Sermon of the Week:
No Insignificant Question-Is Salvation Just the Whim of God?
A sermon preached for The Kirk of Kansas City, Missouri, on September 19, 2021.
Part four of a eight-week sermon series inspired by questions submitted by the Kirk community.
Special Music: Hymn of Faith
Hymns: Blessed Assurance, Jesus is Mine / Come, Live in the Light!
Keywords: Salvation, Predestination, Universalism, Scripture, Jesus. #pcusa
Scripture readings (which you may wish to read prior):
John 3:14-17
and Matthew 7:7-11, 21-29
Permission to podcast / stream the music in this service obtained from ONE LICENSE with license #A-733469. All rights reserved.
I can’t count the number of times
Someone has told me
that I’m doomed for eternity.
That’s not a very nice thing to say to someone, now, is it?
But if you’re convinced that this is a life-or-death struggle
To get on the right side of God’s great ledger book,
You know,
The one that says you’re saved,
or, God forbid, not saved…
Then telling someone that they’ve got it all wrong
might seem quite imperative.
Imperative for the other person you say it to, for their soul.
Imperative for you, as well, to reinforce for you that you’re right.
I’m amazed, honestly, at how they’ve convinced themselves
That saying something like that is a loving thing to do.
I’m not just talking about the random guy on the street corner
With a pamphlet and a bullhorn,
Fire and brimstone.
I’ve seen that guy in Chicago a few times,
or in New York City many years ago,
but I’ve not seen him around Kansas City lately. Thankfully.
I’m not just talking about people from Fred Phelps
former church over in Wichita, Westboro Baptist,
The ones who picket funerals and go after Trans kids.
They’ve confronted me before on this score.
And I’m not just talking about the emails I get
Because I serve on a city council right now,
Or because I serve as a pastor of a denomination
that ordains women and LGBTQIA people as leaders
or is seeking to confront racism in our world.
Some of those emails are a doozy.
I’m also talking about the everyday confidence
That certain other Christians I know have
People that know me,
Are in relationship of a sorts with me,
And are convinced that they are RIGHT,
ultimately, about the big questions,
And that they’re just not sure that I am.
Repent! Save yourself before it’s too late, Chad.
///
To be fair to them, I’m also convinced that I’ve got it sort of right.
I try to maintain a degree of humility, or caution, about it,
out of principle,
But I also think that this journey of faith I’m on is the right one.
That’s how faith works. It is a way of life.
And thankfully, I’ve found many many other people of faith
Who don’t regularly go around thinking that I’m doomed,
Because they don’t really
spend time thinking about God’s ledger.
About who is in, and who is out.
But some people clearly do.
And it impacts so much about how they engage the world:
Life is one big test, a competition,
One rooted in fear and worry,
Maybe guilt and envy too.
I try not to be insulted, honestly.
I’ve spent a lifetime seeking to be a good Christian.
Have read the good book.
Have prayed good prayers.
Have learned from good people, faithful people.
Have sought to have my faith inform my actions and my values…
And the presumption when I encounter people
who question my ultimate condition
often is that I just can’t know very much,
Because my faith is this way,
The way of justice, the way of compassion, the way of grace…
and theirs is… something else, I guess.
If only I would change,
Believe things more like they believe things,
then maybe I would be saved…
Since they believe they’re on God’s good side,
It must mean that I am not.
Which helps them sleep at night…
While saying somewhat nasty things to others.
///
Truth be told, I don’t lose much sleep over it, myself,
And this sermon is an effort to explain a bit about why that is.
We’re going to take a very quick run today
Through a topic that has confused and inspired
many faithful followers of Jesus
For centuries and centuries.
We won’t be able to do this question justice, unfortunately,
But it is a compelling question for us to look into:
Is Salvation Just the Whim of God?
The person who sent us this question
Put it another way, as well:
Why are the gospels good news?
And they asked that question
While quoting a bit of this passage from Matthew
That we just read together:
Not everyone who says to me
‘Lord, Lord,’ shall enter the kingdom of heaven
But only the one who does the will of my Father in Heaven.
On that day many will say to me,
‘Lord, Lord, did we not
prophesy in your name,
and cast out demons in your name,
and do many deeds of power in your name?’
Then I will declare to them,
‘I never knew you;
go away from me, you evildoers.’
And, on first glance,
You might hear that and wonder,
Like the questioner did,
Well, what gives, Jesus?
People seek to do your will,
To prophesy in your name,
Offer healing—that’s what casting out demons was back then
Do deeds of power, in your name,
And you’ll disavow them?
Maybe it is capricious after all, Jesus.
How is that good news?
///
Salvation is an interesting subject.
It means deliverance,
Reconciliation with God and to God’s creation.
It involves atonement,
which is when you make something that is wrong right again.
It involves healing, and hope,
and the fullness of life that God intends
a state of affairs where people have enough
not just to survive, but to thrive
where justice rolls down like waters
and righteousness like an ever flowing stream.
We Christians have been talking about salvation forever
But it is hard to get a handle on just what salvation is,
Or, more to the point, who is going to be saved in the first place,
How salvation is going to happen.
Individually, salvation is about a sense
That we want to be ok,
With the God who made us and who, ostensibly, loves us,
And, because of that, that we will find eternal joy there
With God, and with all of those who similarly are ok with God.
But, importantly, the Bible also talks about salvation
In a communal sense,
As a state of affairs where things are put pack together again
here the kingdom of Heaven
dwill thrive, here, on Earth
That very realm of God that Jesus came to proclaim.
And salvation in this sense
has an already but not yet quality
When Jesus talks about it:
Salvation is here, if we have eyes to see it.
Salvation is going to be here,
as we remain broken, yearning, praying,
As we look around us and see violence and heartache
And we know there is more to do.
Indeed, Jesus bursts on the scene
At a time when people were desperate for things to be made better
For a people who worked hard to be faithful
Through following all sorts of rules and structures and offerings at the temple
Who wanted justice and freedom in a society that kept them on the margins
Who worked hard just to survive.
And in that world, Jesus came to proclaim salvation.
And upon his death and resurrection and the gift of the holy spirit,
The early church felt alive like it had never felt before,
Bursting with new hope, and new possibility.
They believed salvation was here,
in and through this Jesus.
///
Over the centuries that followed,
The Christian community tried to understand what all that meant for us.
Jesus offers salvation for us, new life, eternal life,
But how, exactly?
What do we need to do, if anything, to make it happen?
Or maybe it’s just if we believe, that’ll do it,
No actual action required.
That is one way to succinctly describe
One of the many divisions in the history of the church.
We Presbyterians, actually, trace our history back to one of those splits
The Protestant Reformation,
Where we affirmed that Salvation is found
In Christ alone,
By Faith alone
By Grace, alone
Through Christ alone
For God’s glory, alone.
By which the protestants were trying to say
That Salvation is a God thing.
It isn’t something that we do, or can influence.
God does it.
Through Christ. By Grace. Through faith.
Which should come as some sort of comfort, actually,
In the face of all those who would tell you that you’re doomed.
They don’t get to decide.
It is above their pay grade.
God is the one who saves.
And, we believe, God does that through Christ,
By grace, and certainly through the gift of faith,
or trust in the one who offers that salvation.
Indeed, the apostle Paul affirmed way back when
That whosoever calls on the name of the Lord shall be saved.
///
Ok, fair enough,
But what about this passage, and others like it,
Where Jesus seems to be telling people that they’re rejected
That they’re missing the mark, somehow,
That their efforts aren’t cutting it.
There are plenty of passages that suggest something like that:
The sheep and the goats,
where those who don’t feed the hungry,
give water to the thirsty,
offer clothing and companionship to the hurting,
who didn’t do so to the least of these,
didn’t do them for Jesus,
and will be cast aside, Matthew suggests.
Or when Jesus rolls his eyes at the legalism of the Pharisees
The skepticism of the Sadducees,
The power-jockeying of the disciples…
Very very few people seemed to get
what he was trying to teach, at the time.
No matter.
Pay attention to what Jesus does, even so.
He kept on teaching, right?
Kept on healing.
Kept on loving.
Offered parable after parable about searching out the lost
The lost sheep, the lost coin,
The lost son, the prodigal.
Offered teaching after teaching
About serving and loving people who see things differently
Like the Good Samaritan,
The woman caught in adultery,
The Pharisee who comes at night to try to understand.
God never closes the door,
Jesus is trying to say, in these stories.
God never closes the door.
///
So what are we to make of all of this?
Well, first, let’s just be honest
And affirm that the Bible is kind of confusing on this topic.
Maybe it shouldn’t be, but it is.
Just to use our reading for today as an example,
In one place, you’ve got Jesus talking about
People who are doing everything they think they ought to do
To get on God’s good side
Being told that they’re not in, at least not yet.
But elsewhere, in our same reading,
We have Jesus saying:
Ask, and it will be given to you,
Seek, and you will find,
Knock, and the door will be opened.
And in another sermon, on another day,
If we were just looking at this section from Matthew
We’d try to dig more deeply
Into what Jesus might have meant by
“doing the will of the Father”
Or we might explore what faithful asking,
faithful seeking, faithful knocking means.
This isn’t a passage where, before the big game,
The quarterback can pray to God to ask for a win,
And because of that, God will provide.
God doesn’t work that way,
even if we know that God is a Chiefs fan.
But, stepping back, we can affirm that there are conflicting messages
About what salvation means, about how salvation is conveyed
And about who, ultimately, will be saved.
Is it for those who ask, seek, knock, whatever that means,
Or is it going to be denied to people,
Even those who seem to do what they think God wanted them to do,
Only to be turned away?
///
And right there is where we come full circle,
And we ask ourselves why are the Gospels Good News?
If salvation is the whim of God,
Given at God’s good pleasure to some, but not to others,
Why follow that God?
Why trust that God?
Why work to do good in the world,
If you might just be on the bad side of the ledger anyway?
The presumption underlying that perspective, though,
Is that Salvation is only given to some, and not to all.
The term for that is double predestination:
some are going to be saved;
others are going to be sent to the bad place.
There are a lot of people who believe in some form of this.
Actually, some people can only think of Christianity under this framework,
And that’s because the Bible often talks
in the language of punishing evil,
Of God’s pursuit of justice.
How can a good and a just God not reward what is good and just,
And punish what is not?
And the presumption is that punishment
An ultimate and forever break from God.
And if God does that for some,
Then, watch out.
Which side of the ledger are you on, my good man?
But here’s the rub:
How can a good and just God just leave it there,
And close the door forever?
How can a good and just God
Not go after the lost coin, the lost sheep
The wayward son,
The tax collector and the centurion
and the pharisee and the people of little faith…?
And the truth of the Bible is that
There are OTHER passages there
Many many other passages
That attest to God’s ultimate desire to do just that
To leave the door open,
To help everyone who misses the mark
Make things right again.
The alternative to Double Predestination
Is something called Christian Universalism,
Where, somehow, God will find a way
To reconcile all people back to God.
That there will, somehow, someday, be no one left behind.
///
Did you hear something like that in the other reading for today,
The one that Carlton offered for us:
“For God so loved the world
that God gave the only Son,
so that everyone who believes in him
may not perish
but may have eternal life.
“Indeed, God did not send the Son
into the world to condemn the world,
but in order that the world
might be saved through him.”
That phrase, the world, means “the world.”
It means all things, all people, all creation.
It means the world.
God intends to save the world.
Not just some of the world.
Not just people like me.
The world.
All creatures.
Everyone.
///
This has befuddled and confused people of faith
For as long as we’ve been seeking
to follow God on the way of Jesus,
And I wish it were clearer in the scriptures. I really do.
Maybe it is confused
Because it doesn’t get figured out while we’re alive.
The people who wrote the bible don’t have a clear understanding
Of what happens next, after we die.
Our faith proposes that this all gets worked out later,
in God’s good time,
And we just don’t have a good sense
of what exactly happens after our death.
For that, we have promises, and assurances,
That those of us who follow God will dwell with God,
That God has many rooms within God’s wonderful house,
That we will find rest, and peace, forever more.
For me, I have been more convinced
By the work and teachings of Jesus
That God intends to make things right for all of us.
And I do find it to be good news
That even with God’s commitment to justice, to righteousness
To holding even me to a high standard
That there is also forgiveness
That there is also opportunity to grow and change and heal
That there can be hurts that are made right again
Where perpetrator and victim can find healing, somehow,
Where those who are ground down can be made whole, again,
Where lion will lie down with the lamb
And there will be more hurt on God’s holy mountain.
Those are promises of the faith.
That is where God intends all of this to go.
That while we are here on earth, in this life,
God wants us to work to make that just a bit more real, day by day.
But we do it not because we want God to save us.
We do it because it is right, because it is true, because it is beautiful.
All the passages to the contrary,
That suggest that those who falter will not make it,
Are better read as temporary, not permanent.
As I read them,
They suggest that none of this grace is cheap grace,
That we will all have to deal with our missteps
Will have to atone for them.
That the harm we do can’t just be forgotten,
But must be made right.
And that God intends to be there, in the middle of that,
Again, working to make all things new.
So, personally, I don’t believe
that salvation is given at the whim of God
Because I think that God is working to save all of us.
And because I believe
that God can do whatever God wants to do,
I think God will eventually succeed,
Even if I don’t understand how God will do it,
Even if that has to happen into the future,
before that day when, ultimately, all will be made right.
People who tell me that I’m doomed forever
Have such a SMALL understanding of God.
Because God can surely do a good work in me,
Has plans for me and my welfare,
For you and your welfare,
And for all creation,
And if God is God, then God will see it happen.
And, what happens,
when you start seeing the world in that way,
Is that you stop stressing about your place on the ledger
And you start seeing opportunities, instead,
to help make the world right again,
you stop judging people, drawing lines to exclude people,
and instead you start believing
that my salvation is actually possible
that God actually does care about me
and that means, truly, everything is going to be ok.
And that is indeed Good News.
Hopeful, life giving, Good News.
And not just for some. But for all.
So may we, dear friends,
Trust in the power of God
To save even us, even them, even everyone
Through the power of faith, hope, and love,
And may we leave that work to God
And, instead, do what we can to care for one another
As Jesus the Christ taught us to.
May it be so.
Amen.
Photo by Olga DeLawrence on Unsplash
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