We Believe in Salvation for Sinners

For the past couple of weeks, I’ve been teaching this chapter of Will Willimon’s book, This We Believe, to one of our adult Sunday school classes. Last Sunday, when I put up the first slide of my nifty powerpoint presentation and read the title, one of the class members cheered. This class is a delightful blend of wit, intelligence, and deep faithfulness. So I agreed with the tongue in cheek gesture. Yes, it is a good thing we believe in salvation for sinners – we know ourselves that well.

We, as United Methodists, are accused fairly often of having an underdeveloped doctrine of sin. But, as Willimon writes and I paraphrase, we need to fully appreciate the problem of sin to appreciate God’s remedy in the incarnation, life, death, and resurrection of Jesus Christ. If sin were no big deal, why did God come among us? Jesus might as well have taught a self-help program so that basically nice people could become nicer.

Of course, one of my other source documents for these lessons was John Wesley’s sermon, “The Scripture Way of Salvation.” Wesley may have been a better preacher than he was a systematic theologian, but he lays out his understanding of the work of salvation very nicely in this sermon, although he amplifies certain points elsewhere.

One of the things I had forgotten, but that struck me powerfully in my preparation was the past-present-future aspect of salvation. Salvation was accomplished once and for all in the work of Jesus Christ (past tense). Salvation is a reality that can be lived into here and now (present). And, salvation is that entering into glory with God after death (future). It troubles me how much thought and speech centers around the past and future aspects of salvation with little mention of the present. It seems contrary since our “now” is all we really have before us. It is in this “now” that we can make a difference, experience life, and life abundantly.

Then, tonight, in my Disciple Bible Study group, our text just happened to be the first half of the gospel of John. This gospel, which assumes we all start in a state of death, but have the opportunity to come to life through Jesus. Jesus comes to speak life into our death-ridden existence. But, we would rather have the safe answers, the actions kept at a distance in the past, or the promise of comfort to come.

It was a helpful coincidence as I continued to mull over this idea of salvation, so different from what some of our brothers and sisters might understand it to be. Today, in Sunday school, I invited the class members to take different versions of the “sinner’s prayer” and study them theologically – what points are being made, what do you find troubling or out of sync with our doctrine, what is the purpose, what are the benefits or pitfalls?

I brought this exercise because I remember a time when I was a child that I visited a relative who convinced me to pray this prayer. I was away from home, I was out of context, and she made the case with impassioned belief. She constructed the image of my own heart, locked from within, that needed to be opened to Jesus. This prayer was the way to invite him in. Afterwards, she took me to the jewelry store and bought me a cross necklace, which I still own.

I think that she thought that she saved my soul that day and had done her duty by me. I had received my ticket to heaven. But, Wesley also writes “Christianity is essentially a social religion; and that to turn it into a solitary religion, is indeed to destroy it” (Sermon 24: Upon our Lord’s Sermon on the Mount). Perhaps, nominally, I was a Christian, but there was no community to nurture me, like so many who are invited to click whether or not they became a Christian by praying the prayer, now offered online.

To this day, I don’t point to this event as my “conversion.” That event was many years later, in a community of faith that nurtured me, allowed me to ask questions, and loved me, whatever my decision may have been. Christianity is a social religion, not just a checked box that I have accepted Jesus as my personal Lord and Savior. Surely, he is that, too, but my soul would wither without the company of other sinners and saints.

Why I can’t believe everything happens for a reason…

Recently there has been a pile up of grief and sadness in my extended family. Marriages in crisis, impending deaths (yes, plural), relationships fractured, persons feeling lost, hurt, isolated, strained, etc. Being who I am, I am simultaneously a member of the family and the pastor for the family. To me, it’s no different than the lawyer in the family who gives legal counsel for free or the nurse in the family who listens, pokes, and prods to see if someone really needs to go to the doctor. I am a pastor and I might as well put my training to good use whenever and wherever I can, especially for the persons I love most.

So here we are, walking through this valley of the shadow of death (see Psalm 23), and I’m having deep conversations with loved ones – on the phone, in person, via text message and Facebook and e-mail. One of these beloved family members talks about how he deals with all of this is because he knows everything happens for a reason. He shares his experience of another family member who should have died a few times, but didn’t, and here we all are today.

I understand where he’s coming from, but I can’t agree. There are many days when I would like the world to be straight-forward, trusting that God’s purposes are being worked out according to God’s plan. But I just can’t. So I’ll write here, with a little more context, what I shared with my family member.

I just can’t believe that everything happens for a reason. Out of my experience, in my line of work, I get to walk alongside pain and death because those are often the places where people remember they need God the most. So I’ve seen the family that has nearly nothing because the system is broken. I’ve seen the children who have lost their parents because someone else chose to drink and drive. I’ve seen the baby who dies for no known reason. I’ve seen the child, parent, grandparent with cancer. And I can’t – don’t – WON’T believe that this is what God had in mind.

I believe God had in mind an idyllic paradise, something like what’s written in Genesis, a garden where we walked with God and talked with God, where the food was so bountiful that you just had to reach out your hand to take it, and we all lived in harmony – the people and the animals and the earth.

But I also believe that God gave us a generous portion of the imago Dei, and for me that looks like creativity and free will. So we used our free will, we made choices and screwed it up (sorry for not being gentler with that), and now here we all are – daughters and sons many generations removed dealing with the great snowball of corporate sin – the bad decisions and the hurtful actions and all the greater evils of leaving the right things left undone. So no one starts at 0 in life when it comes to good and evil; we all start in negative numbers because we all own this evil that is.

But I also believe that God is working mightily to bring about God’s purpose for creation. I don’t know why God created all this; I only know that the God I come to know through the Spirit as I read scripture is a God who will bear all kinds of pain to be in relationship with us. Jesus tells a story, a parable, about a father who forgives his sons who do all kinds of stupid stuff – one squandering his inheritance and distancing himself from his family, the other failing to really be in relationship even when he’s at home and then refusing to forgive his brother (see Luke 15). The father in the story runs to his son. He runs, rejoicing that there is the opportunity to be in relationship, to love one another again.

So God bears with us in our decision-making, even when it is obviously not what God would want for us. It’s like when my son decides to run full speed down the driveway and I hold my breath, hoping he doesn’t fall and split his lip or worse. I imagine God watching all of creation with bated breath, wanting to reach out to steady us, but at times holding back, knowing that we are created imago Dei, we have to make our own choices, our own mistakes, so that we can enter into the love of God of our own free will. That is how it means something.

And when we line up our lives with God’s hope for our lives, it doesn’t mean there won’t be pain and suffering. As Westley says in The Princess Bride, “Life is pain, Highness. Anyone who says differently is selling something.” Even as good and faithful people, we are still going to be impacted by other people’s bad choices. We get to deal with that, too. But for us, as persons who believe in the love and grace of God through Jesus Christ and stand in the power of the Holy Spirit, we are those who are built on a solid foundation (see Luke 6). The winds come and howl about our ears, the rains come and we sway with the mighty current, the earth trembles and shakes everything we’ve built our life upon, but this one thing, this one relationship, can endure and never disappoint.

I feel all of this because I’m in the boat with my family, too. Even as I struggle to stand apart just a little bit, offering a listening ear, a loving heart, and very little advice, I feel every bit of it. And it’s so much harder, dearer, and awe-full because it is my own family. I tremble, shake, and cry, but keep leaning on the grace of God. While I don’t believe everything happens for a reason, I know God will make the best of it all, working with creation, with each and every one of us, until we are reconciled and made new (see Revelation 21:5). Glory be to God.

Inner Body Bright

I started taking yoga again around 6 weeks ago. I think the instructor is one of the best preachers I’ve heard regularly even if she probably wouldn’t think of herself in those terms. Two weeks ago she started the session by talking about how beautiful the variety of shades of green are in the spring. And it’s true, even in Texas. Spring brings a freshness, a vibrancy that gets dulled and finally burnt to a crisp over the summer. She went on to say that looking at all of us was like seeing the spring’s greening. It was a core truth for me – we are all beautiful, various expressions of life, of the imago Dei.

Later in class, our instructor talked about standing in mountain pose with our inner body bright. I stood a little taller, rooting down through my feet into the mat, into the floor, into the foundation, into the earth. I stood a little taller, stretching up toward the ceiling, toward the sky, toward the universe. I imagined my soul shining brightly and wondered what color it might be – a vibrant purple? a beautiful yellow? a tired grey?

Following this thought further, I thought about how many times we all try to be something we’re not because we feel like we’re supposed to be. It may not be anything dramatic, just little, but constant compromises that we make that chip away at our character. If green tries to be yellow, how washed out does it become? If yellow tries to be orange, how might it strain?

This past week at yoga class, we worked our shoulders and talked about our inner strength, the strength that comes from integration. Our instructor made the point that many people think that being strong comes from being hard on the outside, but when we are truly strong on the inside, we are able to be softer, more flexible on the outside.

I think it all comes from being authentic, even as I strive to grow in to perfection in love by the grace of God. If I am fully me, living out who I am called to be, then I shine brightly. I express my gifts fully. I don’t become dim or burned out by trying to be someone I’m not.

It was interesting as I expressed these thoughts with my residency group since some seemed to respond as though this fullness of being was bordering on sinful pride, on being content with where we are, of denying growth. But I don’t think it’s that at all. I forget where I read it in seminary now, but for some people – particularly women who are often socialized to sacrifice self in the service of others – the sin that we struggle with is not pride, but un-being. We collapse in on ourselves, become invisible. That’s not to say that we serve out of the hope of being recognized, but that we should be inner body bright – authentically our true selves as God intends.

The Walking Wounded

I could see it the moment the words came out of my mouth. How I wished the words had little tethers so I could pull them back in, but it was too late. His face shifted, his posture changed. I had wounded him. Whatever my intent, the damage was done.

This past Monday, I got to attend the Wallace Chappell Lecture at Perkins School of Theology. It featured Rev. Jeff Kirby of Church of the Resurrection in Kansas City talking about “Evangelizing Men in a Culture of Noncommitment” and Rev. Dr. Elaine Heath talking about “Evangelism in a Culture of Violence Against Women.”

Now, some of you may have stopped reading right there. Just in those two sentences, there are many words that make us shudder to a stop – violence, evangelism…

But in listening to Dr. Heath, who I had for my one and only evangelism class when I attended Perkins, she brought up a point that I had forgotten in the busyness of my everyday life. In her reading of Genesis 3, she lifts up that perhaps it is not willfulness and pride that lead to the Fall in the garden, but a childish exuberance, inexperience, and immaturity. After all, how can a child know what “to die” means if they’ve never experienced it?

So it is, through the agency of the serpent, that they are tempted and wounded. They want to be like God – what child doesn’t want to be like their parent – but they first thing the come to “know” is shame. The good gift of their bodies and their relationship with God becomes tainted with guilt.

Dr. Heath used this scripture passage along with her readings of St. Julian of Norwich to talk about our original state to be one of woundedness that inevitably leads to actual sins. We enter the world unknowing, with basic, primal needs for love and sustenance. We learn from the faces we encounter every day, whether they smile and coo or grimace and snarl.

And at some point, by some word or deed or something left undone, we are wounded.

Having just had a child, I know this will happen, may already have happened, and it makes me so indescribably sad. And yet I know it happened to me, has happened to everyone I love, and continues in circles, ever-spreading outward as subtle as an epidemic and terrible as a tornado.

Sin is the sharpest scourge that any chosen soul may be smitten with: which scourge thoroughly beateth man and woman, and maketh him hateful in his own sight, so far forth that afterwhile he thinketh himself he is not worthy but as to sink in hell,—till [that time] when contrition taketh him by touching of the Holy Ghost, and turneth the bitterness into hopes of God’s mercy. And then He beginneth his wounds to heal, and the soul to quicken…
   – Julian of Norwich, Revelations of Divine Love, Chapter XXXIX

Sin, which I have always described as a turning away from God, leads to the wounding of self and others. But the hope we have is that our God in Christ endured these same wounds and pours out grace. So, my prayer this day and every day, is that I may not wound others. God, help us find ways to turn our woundedness into avenues for grace.