Jesus, Saviour

Luke 9:18-20;John 3:16-21

A sermon by Kathy Toivanen at EMUC, 2/11/2007

One summer at the age of 11 or 12 I was ‘saved’. All in all it was a rather peculiar and unsettling event. Here I was, born and raised in the United Church of Canada - I’d been baptized, I faithfully attended Sunday School, sang in the children’s choir, gave of my offering to both the local church and to missions and thoroughly enjoyed taking part in the life of the congregation. Through this church involvement and through other aspects of my daily life, I truly did have a sense of the presence of God in my life.

All of a sudden, all of that was called into question through the interrogation of some well-meaning cousins. According to their wisdom, my baptism, my life in the church and my experience of God was worth nothing unless I prayed a specific prayer asking Jesus to come into my heart and be my personal saviour. If I did I would be saved and I would escape the fires of hell.

Part of me didn’t really trust in what they were saying, but part of me felt just a bit fearful and so just in case I prayed the formula prayer. It only took a minute, and now satisfied that I was saved, we all headed off for an afternoon swim. Frankly, I felt a little cheated. Nothing spectacular happened, there were no fireworks, no visions, no heart-stopping moments of awe and wonder - the world around me looked the same and my life appeared to be unchanged. In fact, I simply carried on, living my life as I had always done.

I don’t know what pops into your head when you think of Jesus as a saviour. Perhaps you experienced a similar event to mine at some point in your life. Perhaps you cringe at hearing this description of Jesus, because it has become so closely associated with a particular brand of Christianity - those whom we often label "Bible Thumpers" or Fundamentalists or Evangelicals.

On the one hand, the incident that I experienced that one summer was relatively harmless; on the other hand I believe it was a serious distortion of what it means to call Jesus, ‘Saviour’ and to commit your life to his saving work.

The work of a saviour is the work of ‘salvation’.

Philip Potter, the former General Secretary of the World Council of Churches (a key leadership position - similar to the role of the moderator of the UCC) speaks of the root meaning of the word salvation. In Hebrew, it means ‘wide, spacious, free, liberation for well-being.’ In Greek, it means ‘deliverance from ill health, the perils of the sea, and the imprisonment of the body in death, ignorance and false opinion, so as to be free to be oneself.’ In Latin, it means ‘authenticity, integrity, being liberated from all that alienates or impedes one’s growth’. (p. 102 in Streams of Faith by Lois Wilson) Salvation also comes from the same root as the word ‘salve’ which is as we know an agent of healing.

It seems to me that in thinking of Jesus as a saviour, as one who offers salvation, we need to attend to the breadth and depth of all of these meanings. We also need to remember that Jesus was born and raised a Jew and as such, he would have been most familiar with the stories of God’s saving activity in the life of his people. Those stories were retold and celebrated most particularly on the night of the Passover Celebration when Jews remembered their deliverance from slavery in Egypt.

If you turn in Voices United to #131, you will find a Hebrew song that is often sung at Passover - in fact those of us, who attended the Seder Passover meal at Solel Synagogue last year, had the opportunity to sing it at that time. The song celebrates the saving activity of God as rich and varied -

bringing the Hebrews out of Egypt, freeing them from the ‘prison’ of their enslavement, making a way for them through the waters, leading them to dry land, guiding them in the desert, giving them the 10 Commandments and the Torah, providing manna to eat and a sabbath day of rest, holding a banquet and calling the whole world into freedom.

And you will note that the saving work of God is not just about personal salvation, but about the salvation of an entire nation!

Jesus was rooted in this saving history of God. It was his people’s story; it was his story. Jesus sought to live his life as a faithful child; as a faithful son of this saving God. Jesus took to heart the wonderful breadth and depth of God’s saving activity and we too should do no less when we think of Jesus as a saviour.

When Luke wrote his gospel, he wanted to make sure that his readers got the connection between Jesus’ life and God’s work of salvation. And so he tells a story of Jesus in the local synagogue, reading this passage from the book of Isaiah:

The Spirit of the Lord is upon me,

because God has anointed me

to bring good news to the poor.

God has sent me to proclaim release to the captives

and recovery of sight to the blind,

to let the oppressed go free,

to proclaim the year of the Lord’s favour.’

Jesus ends the reading by saying ‘Today this scripture has been fulfilled in your hearing.’ What happens in the rest of Luke’s gospel is an unfolding of the ways in which Jesus fulfills those words from Isaiah.

Over the past number of weeks, we have lifted up these saving activities of Jesus as we have explored his teachings, his healing ministry, and his radical welcome and acceptance of those who were cast outside of the boundaries of acceptable society.

The words ‘salvation’ or ‘saviour’ rarely occur in the gospels.

The only time the word is mentioned in Luke’s gospel is after Jesus has gone to the home of Zacchaeus, a despised tax collector. Presumably after sharing a meal and some conversation with Jesus, Zacchaeus announces that he will give half of his possessions to the poor, and to those he has cheated, he will pay back four times the amount. At that point, Jesus says that salvation has come to Zacchaeus’ house.

Salvation for Zacchaeus has very little to do with praying a formula prayer asking Jesus to come into his heart - but it has everything to do with a man whose heart has been transformed by the words and actions of Jesus that liberate him to act with justice and mercy by repairing the wrongs he has committed and by generously sharing his resources with the poor.

We could spend all day lifting up other stories of Jesus’ saving work in the gospels. He brings sight to those who are blinded by prejudice and fear; he brings healing to those who are wounded in body and spirit; refreshment to those who are hungry and thirsty for a word of hope and welcome; freedom to those bound and held captive by their own beliefs and by oppressive conventions of their society; truth to those overcome by lies; love to the unloved and unlovable; peace to the conflicted and tormented; life to those who know death; and forgiveness to those who believe that they are past forgiveness.

On none of these occasions, does Jesus demand that people worship him or acknowledge him as saviour. In fact when people try to do just that, Jesus tells them to remain silent. Jesus is more likely to encourage them to go and give thanks and praise to God and to ‘go and do likewise’ - that is reflect the same saving work in their interactions with others.

I don’t think that we can leave the topic of Jesus as Saviour without dealing with John’s gospel - in many ways the most poetically beautiful of the gospels and perhaps the most abused and misunderstood of the gospels.

Most of us are quite familiar with the scripture passage we read today from John’s gospel. John 3:16 pops upon our TV screens during sports events; it is plastered on many billboards across Canada and the U.S.A. It is a scripture text that has been used as ammunition for those who wish to declare that the only true faith is Christianity and that any who are not Christian are going to hell in a hand basket. By now, I hope that you will have figured out that this is not a perspective that I hold.

So what on earth are we to do with this scripture text?

It helps to know a bit of the context in which John’s gospel was written. It was the last of the gospels to be written during the time when there was conflict between two groups of Jews, like a sibling rivalry. There were those Jews who believed that Jesus was the Messiah, and those Jews who didn’t share this belief. Over time this sibling rivalry hardened into distinct camps. Those who believed that Jesus was the Messiah were not welcome into the synagogue for they were viewed as being heretical. By the time John’s gospel was written, it was way beyond sibling rivalry. It was more like ideological warfare. John, a Jew himself, refers to those Jews who didn’t believe that Jesus was the Messiah simply as ‘The Jews.’ And he wrote a gospel that of all the gospels is the most anti-Semitic in nature.

"The Jews", according to John’s gospel, are "children of Satan", "murderers and liars"; they dwell in darkness while true believers are in the light. To read these texts without understanding the ideological and political context which gave rise to them is to perpetuate anti-Semitism and religious intolerance.

We need to read this text from John’s gospel and compare it to the life and teachings of Jesus in all of the gospels. For there we find a Jesus who talked about faith not so much as an intellectual matter of ‘believing the right things’ but as a matter of loving God with all your heart, and soul, and mind - and loving one’s neighbour as oneself, even when those neighbours have different belief systems.

When we think that as Christians, we have the truth of God all wrapped up around our fingers, we need to remember how often Jesus surprised his audience by pointing out the faithful actions of those who were considered to be outside of the religiously righteous. After all, isn’t Jesus’ parable of the Good Samaritan a strong reminder that those outside of the ‘religiously righteous’ may well be the ones who actually live out the truth of loving their neighbour as God calls us to.

Last week we took a look at all the times that Jesus upset the ‘religiously righteous’ when he broke the rules and associated with the unclean, the outcast and the ‘sinners’. Surely his actions showed loud and clear that God’s love has no boundaries. Surely, if we are to call ourselves Christian, if we are to declare that Jesus Christ is our Saviour, it means that we too are to live in ways that show that God’s saving love for the world is not limited by the boundaries of religion, heritage and tradition.

At the same time, it is important to affirm that each one of us experiences the saving love of God in a particular and unique way in our lives. After all, isn’t it true that we all know what it is to love and to be loved through our own unique experiences of being a friend, a parent, a child, a lover or a spouse. Isn’t it true that the way that we grow in our capacity to love others is through our particular and personal experiences of love.

So is it with those of us who have come to know the saving love of God through the life and teachings of Jesus. And so it is indeed right and good for us to come together to affirm and celebrate our particular experience of God’s love in Jesus - to tell the familiar and beloved stories, to sing the hymns of praise, to take time to listen for his spirit among us, to engage in meaningful rituals that deepen our experience of his love and strengthen our commitment to express such love in the world.

One of the best loved and most widely sung hymns that proclaims the gift and grace of God’s saving love is ‘Amazing Grace, the hymn we are going to sing next. In your bulletin, there is a brief historical background to the hymn that John Newton wrote. At the time, the hymn was a personal testimony to the grace that John experienced in his own life.

But the hymn has become much more than his personal experience of God’s saving love. It inspired many in John Newton’s time to work toward the abolition of the slave trade; it became an anthem sung by activists in the Freedom Marches of the Civil Rights Movement in the 60s;

Jessye Norman, an internationally acclaimed soprano sang the hymn at a 1980’s concert to benefit the freedom fight of Nelson Mandela; Joan Baez, an American folksinger opened the US portion of ‘Live Aid’, the 1985 concert for African famine relief with her performance of the hymn; it has been sung by those in prison and in a special memorial service at the site of the twin towers after the devastating events of Sept 11; it has been translated into countless languages - in our Voices United Hymn Book it is the only hymn to appear in eight languages - Japanese, Chinese, Inuktitut, Mohawk, Cree, French and English!

The hymn’s legacy is a testament to the saving love of God that we can witness to in Jesus’ life, a saving love that to this day transforms lives and empowers people to dedicate their own lives to God’s saving work through actions that bring good news to the poor, proclaim release to the captives, recovery of sight to the blind, and freedom for the oppressed.

I invite you to turn now to #226 in Voices United and together we will sing this hymn and celebrate the grace of God’s saving love in our own lives and in this world.