GOD, JESUS, AND SALVATION
Texts: Psalm 147:1-14, 20b; Luke 19:1-10

“I am not ashamed of the gospel,” so Paul wrote to the Romans. (Did some think he should be ashamed? If so it probably had to do with a savior who was crucified.) “For it is the power [dunameis energy] of God for salvation to everyone who believes” - - to the Jew and to the Greek, which means to everyone.

Here is the question that occupies my mind and heart these days: What is the shape of the salvation of God in Christ which we receive, proclaim and embody? And how do we as a church receive, proclaim and embody it? If I had only seven weeks left as your pastor, I would occupy myself with these questions. So why not now?

I

First, what is salvation? It is the task of every generation of Christians to recover their native tongue. A central word of our native language is salvation.

The Lord is my light and my salvation;
whom shall I fear?
The Lord is the strength of my life;
of whom shall I be afraid?
Psalm 27:1

Over and over again in the Hebrew Bible God is called Savior. And in the New Testament Savior is a name given both God and Jesus.

The word “salvation” gives some of you the jitters. You are like the French police chief in the Pink Panther movies who begins to twitch when Inspector Clouseau enters the room. The word is in need of some rehabilitation. It has become trapped in too small a theology.

Alabama Baptists about ten years ago calculated how many in Alabama were saved and how many were lost. Anyone presuming to read the mind of God on this is both fool and religious bigot.

So here again is the question: What is the shape of the salvation of God in Christ which we receive, proclaim and embody?

II

Let’s start with the Hebrew scripture. The word “salvation” is the Hebrew word “to deliver,” which literally means “to be made wide” or spacious. If you’re in slavery, exile or prison, even the prison of your own mind, salvation is in wide places, in spaciousness.

God the savior is pictured as the God who delivers us from slavery, exile, death.

But salvation is more than that. Claus Westermann says that Salvation comes in two modes: Salvation as Deliverance and Salvation as Blessing. Salvation as Deliverance points to the big, dramatic rescue events as when God rescued the Hebrew people from Egypt and Exile.

But Salvation also comes in the mode of Blessing: The daily ways God comes to bring life and healing. The ordinary but yet not ordinary ways God provides spirit and strength. We have tended to emphasize salvation as deliverance and forget salvation as blessing. (That’s because moles have dominated theology.)

The Psalm for today (Psalm 147) describes both forms of salvation: God,
gathering outcasts
healing the brokenhearted
binding wounds
lifting the downtrodden
casting the wicked to the ground
sending rain
making the grass grow on the hills
providing animals with food
blessing children within us
filling us with the finest wheat
granting peace within our borders.

An earlier translation of Psalm 147:10 reads, “He delighteth not in the strength of the horse, nor taketh pleasure in the legs of a man” (which is true enough if you’ve been in some of the locker rooms I have).

Salvation is God coming to deliver and to bless: To deliver us from all that diminishes and destroys us, and to bless us with all that brings life, joy, goodness. As Jesus said, “I have come that you might have life, and have it abundantly.”

We should say here that this salvation is not owned by any people and any church. It is not confined to Christianity, which has too often had too little Christ in it. It is God’s gift to the world, as free as the sun that shines and the rain that falls from the sky. Jesus said as much.

The church has failed the salvation of God when it has tried to own it: To be its doorkeepers, to hold the keys to heaven and determine who gets in and who’s shut out.

III

This is the broad picture of God’s saving work in the world. Let me now talk about the shape of God’s salvation we receive in Christ. Here is how I would describe it: The salvation of God in Christ is Reconciliation. Reconciliation with God, and thus with one’s own truest self, with neighbor and with creation itself, so that a person lives forgiven and free, a follower of Jesus in the world, a member of his community, and a participant in the kingdom of God, God’s reign of justice, joy, mercy and peace, that is, God’s reign of love.

Definitions kill as well as clarify, so please, this is only a beginning description. I would like to highlight two words: Reconciliation and person.

Reconciliation is restoration of relationship, the restoration of a relationship of trust between Creator and creature so that a person lives joyfully in the presence of God and joins God in God’s ministry of reconciliation in the world. It begins in forgiveness, and it grows in its partnership with God and God’s mission in the world.

The other word is person. As the Orthodox theologian Lossky says, we must distinguish between the true category of the person and the false category of the individual. The individual is seen to live life in isolation and self-sufficiency. The person lives in community, in life-giving connectivity with others, God, and creation.

In the extreme individualism of the West we live as strangers in paradise, clutching our individual rights, our individual salvation, our individual identities, forgetting that our deepest personhood is bound up in relation. Salvation is always personal, but it often in America becomes too personalized, too shut off from the larger world. It’s just “me and my God.” Praise the Lord and pass the tax reduction!

One of the most important meanings of the Trinity is that God is community - - a community of being which envelops and interpenetrates all reality.

Salvation connects us with God and with all the world. It is not our golden parachute out of the world; it is our deepest participation in it.

Salvation is all the ways God is coming to deliver, heal, forgive, reconcile, bring life and make new. In the Greek it means wholeness, healing, wellness - - which is close to what the Hebrews meant by shalom. Jon Sobrino, South American liberation theologian, says we should tell of salvations, plural, rather than salvation, singular.

What else does the New Testament says about salvation? It says it comes by grace, as a gift, utter, free, simple gift. What I see so often is an anxious, manic striving after salvation, our frantic attempts at self-salvation, as if it’s all up to us. In America’s current cult of self, the supreme religious question is: Do you know yourself as your personal Lord and Savior?!

Salvation is the gift (underlined) of God (underlined). And it is received by faith, which is our response to grace: The opening of our hands to receive it, then letting it day by day fill our lives. Faith or believing is deeper than creed; it is the joining of your life with the life of God, and the life of Christ in the world.

And this is important: The New Testament pictures salvation as a drama in three tenses: I have been saved, I am being saved, I shall be saved. Past tense: We have been loved, forgiven, and received once and for all by God. Present tense: We are every day seeking to receive and embody that salvation. Future tense: And one day we and all the world will enjoy the fulness of salvation, what Julian of Norwich pictured as she wrote:

All shall be well
And all shall be well
All manner of thing shall be well.

So if someone asks you, “Are you saved?” say, “I’m on the road. How about you?”

And if you’re on the road you care about the salvation of the world, not just your own. God has enlisted you now in the salvation of the world in however God can best use you: Creating jobs, healing bodies, working for justice, writing poetry, teaching students, talking about Jesus, defending the defenseless, your job not just putting bread on the table but being bread for the world.

In Mahayana (or big boat) Buddhism the holy man stops at the gates of Nirvana and turns back to the world to help those who are in need of salvation. Call me a Mahayana Christian.

IV

To close, let’s look at the salvation that came to Zaccheus and his house.

He’s a chief tax collector and he’s rich - - which means he’s a Jewish collaborator with Rome and he’s used the system of tax collecting to bilk his own people. People despise him. Imagine Enron’s Kenneth Lay.

Zaccheus has heard about Jesus, and with some combination of hope and curiosity comes to take a look. When he gets to Main Street the crowd is too great and he’s too short of stature to be able to see Jesus. So he scampers up a tree like a kid. “Unless you become a child,” Jesus said.
When Jesus sees him he says, “Zaccheus, come down from the tree. I must go to your house today.” Holy people didn’t eat with crooks and sinners. Jesus did. The crowd is nonplused. They grumble. How could he?! But as Anne Lamott says, When you and God hate all the same people, there’s a good chance you’ve created God in your own image.

They go arm in arm to Zaccheus’ house. Salvation as friendship. In mid-meal Zaccheus stands and says, “Lord” - - “Lord” means here that Zaccheus has staked his life on this man - - “half of all my possessions I will give to the poor; and if I’ve defrauded anyone, I will repay them four times.” I’d love to have seen the faces of the servants in the room. They couldn’t have been more surprised if Donald Rumsfeld joined the peace movement.

Jesus says, “Salvation has come to this house today, because he too is a son of Abraham.”
How many ways do you see salvation at work here?

- - Zaccheus is welcomed and befriended by Jesus.
- - Zaccheus receives mercy where he expected judgment.
- - Zaccheus repairs his economic exploitation of his people
- - Zaccheus is restored as a “son of Abraham,” to his own people.
- - Those he has defrauded are richly repaid

“Today salvation has come to this house,” Jesus said. Reconciliation is breaking out all over!
What we see here is what a pastor friend, Ginger Gaines-Cirelli, calls “realized shalom” – embodied, actualized shalom; healing, wholeness, peace, happening now.

So Jesus comes to us who are perched up a tree today and says, “Come down, I must go to your house today.” He sets the table. He offers bread and wine - - most of all, himself.

“The Son of Man has come to seek and to save the lost,” he says. Every lost one of us. Every lost part of us.