A sermon on John 3:14
When I was in college, I had a number of friends who were
very into the idea of saving souls. They would take any opportunity
they could get to ask people if they had been saved. “Have you accepted
Jesus Christ as Lord and Savior in your heart?” they would ask. And I
have to admit that at the time, I was more than a little puzzled
by this. I could never seem to wrap my brain around the idea that
merely uttering these seven little words-- “Jesus is my Lord and
Savior”-- would somehow, magically, grant me salvation and an instant
ticket into heaven. I would say the words, but deep down, it didn’t
seem to me like that should be enough. There must be more to being a
Christian, I thought, than merely saying the words and getting others to
say them too. And the more I thought about it, the more I began to
move from merely being puzzled to being disturbed and a little
disillusioned. Because for me, and for many people who grew up in more
evangelical or conservative traditions, the word salvation meant going
to heaven-- which is certainly a fine prospect in and of itself.
However it was the opposite possibility-- that of spending an eternity
in hell— forever being punished through suffering and pain, simply
because one didn’t believe the right thing— that I found deeply alarming
and disturbing.
For Christians who have embraced a
God who is good, loving, and merciful, this idea of eternal punishment
and suffering just didn’t seem to fit. For God so LOVED the world, John
3:16 says, that God gave God’s only son. Not to condemn the world, but
in order that the world might be saved through him. Traditional concepts
of salvation generally state that salvation is about liberation from
sin and death through Jesus Christ, thereby granting us access to
eternal life. But does this kind of definition leave us stuck with a
“heaven and hell framework” for Christianity that reserves heaven only
for a select few? Do we have to accept the notion of eternal damnation
if we want to keep the Christian concept of salvation in our
vocabulary? Or is there a way of thinking about this idea of salvation
through Jesus Christ that goes beyond a heaven and hell
Christianity? Can we reclaim the word salvation as a life-giving and
faith-affirming word for the 21st century church? I believe that we
can. And in fact I believe that if Christianity is to survive in a
modern, pluralistic culture, I think we have to.
One way we can
begin to do this is to go back to biblical understandings of the word
salvation. For the majority of the Old Testament, the word salvation
has absolutely nothing to do with heaven or hell. In fact, for the
majority of the Old Testament, the idea of an afterlife doesn’t really
exist at all. Ancient Israelites believed that everyone went to the
same place when they died. It wasn’t heaven, it wasn’t hell. It was just
where everyone ended up. Whether you were good, or bad, or somewhere in
between-- everyone ended up in the same place. And so this idea of
salvation being about an afterlife simply didn’t exist for most ancient
Israelites.
One of the first places where we do find some concept
of salvation is in the book of Exodus when Moses leads the Israelite
people out of slavery in Egypt. The word salvation appears for the
first time at the climax of the story when Moses parts the Red Sea and
the Israelites are able to escape the ensuing Egyptian army. There we
read in Exodus chapter 15: “The Lord is my strength and my might, and
God has become my salvation.” In this instance, salvation has little to
do with sin, heaven or hell, and has more to do with liberation from
literal bondage and oppression.
But salvation in
the Old Testament is not just about being rescued by God from bad
situations. The concept of salvation grows and develops as the
Israelites themselves grow in their relationship with and understanding
of God. By the time we get to the age of the prophets— Isaiah,
Jeremiah, Amos, and Micah, just to name a few— the Jewish people have
come to understand salvation as more than just a miraculous saving act
on God’s part. To be saved was to enter into a new kind of life— a life
covenanted with God. A covenant which went beyond the personal and
into the very fabric of communal life. Therefore, in the Hebrew
Scriptures, salvation is consistently corporate, and consistently about
the present, having to do with how we live together in communities and
societies. This is why, when the Israelite society begins to stray from
its primary focus on the common good, the prophets get more than a
little angry and concerned. Because they see God’s salvation— this
dream of a common life together where all are cared for and valued--
growing more and more distant.
All of this sets the
stage for when Jesus comes along in first century Palestine, offering
searing indictments of the state of Jewish society because they had
stopped paying attention to their covenant promises with God. They had
stopped caring about the wounded and poor among them. The lepers and
the lame weren’t even allowed in the temple because they were considered
unclean. Imagine if that were to happen in our churches today— if
someone showed up at the door of a church, sick, or disabled, and they
were told, “sorry, we don’t want your kind here.” That is essentially
what was happening in Jesus’ day. And so something had gotten severely
out of whack. And here is where the concept of sin enters into the
equation. Theologian Gustavo Gutierrez defines sin as “absence of
fellowship and love in relationships among persons.” Well, the
religious system of Jesus’ time had grown to be more about rules and
regulations than it was about fellowship, love or compassion. The
religious authorities of the time had set up an structure that was more
about maintaining their own power and control than it was about caring
for their people. And so in all of this, the religious leaders had
forgotten something very important about salvation. That salvation is
about liberation-- liberation from oppression, suffering, and sin, in
all of its various forms and manifestations.
Jesus’ ministry of
healing is a testament to this understanding of salvation. Jesus didn’t
go around trying to save people’s souls. That’s not what he was
about. What he did do was offer healing, transformation, and
liberation. For those who suffered from physical ailments, he offered
healing and liberation from their pain. For those who suffered from
oppression by the elite of society, he offered a welcoming embrace and
healing words. And for a religious system that had grown too
legalistic, he offered liberation from rules and regulations to make it
easier for people to live into
their covenant with God.
And
so, putting all of this together, I would offer the following
alternative way of thinking about salvation that goes beyond a“heaven
and hell framework” for Christianity:
At the end of
the day, salvation is indeed about liberation from sin, but not because
we want to secure a place in heaven. It’s about liberation from sin in
order to achieve transformation here and now.
On a
personal level, it’s about being liberated from the things that enslave
us— anger, addictions, resentment, or fear. Jesus came to offer us a
way of life that would save us from these things. He showed us a path
that would lead us towards something else-- something
different--something more. In some ways, my Christian friends in
college did get something right-- there does come a point when we have
to make a choice. If we accept Jesus as our Lord and Savior, do we
really accept the path he has given us? Is our commitment to that path
deeper than our attachments to the things that enslave us? Are we
willing to let our faith be more than words so that it can truly
transform us?
On a more corporate level, salvation
is about liberating our communities from the sins of violence, poverty,
racism, sexism, or any of the things that cause division and strife
amongst us. South African Archbishop Desmond Tutu has said that
salvation is about seeking out God’s dream for the world. And God’s
dream for the world, he says, is a world transformed by Christ’s love, a
world transformed by justice and peace. This is what it means to be
saved through Jesus Christ. Because it is through following the path
that Jesus laid out for us— the path of love, justice, and compassion—
that we can begin to realize God’s dream for the world.
This
is what salvation is about. “For God so loved the world, that God sent
Jesus Christ… in order that the world might be saved through him.” God
gave the gift of God’s self so that we would have Jesus’ life, his
teachings, his ministry, and above all his commitment to love and
justice as a path that will lead us to salvation. As Paul writes in
Ephesians, it is God’s gift of Jesus Christ that has shown us the
way. It’s not about a magic prayer that will get you into heaven. It’s
about making a choice for a way of life that will lead to liberation.
This
morning, we celebrated the baptism of two of our young people. In our
baptism, we profess the name of Jesus as savior. But that’s only the
first of many promises. We also promise to follow in Christ’s path, to
resist evil and oppression, to show love and justice, and to further
Christ’s work in the world-- to open the eyes of the blind, bind up the
brokenhearted, and to set free those who are oppressed.
Now
at the end of the day, after all of this, it is important to remember
that salvation is not about a formula, or a ten-point plan-- that if we
do X-Y- and Z we will have achieved salvation. I don’t think it works
that way. In fact, I have a feeling that every time we boil salvation
down to some kind of formula or plan, that usually means we are leaving
someone out. And at the end of the day, it is not our task to decide
who is in and who is out. It is not our task to decide who is worthy of
salvation and who is not. It is our task, however, to do the best we
can do to live into our baptismal and covenantal promises with God and
one another-- to do justice, love kindness, and walk humbly with God.
At the end of the day that’s all we can do. And leave it up to God to
work out the rest.
