Here's Part 3 of my 2011 Advent sermon series.
Who Are We Waiting For? Part 3
Jesus as Savior: Saved From What for What?
Scripture: Luke 2:8-14; 2 Corinthians 5:16-19
Let us pray: May the words of my mouth and the meditations of all of our hearts be acceptable in your sight O God, our strength and our redeemer. Amen.
In this Advent sermon series so far we have considered the importance of Jesus of Nazareth having truly been a human being like us and what it means for us to confess him as God Incarnate. Those topics are vitally important for Christians, yet there is at least one more thing that we need to consider for our answer to our theme question of who we are waiting for to be anywhere near complete—not that it can be complete in three short sermons of course. Almost from the very beginning Christians have called Jesus “Savior.” We heard them doing that in our reading from Luke’s story of Jesus’ birth just now. Many of us can recite those lines by heart, probably in the King James version. They are the angel’s announcement of the birth of Jesus to the shepherds. The angel says “I am bringing you good news of great joy for all the people; to you is born this day in the city of David a Savior, who is the Messiah, the Lord.” Clearly Luke sees Jesus as a Savior, and so has the Christian tradition nearly from the very beginning.
Who are we waiting for? A savior. OK. Jesus is a savior, but what exactly does it mean for us to call him Savior? To answer that question we have to start, I think, with exposing an assumption that lies behind the title of Savior that we give to Jesus. If Jesus is our Savior, then we must need saving from something. Now, I would be surprised if the answer that comes immediately to your mind when you hear the question “what do we need to be saved from” were anything other than “sin.” After all, Christianity has been saying for nearly 2,000 years that what Jesus saves us from is sin. Put a bit more precisely, Christianity has said that Jesus saves us from the consequences of our sin. That is, he saves us from the damnation that, the church has said for so long, is the just and inevitable consequence of our sin unless Jesus saves us from it. Sin is the traditional Christian answer to the question of what we need to be saved from.
Unlike some of my more humanistic colleagues I believe that sin is very much a reality in human existence. It is very much something from which we need to be saved. Sin and its feared consequences are very real existential issues for people today. Yet with many other Christian theologians today I also believe that there are other basic existential issues that are, if anything, bigger, more real, and more immediate concerns for many people today than sin is. Two that are commonly identified in discussions like this one , and two that I know are very real to many people and to me, are meaninglessness and the fear of nothingness. That is, we have a sense that life has no real meaning, and we fear that nothingness, non-being, simply an empty end of us, is our ultimate destiny. I believe that all three of these things—sin, meaninglessness, and the fear of nothingness—are existential dilemmas from which we need to be saved. But wait! There’s more! The whole world has things from which it needs to be saved too. Two things that come immediately to my mind are injustice and our ways of violence, including war. So it turns out that there are lots of things that we and the whole world need to be saved from. Which of course leads immediately to the question: Does Jesus save us from all of these things, and if so, how?
Now, pretty clearly I can’t talk about each of these things from which we need to be saved in one sermon; but I think I can say something meaningful that at least applies to all of them by asking one fundamental question: Do all of these things from which we need to be saved have something in common? I think that they do, and it is that common something that I want to address here.
What all of these existential dilemmas that we humans face have in common is that they are all grounded in a real or a perceived separation from God. They are all manifestations of an alienation from God. We sin and fear the consequences of sin because we do not live in an intimate communion with God. Because we don’t, we lose touch with God’s forgiving grace. We feel meaningless and we fear an ultimate nothingness for the same reason. We lose touch with God the source of all meaning. We lose the assurance that, while we may not know just what form our being takes after our death, nothingness is not our fate because we know that God’s love for us never ends. We oppress others, and we engage in and support acts of violence against our fellow human beings, because we live according to human values and are alienated from God’s values. All of these existential dilemmas, all of these things that trouble our souls, are symptoms of a more basic existential dilemma, separation or alienation from God.
If our most basic problem is alienation from God, that is, if all of the more specific things from which we need to be saved are manifestations of that more fundamental human problem, as I believe they are, then what do we need a savior to do for us? Why to reconcile us with God of course. To overcome our sense of separation from God. To restore us to intimate communion with God and thus to overcome our alienation from God. St. Paul knew that reconciliation is the salvation that we need. We heard him say it in our reading from 2 Corinthians this morning. Paul says that we have new life “from God, who reconciled us to himself through Christ…; that is, in Christ God was reconciling the world to himself….” In another place that is my favorite Bible passage Paul says the same thing by saying that nothing in all creation will be able to “separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord.” Romans 8:38-39, emphasis added Paul was convinced, and so am I, that in Jesus Christ any separation from God that we feel, any alienation from God that we perceive, is overcome. That is how Jesus is our Savior.
And you’re probably saying to yourself something like “OK, that’s nice, but how does that work exactly? How is our separation from God overcome in Jesus?” At least, I hope you’re asking yourself something like that, for something like that is the necessary next question. And this is where the subjects we considered in the first two sermons in this series come in. Jesus does it by demonstrating in his human nature what human life looks like when it is lived according to the will of God and by teaching with his words and more importantly with his life God’s values of justice, compassion, and nonviolence. And he does it by demonstrating in his divine nature just how God actually relates to creation. In him we see God relating to creation by being present with us in it. In him we see God entering into and experiencing in God’s own person the life and the death of a creature, of a mortal human being. People wanted, and many still want, God to break into creation with power to change things for the better. In Jesus we see that that is not how God relates to the world. God’s relationship to the world is precisely one of presence and solidarity with God’s people and with all of God’s creation. That’s how Jesus overcomes the separation from God that we so often feel and that is the root of so many evils, by showing us that any separation we feel between ourselves and God is entirely of our own making. As far as God is concerned there simply is no separation, there simply is no alienation of creation from its Creator.
Because as far as God is concerned we simply are not separated or alienated from God, we can overcome all of those things from which we need to be saved. We know that sin does not separate us from God. We find meaning in a life lived in intimate communion with God. We know God’s love, and we know that that love will not end when we die. We learn how to live, and we know that, because Jesus was a human being, living that way is a real possibility for us humans. Our basic existential dilemma is alienation, and Jesus overcomes our alienation by showing us that it as far as God is concerned the alienation we perceive just isn’t real.
In Jesus we are saved from everything that we think we need saving from because we know in him that we are never truly separated from God, and in Jesus we are saved to the kind of life God wants us to have. We are freed to live the spiritually abundant life Jesus came to give us. We are freed to live lives of service without limitation. We are freed to be prophets of peace and justice without fear. We are saved from life the way we humans have made it for life the way God created it. We are freed to life with and for God because we are freed from all of the fear, all of the doubt, all of the misplaced values that keep us from living life with and for God.
Jesus isn’t our Savior through some act of cosmic magic in which we have no part. Rather, Jesus is our Savior when we turn to him in faith and see in him how we humans are meant to relate to God and how God relates to us. The salvation that Jesus brings isn’t something that we have to wait until we die to realize. It is salvation first in this life, salvation that comes from the reconciliation between God and creation that Jesus demonstrates. God never was distant from creation, but we humans are so good at creating our own distance from God. That is the distance that Jesus overcomes. That is the reconciliation that Jesus effects. That is Jesus as Savior. In Jesus God reconciled the world to Godself, and nothing in all creation can separate us from the love of God in him. In Jesus Christ, we are saved. Thanks be to God. Amen.
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