“Everyone who calls on the
name of the Lord shall be saved” said St Paul in our second reading, from his letter
to the Romans. It’s familiar Christian language. You’ll hear the words “saved” and
“salvation” a lot in churches. It’s there in hymns and prayers. But what does
it mean?
If you’d been a Christian at
the time this church was built in the Middle Ages, you’d have had no
doubt. Salvation
was about where you were going when you died. Many churches would have had a
huge visual reminder of that too, in the shape of what was called a “doom painting”. They were often painted right here on the chancel arch, where you
couldn’t miss it as you sat in church. On one side you’d see the
saved rising up to heaven; on the other side would be people going the
other way, stuffed down into the jaws of hell by gruesome looking demons. Being
saved meant being on the right side of that divide, and you’d want to do
everything you could to make sure you were. Salvation, as it was commonly
preached and believed, was about having a ticket to heaven when you died. But
although doom paintings have, thankfully, gone out of fashion, that view of
salvation is still quite common.
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| Detail from Doom Painting, St Thomas, Salisbury. https://www.flickr.com/photos/sic_itur_ad_astra/6009421976 |
But
if that’s all that being “saved” means to us, then I think we’re missing
something, because what the Bible says about “salvation” is much wider and
richer than that. It is wider and richer in two ways, in particular, which I
think we often miss.
The
first is that “salvation” in the Bible isn’t just, or even mainly, about what
happens to our souls after death. It is also about what happens to our bodies
before it.
We
can see that in our readings today. Peter calls out in our Gospel reading
“Lord, save me!” – there’s that word again - but it’s nothing to do with the
state of his soul. He’s sinking fast in a stormy sea, literally out of his
depth and facing imminent death. The rescue he needs is a physical one, but when
eventually climbs, coughing a spluttering, into the boat with the rest of
disciples, I am sure he is in no doubt that he has been saved.
In
the Gospels, Jesus’ healing work is often described as salvation, “‘Do not fear. Only believe, and she will be
saved.’ says Jesus to a father whose little daughter has just died. (Luke
8.50) “‘Receive your sight; your faith
has saved you.” he says to a blind beggar who cries out to him for help. There
may be spiritual change for the people involved. When the cheating
tax-collector, Zacchaeus, repents and repays fourfold what he has stolen from
people after Jesus has invited himself to tea, Jesus says to the crowd, “today salvation has come to this house”
(Luke 19.9). But often the physical healing
is all we hear about and yet it’s still described as salvation for those
concerned.
Even
Jesus’ enemies taunt him as he hangs on the cross with the words, “‘He saved others; let him save himself
“(Luke 23.35). It’s the real, tangible changes he has wrought in people’s lives
they are talking about. They know they’ve seen salvation happening as he has
healed people. What baffles them is that he doesn’t rescue himself. Salvation,
throughout the Bible, is as much about physical as well as spiritual things,
about the things people are struggling with right there and then, not just what
happens after death. The people of Israel are described as being saved by God
from slavery in Egypt. (E.g Exodus 15.2) ;and saved again by God from exile in
Babylon (Isaiah 45.17) . The Psalmist pleads for salvation from his enemies,
and thanks God when he has been rescued from death or disgrace.
There’s
a prime example of someone who needs salvation in our Old Testament reading
today. Elijah is running for his life. The Queen, Jezebel, is after him. He’d
challenged the prophets of her God, Baal, to a contest, and he – or rather his
God – had decisively won. But Jezebel
isn’t the kind of woman to accept defeat gracefully. She is spitting tacks, and
she’s after Elijah’s skin. So he runs away, as far as he can, out into the
desert. And eventually, after a long journey he finds himself at Mount Horeb,
huddled in a cave, despondent and exhausted. “What are you doing here, Elijah?” asks God. It’s a good question. He
doesn’t really know how to answer it. All he knows is that he has done all he
can to stand up for the God of Israel, to defend the faith of his nation, and
it isn’t enough. Elijah feels that it is all over for him, and for the people
of Israel too. But God has other ideas. To begin with, he reassures Elijah of
his presence. It comes to him not in anything dramatic – wind, earthquake and
fire – but in the “sound of sheer silence”, or a “still, small voice” depending
on your translation. After all the terror and the tumult Elijah has been
through, when he has come to the point where he can’t be the big, brave prophet
anymore, he lets himself fall into God’s hands and discovers that in God’s
presence all is well, whatever else is happening to him and around him. And then God shows Elijah, that though he
thought there was no way forward, God has a plan. He’s already lined up Hazael
and Jehu as kings, and Elisha to take up Elijah’s mantle as prophet too. Elijah
is saved from his despair, given the strength and the hope he needs to go on. That
is what it means for him to be saved by God.
Salvation,
in the Bible, isn’t some nebulous spiritual thing far off in the future, high
up in the heavens. It is practical, personal, immediate. It comes to people as they
need it, making a tangible difference to their lives. That’s the first thing we
often miss.
The
second thing is that salvation, in the Bible, isn’t just a personal possession.
Paul
describes salvation again and again in his letters as something which happens
in communities, and in the whole of creation. In the passage we heard today he
talks about salvation as a state in which “there
is no distinction between Jew and Greek” . That echoes his message
throughout his letters that God’s saving power destroys the divisions of class,
ethnic background and gender that beset his society. A few chapters earlier, he
had talked about the whole of creation “groaning”
to see the new thing God was doing in the world through the Christian
community. (Rom 8) Salvation wasn’t
something you could enjoy in a private bubble, but something which affected
everyone and ultimately could heal everyone. God was “reconciling
to himself all things, whether on earth or in heaven” he said in the letter to the Colossians (Col.
1.19) . The Psalm we read this morning spoke of salvation bringing God’s glory
to the land, creating a place of where mercy and truth met together, and
righteousness and peace kissed each other. In the Bible, salvation is something
we discover together, or not at all. It’s about our relationships with each
other just as much as it is about our relationship with God, about politics and
economics, the way we work, and shop and shape our families and treat the
natural world around us.
So
– two dimensions which we often miss when we hear the words “saved” and
“salvation. The first is that it’s about the here and now, not just the
afterlife. If salvation doesn’t make a difference to our lives right now, it
isn’t salvation in the sense the Bible talks about it. The second is that it isn’t just about us, a personal
possession, a private matter; it’s something which is for, and about the whole
of creation.
There’s
a verse in Psalm 18 which has always summed up salvation for me. The Psalmist
says, “[God] brought me out into a broad
place; he delivered me because he delighted in me.” Being saved means being brought into a “broad place”, a place where we find
life in all its fullness, where we are freed from all that has bound us and
made us less than the people God means us to be. What that might mean in your life right now
is going to be different to what it means in mine, but my salvation can’t be complete
unless yours is too. And our salvation can’t be complete unless everywhere else
in the world the hungry are fed, the poor lifted up, the oppressed set free,
all people enabled to find that “broad
place” for themselves too.
And
if that makes us feel as if the task is completely impossible for us, then that
is just as it should be, because if we could do it, then we wouldn’t need
saving. Whether we are trying to eliminate
world poverty, stop North Korea and the US blowing us all to smithereens or just
trying to cope with the pressures and demands of our own lives, we’ll inevitably
come to a point where we realise, like St Peter, that we are out of our depth,
in over our heads. We try to look strong, stay in control, keep all the plates
spinning and everyone happy, but we’re not up to it. Life is too hard for us to
go it alone. We are saved when we come to the limits of our own power and
discover the limitless power of God beyond them. We are saved when we come to the place of “sheer silence”, when we have run out of
words and yet discover that God understands us anyway. We are saved when we
finally give up thrashing about in the water on our own, and find the courage
to allow other hands to lift us up.
Salvation
isn’t a ticket to life after death; it’s a way of life before
death. It is found in the journey, not the destination. Walking in the way of
salvation day by day brings us into a right relationship with God and one
another, a relationship of humility and openness. As we call out “Lord, save
us!” again and again, we gradually learn to trust that God is beside us anyway,
ready to pull us up from the seas that overwhelm us. And if that is true, then
we don’t need a ticket to heaven, because heaven is where God is, and God is
where we are, in life and in death, which is right where we need him to
be.
Amen
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