For Us And For Our Salvation

A sermon for the third Sunday after Pentecost given at the United Church of Acworth, Acworth, NH on June 17, 2012.

Ezekiel 17:22-24
2 Corinthians 5:6-17
Mark 4:26-34

Our next sentence in the faith and covenant reads:  “We believe in Jesus Christ, His Son, our Lord and Savior, who for us and our salvation lived, died, and rose again, and lives forevermore.”

There is a ton here to unpack.  And since it’s not my goal at this point to make a thorough exposition of our faith and covenant -- such a task would require a book at least -- I will simply help us take a closer look at what this sentence points to.  

I’ll do this by asking some basic questions that come to mind when we read this sentence.  there are plenty of more questions that can come to mind than the ones I raise here, but like I said, this will not be a thorough analysis.  And everyone breathed a sigh of relief.
first question.
the sentence says that Jesus lived, died, rose again, and lives forevermore for our salvation.  

so what is this salvation?

this is a question that’s not easy to answer in one sermon.  so I won’t even attempt to answer it.  rather I’ll just do what Jesus does and give some pictures and some stories.
it’s pretty clear that for Jesus, salvation is participation in the kingdom of God.  so when we ask what salvation means, we are also asking “what is the kingdom of God?”

and Jesus doesn’t ever tell us directly what the kingdom of God is.  but he gives us a number of pictures and parables, of metaphors and stories.
our English word salvation comes from the Latin salvatio which in turn comes from the Greek word soteria.  so i looked up soteria in the massive Greek dictionary that Jim Brown gave me and this is what I found:
soteria, when used of people, means

1. saving, deliverance, preservation, safety
2. a way or means of safety
3. or, a safe return

to talk about soteria is to talk about being rescued.  for us and for our rescue, Jesus...
so then we have to ask the question, rescue from what?  and rescue to what?
what is it that the Bible tells us we needed or need rescue from?
if the kingdom of God is the solution that Jesus seems to offer, what is that kingdom doing to rescue us?
something that the apostle Paul wrote in his letter to the Colossians comes to mind:
“[God] has rescued us from the power of darkness and transferred us into the kingdom of his beloved Son, in whom we have redemption, the forgiveness of sins.”
so there is a “power of darkness” that we have been enslaved in.  and from this power of darkness we are rescued, redeemed, purchased out of slavery, and we are rescued into the kingdom of God’s son, whom God loves.  
the Bible paints our world as having been the place of a cosmic struggle between good and evil.  but unlike many philosophies and mythologies and theologies which see this struggle as ongoing and sort of the backdrop of world history then, now, and into the future, the Bible speaks of a deciding moment when good triumphed over evil.
there are not two equal forces of good and evil, light and darkness, battling it out now and forever.  The gospel, the good news, as it’s told in the Christian scriptures, is that good has triumphed over evil.  Not even that good will one day triumph over this evil bully that continually plagues us and threatens us, but that good has definitively won the day.
We understand from the scriptures that human beings were made not only to live in harmony with God and their fellow human beings, but to create community in which this harmony glowed and resounded like a beautiful song.  Human beings were made for life in all of its abundant overflowing energy.  

The scriptures tell us how God chose to call out the people Israel from the surrounding peoples in order to begin cultivating a new humanity.  They were called to live a different life, a life centered on God and oriented toward neighbor -- but we read the prophetic words crying out again and again that though the people of Israel were to embody peace and harmony, again and again greed and exploitative power corrupted and destroyed peace and harmony -- marred the beautiful design.  

God created Eve and Adam for a purpose and there was a turning away, God called out the descendents of Abraham but there again was a turning away.  Where we were created to live in God’s design, the poetic way of creation of harmony, of mutual giving and receiving, humanity could not seem to escape the powerful temptation to live apart from God, the way of destruction of selves, communities, and the creation.  Where humanity was created for life, we continued and continue to choose death.
The power of the dominion of darkness is strong -- the pull to selfish action, to power and greed, to dominate and be served.  This dominion of darkness is as attractive as it is destructive.  And so the story of Adam and Eve becomes the story of Cain killing his brother Abel.  The story of Moses’ building a new community based on devotion to God becomes the story of rich King Ahab killing the small farmer Naboth to add Naboth's vineyard to his already abundant landholdings.  Again and again what was created good and for good is corrupted by this ineradicable power -- what the apostle Paul calls the dominion of darkness.  
So the story of the scriptures looks to a new king, a new shepherd, a new prophet, who would deliver the people of Israel and restore them to be the community that they were made to be.  And the prophets saw visions of this new anointed and were granted snapshots of who and what God’s deliverance, God’s salvation would be.
The people of Israel naturally assumed that this salvation would be a national salvation focused on Israel. But we are made to understand from the rest of the scriptures that Israel was not the end of God’s plan.  Israel was a means to God’s bigger ends.  

Like a gardener cultivating a field to grow a rich and abundant garden, God was cultivating within humanity a new way through the culture, through the history of Israel.  God was preparing world history, preparing humanity for a decisive moment when God himself would come to deliver all of humanity from the power of the dominion of darkness.
One of the ways that God foreshadowed this event was through the prophets who spoke God’s words to Israel.  Ezekiel was one of those prophets and today’s reading is one of those messages that God gave concerning Israel’s future:

Thus says the Lord GOD: I myself will take a sprig from the lofty top of a cedar; I will set it out. I will break off a tender one from the topmost of its young twigs; I myself will plant it on a high and lofty mountain.  On the mountain height of Israel I will plant it, in order that it may produce boughs and bear fruit, and become a noble cedar. Under it every kind of bird will live; in the shade of its branches will nest winged creatures of every kind.  All the trees of the field shall know that I am the LORD. I bring low the high tree, I make high the low tree; I dry up the green tree and make the dry tree flourish. I the LORD have spoken; I will accomplish it.

Ezekiel prophesies, speaking for God, “I will break off a tender [sprig] from the topmost of its young twigs; I myself will plant it on a high and lofty mountain.”
And we are led by other prophesies and by the Christian scriptures to believe that Jesus is the sprig that Ezekiel prophesies.  That God’s decisive intervention, after generations of cultivation, was to plant a new humanity in the soil of Israel’s culture and history in the person of Jesus, the anointed.  And this decisive moment, Jesus’ life, Jesus’ death, and Jesus’ resurrection, would spell the defeat of the power of the dominion of darkness and signal the beginning of God’s new humanity and the beginning of a new peaceful community which by design would become “a noble cedar. Under it every kind of bird will live; in the shade of its branches will nest winged creatures of every kind.”
This is the significance that Christianity gives to Jesus as Messiah.  Jesus not only teaches and preaches the coming of the kingdom of God, Jesus embodies that kingdom.  All that the people of Israel were called to be and should have been and all that humanity can and will become is embodied in this Galilean carpenter.
God himself enters history in the man Jesus and reveals in his life the design of God for humanity.  In fact, through the Christian scriptures we understand that the suffering and death of Christ is God’s taking upon himself the consequences of humanity’s turning from God and consequently God's destroying of the power of sin and death by rising again to new life.
So rescued from what?  

We are rescued from ourselves, from sin and destruction as a cosmic reality.  

So rescued to what?  

We are rescued to the kingdom of the beloved Son, the kingdom of life, the kingdom of God’s forgiving, redeeming love by which we by faith are being restored individually in order to participate in project: new creation, God’s new humanity through which he is renewing the creation to be the harmony it was made for.

Jesus tells the story of God’s new humanity as a mustard seed.  Small.  Insignificant.  But even though it is small, it becomes a place of refuge for the birds of the air.

‘With what can we compare the kingdom of God, or what parable will we use for it? It is like a mustard seed, which, when sown upon the ground, is the smallest of all the seeds on earth; yet when it is sown it grows up and becomes the greatest of all shrubs, and puts forth large branches, so that the birds of the air can make nests in its shade.’

Jesus comes at the decisive moment in history to inaugurate the new reign of God which not only brings human beings into new spiritual life, but gives new color to all aspects of our embodied life, all activities, all relationships, to our politics even and our economics.  It’s like the melting of the snow in Narnia -- something new has come and by God’s Spirit we are able to experience the change of the old into the new.
But this can only come as we consciously turn from the old, the self-centered by faith to the new, the God-centered.  By faith we lay hold of God’s gracious forgiveness toward humanity in general and us in particular.  By faith we restore a new relationship to God, to others, and to the creation that God gave us to nurture and tend.
This is the soteria -- the salvation -- the rescue -- the return.  We like the son in Jesus’ parable took off in our own destructive direction with all of the gifts that God had given us and “to a distant country, and there... squandered [our] property in dissolute living.”
Some of us may have been fortunate enough to reach the point that the son does in the parable -- where famine strikes and poverty cuts deep and we realize the emptiness, the destruction of living for ourselves.  And we dread returning to the source of the gifts that we squandered out of embarrassment, out of shame -- but we realize with amazement and tearful joy -- that not a condemning judge, but a loving Father extends grace and forgiveness and welcomes us home.
This too is soteria.  A return to grace and restoration with God.  Amazing grace.  In fact it’s from this parable that John Newton gets his line “I once was lost but now am found.”  And there was celebration.
What is this salvation?  It’s cosmic but it’s also personal.  It’s spiritual but it infects every part of us.  It’s a rescuing that is not just for some but for all -- so it’s universal as well.  And those who find their way home to God form a community that is transformed by their new faith and that community becomes like the mustard plant in Jesus’ parable -- a home for those who need refuge from the dominion of darkness.  
So Jesus lived, Jesus died, and Jesus was resurrected to defeat sin and death -- to rescue us from the dominion of darkness -- but also to inaugurate the new humanity -- to rescue us to the kingdom of love.
This is personal --- each person must encounter God for themselves, each person must, like the prodigal, return from the distant country and allow God’s embrace to heal their stubborn selfish soul.  But is also very much corporal -- we are Christ’s living body in this world -- to witness to grace in our community as a light to the world, but as the continuance of the effects of God’s once-and-for-all defeat of sin and its consequences by our faith and words inspired by radical grace.
For what Paul writes to the Corinthians in today’s reading is the reality that we find by faith:  

For the love of Christ urges us on, because we are convinced that one has died for all; therefore all have died. And he died for all, so that those who live might live no longer for themselves, but for him who died and was raised for them.

From now on, therefore, we regard no one from a human point of view;even though we once knew Christ from a human point of view, we know him no longer in that way. So if anyone is in Christ, there is a new creation: everything old has passed away; see, everything has become new!

God binds us together in Christ -- to such an extent that we have all died in Christ -- and as a consequence we live no longer for ourselves but for Christ -- God with us and for us in Jesus.  And it is in Christ that we experience the return of what God has made us for:

So if anyone is in Christ, there is a new creation: everything old has passed away; see, everything has become new!

“We believe in Jesus Christ, His Son, our Lord and Savior, who for us and our salvation lived, died, and rose again, and lives forevermore.”

For us and for our deliverance from the power of darkness and transference into the kingdom of light, God our Savior and Lord came among us and not only inaugurated a new way to be human but took on himself like a lightning rod all of the pain and hate and violence of the consequence of our turning from our true design as human beings

-- and rose again victorious of the destruction and chaos of death, that we might no longer lived under death, but live by the power of God’s spirit, God’s new life now and forever as our future is becomes bound up with God’s future and our plan with God’s plan.

This is our soteria -- our salvation, God's new creation.  Amazing grace. Amen