July 17, 2005   North Park Presbyterian Church

Gospel Basics:  Salvation

Patricia K. Townsend
 

Old Testament:  Psalm 139:1-12, 23-24
New Testament:  Romans 8:12-39

Have you seen those signs that sprang up all over town last week, red signs with white letters that say “believe”? I first saw dozens of them around the VA hospital but now they are spread more widely. They give no indication what or who or why we are to believe. Probably in the Red Sox? But, who knows, maybe God?

They remind me of the wordless book that someone gave me when I was a child--a little booklet in which the first page was entirely black, the second red, the third white, and the last yellow. How many of you had one of those?   The wordless book tells a simple story of salvation: the blackness of sin, red for the shedding of Jesus’ blood, white for the cleansing from sin, and yellow for the promise of heaven’s golden streets. If it is true, as we considered two weeks ago, that the language of sin and salvation is a lost language, one that no longer speaks to our generation, that little book has truly become wordless.

Today in the lectionary we reach the 8^th Chapter of Romans, in which the Apostle Paul restores to us a richer language for speaking about sin and salvation. Paul did not invent that language, much of it is already in the books of the law, the Psalms, and prophets, but he sums it up as he tells the story of the human predicament and God’s response to it. Paul echoes the story of salvation history that had already begun to be told around wilderness campfires and family meals for thousands of generations, at least since the rain stopped and Noah and his family sat on the deck of the ark telling stories to while away the boring days until the water level went down and the dove finally returned with an olive branch.

Our airplane reading for the past weekend was the humorous novel, The Preservationist[i], which retells the story of Noah and his family and their noisy, smelly animal cargo. Bill read it on the way to Denver and I on the return trip. (I don’t know that I would recommend that you read it in the comfort of home, it’s a bit too full of manure and rutting for that, but if you have an uncomfortable coach-class flight ahead of you, in which every seat on the plane is full, it’s just the ticket.)

What I enjoyed most about The Preservationist is that each character has a different take on life; each of them understands the world and their situation on the ark differently. Noah is a grumpy old man, really old, 600 years old, but also a visionary who believes that God has destroyed the people of the earth for their sins. His family disagree about why God has sent the flood and has saved only the 8 of them: perhaps to get them to reform, perhaps just because God can. Noah’s wife is a fatalist who expects the worst so she won’t be unpleasantly surprised, but she and her kitchen keep the rest of them going through all their suffering.

First-born Shem is pious and stoical, Ham is an angry young man, but is also the shipbuilder, Japheth is a lazy teenager who fakes seasickness to get out of his share of the work on board the ark. Because the Bible says little about Noah’s daughters-in-law, the author is free to develop their personalities: each has a different kind of intelligence: one has the mind of a scientist, classifying and studying the animals; one is a student of human nature. The third is a teenager that the others think of as an airhead, except that because she is the one who notices the little things, including the bugs and smaller critters, she has the wisdom to make the practical suggestions that allow the family (and the butterflies!) to survive.

In the novel, each of the people on the ark understands their predicament and the way to salvation differently. What strikes me about Romans chapter 8 is that Paul, too, presents a many-sided view of the human predicament and the understanding of salvation that will speak to that predicament. The anthropologist in me observes that, like different personalities on the ark or  in a single culture, individuals reared in different cultures will respond to different images that Paul gives.

Take the folks in a small Papua New Guinea society, speaking a language with a few hundred speakers at most, experiencing high mortality in infancy and young adulthood, for whom the survival of a lineage of brothers is a political necessity. To them the language of Romans 8 speaks best through verse 29 that speaks of Jesus as God’s son being  “the firstborn among many brothers.”[ii] That is a verse that you probably blip over; it does not speak to your social setting in the same way that it does to the demographically vulnerable natives of the Upper Sepik foothills in New Guinea among whom we lived.

Romans 8 speaks many other languages of salvation.

To the person who is worried about violating God’s law, it uses the language of justification, the forensic view that was so emphasized by the 16^th century Reformation, that those who are accused as lawbreakers are made right with God.

To those troubled by sins of the flesh and death-dealing addictions, it speaks the language of salvation, of the Spirit that gives life to our mortal body.

To those who are slaves of debt, it speaks the language of redemption and liberation.

To those who feel alienated, separated, and orphaned, it speaks the language of reconciliation and adoption into God’s family, for when we can only cry, “Abba,” “Father,” the Spirit within us bears witness that we are children of God.

When Paul preaches like this, he follows the example of Jesus, who opened his ministry in the synagogue in his hometown by quoting the prophet Isaiah, “The Spirit of the Lord is upon me, because he has anointed me to preach good news to the poor. He has sent me to proclaim release to the captives and recovering of sight to the blind, to set at liberty those who are oppressed, to proclaim the acceptable year of the Lord.” It was a message of salvation tailored for the predicament of each who heard it.

In different societies, the human predicament will be seen differently. We spoke in an earlier sermon about sin as anything that drives life toward death, anything that separates us from God, who is the source of life. Theologian Jürgen Moltmann[iii] writes of five “vicious circles of death” in different social settings—

the vicious circle of poverty, that consists of hunger, illness, and early mortality,

the vicious circle of force, that violent spiral that we see so well today in Iraq, where force exercised against a brutal dictator has bred a counter-force of insurgency and terrorism,

the vicious circle of cultural alienation, in which people see themselves as mere cogs in a technocratic machine, perhaps most eloquently expressed by my brother when he signed his letters to me from college with his student number instead of his name, writing from a large impersonal university,

the vicious circle of the industrial pollution of nature, that leads to the death of ecosystems, Paul, too, was aware of this, even before the Industrial Revolution, speaking of the whole creation groaning to be set free from its bondage to decay,

and, finally,  the vicious circle of senselessness and godforsakenness, that sums up our present situation of despair, apathy, and an unconscious death-wish. 

To each of these vicious circles of death, the crucified Christ has brought salvation and life.

There is an inescapable link between salvation and suffering. The cost of salvation is suffering, the suffering of God, the crucifixion of God’s Son. In salvation we do not escape that suffering but share in Christ’s suffering and he in ours.

In the chapters of Romans that we have read this summer, Paul expresses a clear view of the unavoidable place of suffering in human life. A few weeks ago we read from Romans 5, “…we rejoice in our sufferings, knowing that suffering produces endurance, and endurance produces character, and character produces hope, and hope does not disappoint us, because God’s love has been poured into our hearts through the Holy Spirit which has been given to us.” (5: 3-5)

Today we read: “I consider that the sufferings of this present time are not worth comparing with the glory that is to be revealed to us.” (8:18) And that “in this hope we were saved.” (8:24)

Only after I chose the hymns for today, out of the many 19^th century hymns in our hymnal that say something about salvation, it struck me that each of the three I had chosen was written out of extreme human suffering, yet all are full of hope and joy.

We began with “Joyful, joyful we adore Thee, God of glory, Lord of love.” The melody was adapted from Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony, written after Beethoven was almost completely deaf, this man to whom sound and music were so important.

In a minute we will sing the African American spiritual, “There is a balm in Gilead to make the wounded whole.”  This view of salvation as a healing balm, first expressed in those words by the prophet Jeremiah, was meaningful to slaves who suffered the wounds of beatings and injuries at work in the fields.

And our closing hymn, “Blessed assurance,” was written by Fanny Crosby. Blinded by an eye infection in infancy, she wrote in this hymn, “visions of rapture now burst on my sight, angels descending bring from above/ echoes of mercy, whispers of love.” She lived in blindness for 95 years and wrote over 9000 hymns, 16 of which are found in our hymnal.

Joining with voices from the Apostle Paul to Fanny Crosby, together we can assert, “ …Neither death, nor life nor angels, nor principalities, nor things present, nor things to come, nor powers, nor height, nor depth, nor anything else in all creation, will be able to separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord.” (Rom 8:38-39)

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