lives. This in-pouring of love by the Spirit essentially changes the orientation of our hearts so that we willingly turn to God by seeking the new relationship which God desires to have with us.

    Second the Spirit leads us to God by giving us the ability to follow the way of Jesus. In 1 Corinthians 12:3 Paul writes, "Therefore I want you to understand that…no one can say 'Jesus is Lord' except by the Holy Spirit." The willingness to acknowledge Jesus as Lord is the first outward demonstration of a new heart; a heart which is oriented toward God through Jesus. By declaring that Jesus is Lord we begin putting the will of God in Christ first and our own wills second. We follow the way of Jesus toward God.

Third the Spirit leads us to God by making us part of God's family. In Romans 8:15-16 Paul writes, "For you did not receive a spirit of slavery to fall back into fear, but you have received a spirit of adoption. When we cry, "Abba!
Father!" it is that very Spirit bearing witness
with our spirit that we are children of God." You and I are now given the opportunity to have an intimate relationship with God. We are able to respond to God's love as a beloved child to a caring parent.

    Fourth and finally the Spirit leads us to God by helping us to pray. Romans 8:26-27 puts it this way. "Likewise the Spirit helps us in our weakness; for we do not know how to pray as we ought, but that very Spirit intercedes
with sighs too deep for words. And God,
who searches the heart, knows what is the mind of the Spirit, because the Spirit
intercedes for the saints according to the will of God." In a sense the Spirit enables us to have a deep and profound relationship with God because the Spirit takes our needs and desires, which we cannot fully express, and lays them before God.

    God's love for the world is so deep that it does not end with the sending of Jesus Christ to die on the cross. Rather God's love is expressed in the never ending work of the Spirit which not only applies that work to our lives but creates an eternal connection between ourselves and God.

The Road to Redemption – The Five Part Story: Jesus is the Way to God

    We began our Five Part Story Two weeks ago by remembering that God Loves the World; that this universe and everything in it, were created by and are beloved by God. The story continued last week when we looked at the fact the We Wandered Far From God; that humanity chose to leave the paths of life God had established for them, choosing instead to wandered along ways that led to pain and death. The struggle for humankind then has always been how does it find a way off of the path of pain and loss and back onto a path of life and hope?

     As I noted in a sermon some weeks ago this journey from death to life, from failure to redemption forms the basis for some of the greatest stories of the human race. From Homer's the Odyssey, to Dickens' A Tale of Two Cities, to Conrad's Lord Jim, to Star Wars (remember Darth Vader?) authors and movie makers have tried to offer us visions of redemption. The Biblical story is no different. The difference between the great tales of literature and the scriptures however, is that the former are dealing in fiction while the latter is dealing in reality.

    The New Testament is the story of redemption; a redemption which has been made possible by Jesus of Nazareth. Just as the Old Testament began with saga, so too does the New Testament. In Matthew, Luke and John we are offered glimpses of angels delivering messages, babies leaping in wombs, mysterious strangers from the East delivering gifts and an amazing poetic description of Jesus as the Word made flesh; of Jesus as God incarnate in our midst. These stories are intended to inform us of the unique character and mission of Jesus. He is the one, sent by God, to lead God's people back into right relationship with God.

    The manner in which Jesus accomplishes this mission and becomes the Way to God is twofold. The first way forms the heart of the Gospel of John, central parts of Paul's theology and portions of the Book of Hebrews. They all claim that Jesus is the Way to God because Jesus and God are mysteriously one. John 1:14 makes clear that in Jesus, God "became flesh and dwelt among us." Paul writes in Colossians 2:9 that "For in Christ all the fullness of the Deity lives in bodily form." Hebrews 1:3 tells us that Jesus "reflects the glory of God and bears the very stamp of his nature." These descriptions remind us that Jesus can lead us back to God because Jesus is connected to God in a way that the rest of us are not; that the rest of us cannot be connected to God. Jesus becomes then the bridge between heaven and earth; a bridge over which we can travel back into the heart of God.

    The second way in which Jesus is the Way to God is that Jesus deals directly with sin. Sin is the human condition which causes us to Wander Far from God. Unless sin is dealt with, humanity will never be able to turn away from its death dealing and turn to God's life giving ways. The heart of the New Testament story is that by Jesus going to the cross and being raised from the dead, the power of sin is finally broken. Through Jesus' death and resurrection sin and death have been defeated. What this means for humanity is that we can now both see the path back to God (Jesus being the bridge) and we can follow the path (Jesus has taken care of sin). Thus reconciliation and new life have become possible.

    As I noted above the difference between stories of redemption (literature and movies) and the Biblical story (the work of Jesus) is the difference between fiction and non-fiction. While stories can inspire us, Jesus changes us. For two thousand years more than a billion followers of Jesus Christ have found their lives transformed by their relationship with Jesus. Through their faith in him they have found forgiveness, redemption and new life. They have left brokenness behind and found new possibilities for full and inspiring lives. Their lives, our lives, are testaments to the reality that Jesus is the Way to God.

    

The Road to Redemption: The Five Part Story – We Wandered Far From God

    Last week we examined our foundational belief that God loves the world. This understanding allows us to navigate not only the rest of the Five Part Story but our lives with confidence. We are able to do so because we know that the God we worship is one that desires for us good and not evil; life and not death. With that in mind we proceed to the next portion of our story.

    Beginning in Chapter three of Genesis the story teller attempts to explain how humanity moved from the wonderful idyllic life in Eden described in the two preceding chapters to the situation in which God's people found themselves; a world of violence, difficulties and death. Most of us know the basic story. Adam and Eve, our prehistoric progenitors were hanging out in the garden when a serpent showed up. We are told that the serpent was crafty (a gift of God?). The serpent, without lying outright, plants doubt in Eve's mind that what God had told her about not eating the fruit of the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil, was true. God had told the first couple that if they ate of that fruit they would die. The serpent implies otherwise. Adam and Eve decide to trust the serpent. As the story goes on, when they ate the fruit, their eyes were opened and they knew they were naked; in other words their choice to listen to someone other than God left them exposed. This is the first story of human beings wandering off of the path that God had laid out for them.

    The Genesis story continues with a series of further wanderings in which people move farther and farther away from God's desires for them. These include the tale of Cain and Able in which murder (fratricide to be exact) enters the world. This is followed by the acknowledgement that humanity quickly became so evil that God decided to start over; the Noah story. While God does begin again the results are basically the same; after Noah is saved he plants a vineyard, gets drunk and one of his sons takes sexual advantage of him while he is inebriated (Genesis 9:20-27). The initial saga is completed in Chapter Eleven with the Tower of Babel story. In this tale all of humanity refuses to do as God asks (be fruitful, multiply and fill the earth in order to care for it) and instead decides they will stay together, build a tower to heaven, invade God's home and force God to do as they desire. God has other ideas and sends them on their way to fulfill God's plan.

    By the time the New Testament rolls around the metaphor of wandering far from God had been replaced with the word, sin. The two most basic meanings of the word sin are: 1) to miss the mark, as when an archer misses the bullseye and 2) to break a law. Notice how each of these definitions is based on the concept of wandering far from God. Missing the mark reminds us that God has a "target" of behavior for which we are "shooting." Violating a law reminds us that God has established rules which serve to keep us on the right path toward the "target" set by God. Thus sin, which has often been associated with a limited list of certain actions (adultery, murder, greed, theft, etc.) is more than that. Sin is the disease which has infected humanity; meaning that human beings are inclined to wander off of God's path which leads to life, and onto paths which lead to death. Individual actions (adultery, murder, greed, theft, etc.) are merely symptoms of the disease.

    The issue for the New Testament writers then was two-fold. First they had to name the symptoms of the disease. Jesus does this in subtle ways through many of his stories and parables, while the letter writers (Paul, Peter and James) name the symptoms outright. Secondly though, the writers needed to address the disease itself. They needed to tell the church how God had dealt with sin in such a way that human beings could find their way back to God; how the disease of sin could be put in remission enough so that they could live the lives God intended them to live. This will be the focus of our next article.

    

The Road to Redemption – The Five Part Story – God Loves the World

This coming week, on eBay, you could bid on a 1954 letter from Albert Einstein in which he declares that the "the Bible a collection of honorable but still primitive legends which are nevertheless pretty childish." There are many people in world today which would appreciate that description. For others, those would be "fighting words." Conservative Christians see the scriptures as the very Spirit breathed words of God; perfect in every aspect. Still others see the scriptures as a long historical and theological record of God's people and their spiritual journey. Regardless of how one sees the scriptures they are at their heart a singular story with a beginning, a middle and an end. They are the story of God's work in the world; told in saga, history, poetry, letters, and lament. This strange amalgam of components can be confusing and confounding. Nevertheless if we allow them to speak to us as a whole we will hear a five part story emerging from them. This article will address the first part of that five part story; God loves the world.

    The Biblical story opens with two stories of creation in Genesis chapters one and two. In Chapter One we are told that God created the heavens and the earth. Additionally we learn that those initial heavens and earth are a chaotic mess. There is no light and dark, night or day or even heaven and earth. God then proceeds to bring some order out of the chaos (remind anyone of the long evolutionary process from the Big Bang to the present?). For six days God goes about speaking order to the disorderly universe. At the end of each day God declares God's work to be "good." Finally at the end of the sixth day, when all is completed God decides that creation is "very good." (Genesis 1:31) This story makes clear that creation is God's very good thing that God has made. God not only has a vested interest in what happens on this blue-green planet, but will be intimately involved in its ongoing life.

    This sense of God's love for creation continues in God's work to bring this creation back to its former glory (next week we will look at how creation lost its way). These stories are replete throughout the Old Testament. When humanity becomes too wicked God begins the human experiment over again with Noah and his family. In the Tower of Babel story God insures that humanity will go forth and care for creation. Next God chooses a family, Abram's, through whom the entire creation will be blessed. When this family finds itself in captivity in Egypt God sets them free with mighty acts of power. Once they are free God not only provides for their physical needs, God gives them a set of rules which are to guide their interpersonal, intercommunity and religious lives. These rules include many that protect the weak and powerless. As time goes by and the people refuse to follow these rules God works with them (sometimes in rather tough love kind of ways) in order that they continue to be a blessing to the world (these are the stories of the prophets, exile and return). In all of these of stories we see God loving the world.

    The penultimate demonstration of God's love for the world comes to us in the Gospel of John where we read about God becoming one of us. John makes it clear that God's love for the world was so great that God, rather than abandoning the world, becomes enfleshed in it and then dies for it. In the work of Jesus, the "Word made flesh" we see God's absolute unconditional love for all of the created order. This love in and through Jesus does not end with Jesus' resurrection and ascension but is made real to and for us through the ongoing work of the Holy Spirit. The story of God's love for the world is completed in the Book of Revelation where we witness God recreating the world in such a way that once again God can say that creation is "very good."

    God loves the world is the foundational conviction upon which we base all that we believe and all that we do at Everybody's Church. Our goal is to try and allow God's love to live in us that all we encounter might experience that love as well.