Salvation Stories

Number 21:4-9; John 3:1-17

March 11, 2018

I got a cold call a while back from a young man wanting to tell me about his call to ministry with a conservative evangelical outfit that I’ve known about since I was a teenager in what folks often call “the buckle on the Bible belt.”

I’ve gotta say I had three immediate reactions to the invitation, and none of them were charitable:

First, I thought, “I am not remotely interested in what you’re selling.”

Second, I thought, “I am still not remotely interested in what you’re selling.”

And third, I thought, “why is the Eagles’ Peaceful Easy Feeling running through my mind?”

I pondered that third one for a bit before recalling that when I was an undergrad there was a guy who used to hang out in the student center at Kent State with his guitar at a table for this same evangelical ministry and that was the only song he knew.

So I had these uncharitable thoughts, and then sent him back a note saying, “sure, I can grab a cup of coffee with you.”

I mean, I’ll meet with most anybody if it involves coffee.

But, seriously, I accepted his invitation for a couple of reasons, and coffee wasn’t even on the list!

First, he’s a millennial who wants to talk about faith, and while I am 100-percent certain that we see almost the whole of Christian faith and life and theology from vastly different perspectives, I am also 100-percent certain that the Mainline Protestant enterprise in general, and our little piece of it in specific, must learn how to be church differently, so I am open to unexpected conversation partners who might have something to teach me about parts of the culture that remain foreign to me.

Second, I am always open to hearing someone else’s experience of faith, someone else’s passions, someone else’s salvation story.

Ultimately, that’s the heart of the matter: salvation stories.

Though the common thread in our two readings today would appear to be the phrase “lifted up” and all that those words suggest about the crucifixion, at their heart, these two texts are salvation stories. Taking them as such can broaden our understanding of such stories, and expanding our understanding of salvation is one of the crucial next steps for the church.

For our overly narrow understanding of salvation place limits around much that is not ours to limit, including, first and foremost, the grace of God.

Developing a more expansive understanding of salvation comes with growing a more expansive understanding of church, and while that clearly calls forth important, significant, creative theological work, it calls forth first important, significant, and creative practical, relational work. That is to say, when we broaden our understanding of church we will also broaden our understanding of God.

I’m not going to say that it couldn’t, in principle, be the other way ‘round. That is to say, I can imagine that a broader understanding of God leads to a broader understanding of the gathered community of faith, but that’s not the way I’ve seen it happen, and it’s also not really the model that scripture describes.

The horizons of the people of Israel expanded as they wondered in the wilderness for 40 years. Their sense of themselves and of God grew in the wilderness. It wasn’t simple, and it wasn’t all nice and polite, either.

The people spoke against God; they spoke against their own leaders. They bitched and they moaned. “Why have you brought us out here to die, alone, in the wilderness? The food it terrible. And there’s never enough. And what’s with the weird snake thing anyway?”

Nevertheless, they persisted. They journeyed together, and along the way, against all odds, they built up the resilience that survival as a nation would require.

They lived into their identity as a people called out by God. They found wholeness and well-being. They discovered the meaning of shalom, and in it they found their salvation.

Salvation is a fascinating word, with roots related to health and wholeness, and a general meaning quite similar to shalom. I am fond of the way Barbara Brown Taylor writes of it:

“Salvation,” Taylor says, “is a word for the divine spaciousness that comes to human being in all the tight places where their lives are at risk, regardless of how they got there or whether they know God’s name. Sometimes it comes as an extended human hand and sometimes as a bolt from the blue, but either way it opens a door in what looked for all the world like a wall. This is the way of life, and God alone knows how it works.”

The evangelical Christians of my youth had one salvation story: you needed to profess your faith in Jesus Christ as the only son of God and that was the only way to salvation. John 3:16 – famous for showing up on posters at sporting events and billboards along roadside – sums it up: For God so loved the world that he gave his only Son, so that everyone who believes in him may not perish but may have eternal life. “Salvation” meant eternal life, and eternity only began to count after this earthly life ended. Thus the ubiquitous billboards asking, “if you die tonight do you know where you are going?”

“Uh, the funeral home? The cemetery?” Those were inadequate answers.

Early on I learned that, “what business is it of yours?” was also an inadequate response, for deep in the heart of the best of evangelical thought is the conviction that most important work for Christians in this life is summed up in the Great Commission – the words of Jesus at the end of the gospel of Matthew – “Go therefore into all the world teaching them what you have learned from me and baptizing them in the name of the Father, and the Son, and the Holy Spirit.” 

At its best, the Great Commission captures something essential: the idea that my salvation is bound up in yours. But when “salvation” is reduced to a pledge of allegiance to Jesus then all of the worst instances of Christian nationalism – beginning with the sword of Constantine and continuing right up through the Holocaust – are logical and all but inevitable results.

We need a bigger salvation story. We need a richer understanding of salvation. I absolutely believe that my salvation is bound up in yours because I also believe that Martin Luther King was right: injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere. What affects one directly, effects all of us indirectly. We are bound together in an inescapable web of mutuality.

If I reduce the story of salvation to individuals uttering the right words of faith – I accept Jesus Christ as my lord and savior – then I am putting a fence around the grace of God. That fence is built, alas, on one of the cornerstones of evangelical thought: reading the Bible as (and I’m quoting here) “God’s infallible written Word […] uniquely, verbally and fully inspired by the Holy Spirit […] without error (inerrant) in the original manuscripts.”

If that is your starting point you are going to end up in a tangled, incoherent mess where the prejudices and cultural assumptions you bring to the text determine how you read and what you do with that reading.

A culture grounded in patriarchy will necessarily reproduce patriarchal readings. A culture ground in white supremacy will necessarily reproduce white supremacist readings. A culture grounded in the myth of redemptive violence will necessarily reproduce readings that support militarism and systems of domination. A culture grounded in colonialism will necessarily reproduce colonialist readings.

None of us come to the text without our own baggage, but we can come recognizing that baggage and we can own our bags even if we cannot check them at the door, as it were.

My friend Abby Mohaupt, an ecofeminist theologian working on her doctorate at Princeton, is traveling in Africa this month. The other day she posted this note on Facebook:

Listening to an American white male seminary student make the argument that women and people who are LGBTQ shouldn't be ordained. the sweet guy from the philippines is doing his best to decolonize the colonizer (he's doing the Lord's work.)

That single post captured so much for me. I doubt that the colonizer recognizes that he is in any way reproducing his own captivity to a patriarchal culture. He no doubt believes that the Bible is somehow free from any context, and that his reading is equally innocent. He doesn’t even know that he’s carrying baggage, even though it’s kinda hard to imagine travelling all the way to Africa without a suitcase.

My prayer for him is simple: that he have multiple opportunities to gather at table with the sweet guy from the Philippines, and with Abby, and, if he’s super lucky, with Travis or Lee or Ron or any of the dozens of gay, lesbian, bisexual, queer folks we’ve ordained here over the past quarter century.

If he’s open to it, he’s on a long journey. It might take 40 years of wandering. There will be disagreements and squabbles a plenty along the way. But if he’s faithful – if we are faithful – in the journey we will find that God still so loves the world – the whole cruel, crazy, beautiful world, and that the incarnation – the Jesus part of the story – is about building a bridge from here to eternity.

The way of Jesus is the way of relationship, of breaking bread with outcasts, sitting at table with those with whom we disagree, reaching out in love, not to convert but to connect. “God did not send the Son into the world to condemn the world, but in order that the world might be saved.” May it be so, for all of us. Amen.