From What Are We Being Saved?

Lent is a season in which stock in honest confession goes up, and I have a confession to make.  Ever since I was a little boy I have wondered how on earth to make sense of the common Christian statement that Jesus died for our sins.  Long before I was thinking abstractly, I couldn’t figure out how a death in the past had anything to do with the wrongdoings and missteps I was racking up two millennia afterwards.  But, good little boy that I was, I accepted what preachers and teachers told me, and like probably every one of you, I grew up thinking that the whole point of Jesus’ death was to wash away my sins and get me ready for eternal life in heaven. 

And then one day in sixth period Bible class my senior year in high school I said something to that effect and heard for the first time that eternal life was not a future reality but a present one.  I suppose I could date my theological education to that moment.  That one sentence altered my entire perspective. I didn’t immediately toss my boyhood understanding of Jesus’ death and its relevance to me, but it didn’t take me long to begin wondering why he had to die.  I didn’t know at first that I wasn’t the only one who’d ever asked that question or who thought that there must be something about the death of Jesus I was missing.  It wouldn’t be stretching the point too much to say that I’ve been grappling with that ever since.

I know of few places in scripture where the issue of appropriating Jesus’ death comes in for quite so stunning a commentary as the first chapter of 1 Corinthians.  Listen again to St. Paul:

¹⁸ For the message about the cross is foolishness to those who are perishing, but to us who are being saved it is the power of God.

¹⁹ For it is written,

“I will destroy the wisdom of the wise,

            and the discernment of the discerning I will thwart.”

²⁰ Where is the one who is wise? Where is the scribe? Where is the debater of this age? Has not God made foolish the wisdom of the world?

²¹ For since, in the wisdom of God, the world did not know God through wisdom, God decided, through the foolishness of our proclamation, to save those who believe.

²² For Jews demand signs and Greeks desire wisdom,

²³ but we proclaim Christ crucified, a stumbling block to Jews and foolishness to Gentiles,

 

Edward Knippers, "Crucifixion"

²⁴ but to those who are the called, both Jews and Greeks, Christ the power of God and the wisdom of God.

²⁵ For God’s foolishness is wiser than human wisdom, and God’s weakness is stronger than human strength.

If we read the entire argument, we find that Paul is explaining how it is that the ego is incapable of grasping the mystery of the cross.  So is the rational mind applying the normal rules of logic.  In his characteristic way Paul frames his argument in terms of “boasting.”  And that is one of the chief earmarks of our ego:  boasting.  “I did it all by myself,” we learn to boast as little children.  So we did, or might have done.  Not so with the cross.  The cross, the death of Jesus, blasts the categories that we normally operate with.  We can’t get to the meaning of the cross by figuring it out.

So if the message about the cross is not that it’s the necessary means for getting us into the afterlife, what does it mean to claim that “to us who are being saved, it is the power of God”?  Notice that salvation is a process.  It is not that we have been saved or that we shall be saved but that “we are being saved.”  And take a look at what “saved” means.  What do you think?  That it means being spared “hell”?  Take a guess at how many references to hell (in the English Bible) there are in the entire book, including the Aprocrypha.  Hundreds? Dozens? There are fifteen.  Interestingly, not one of them appears in St. Paul.  Now, you’d think that if Paul thought—or knew—that salvation had anything to do with not going to hell he’d at least have mentioned it. 

No, salvation is about being made whole, which happens through living the life of Christ.  It is about being reconciled to the Creator and Source of all life, not living at odds with that Life.  Salvation is about transformation from conformity to this world [Romans 12:2] to quite literally having the Mind of Christ in us [Philippians 5:2].  And if, in sober moments, we think about what the Mind of Christ acted like during that short period of time when Jesus was among us as a human being on this planet, we are bound to see that almost nothing he did was according to the rules by which the world operates. 

The story of the cleansing of the temple is a case in point.  I once had a student in a Bible study who said, “Jesus shouldn’t have done that.  You don’t start a riot with an act of violence.  If he didn’t like the money-changing going on in the Temple, he should have called the police.”  Jesus did not play by the world’s rules.  That is what the temptation story is about.  The temptation was for him to do exactly that.  Be spectacularly secure!  Give people the bread and whatever else they want!  Play political games and amass as much power as you can!  If you think about it, every temptation that human beings have ever experienced falls into one or more of those three types.  And that, by the way, is why the poor are blessed.  Not that the poor don’t experience temptation—they do, we all do—but that poverty in the truest and deepest sense of the word is the state in which a person is less encumbered with the things that create the illusion of self-sufficiency.

Jesus Is Stripped Of His Garments

Are you beginning to see what the cross is about?  It is about letting go.  Just last week we were hearing that stunningly difficult saying of Jesus: “try to save your life, and you’ll surely lose it.  But lose your life for my sake and for the sake of the gospel, and you’ll save it.”  It doesn’t work to gain the whole world if it means losing your soul.  Interestingly, death in the terms of the New Testament is never just the dying of the body.  Real death often dresses in the garb of all those things that dazzle us into thinking that they are life-giving when in fact they are anything but.  Money, possessions, wisdom, intellectual accomplishments, professional advancement, status, prestige, and all those sorts of things.  But the things that look perilously like surefire death are often the very things that make for life:  divesting ourselves of what we’ve accumulated; risking everything to follow the path of the soul; profligately giving away money and possessions; taking on the status of servant; remaking our lives from the ground up; becoming as little children who can laugh and play and trust and learn new things; accepting suffering as a teacher and grief as a friend; staring death in the face and seeing that there is nothing to fear but fear.  Such is lifegiving, and totally counter-intuitive.

That is the way of the cross.  That’s it.  And it looks awfully foolish. It takes no time at all to dismiss it as folly, lunacy even.  But if we look about creation and observe how other forms of life actually live, we can see that the wisdom of God, written across all of Nature, turns out to be simply living in accordance with a few basic things, like acceptance, openness, and giving.   To live that way is salvation, for it is to be whole. 

And it turns out to be very powerful.  Unlike the signs and wonders and wisdom that various cultures laud and applaud, the way of Christ, the way of the cross, is indeed the power of God.  I once knew a man who in a short space of time lost his wife, his job, his career.  He later said that at that point he began tithing all that he had and giving it away. When asked how, he said, “It’s easy to give a tenth of what you have if you have nothing.”  No one can wrest from you any treasure that you have if your treasure and the heart it expresses is laid up in this eternal reality of God’s life where moth and rust don’t consume and where thieves can’t break in and steal. [Matthew 6:19-21] Suddenly the weak seems very powerful, the fragile body the manifestation of an indestructible psyche, and mortality a gift to be grateful for not a threat to be defended against.

To be honest, a crucified Jesus will never be pretty, attractive, or appealing.  We’ll always deal with the hard stuff by turning Jesus’ death into picturesque stained glass and the cross into a piece of jewelry.  Nor will those who catch on to the difference between the wisdom of the world and the foolishness of God outnumber those who cast their lot with the more accessible and understandable, not to mention promising, ways of the world.  But if, by some chance, you are one who is open to living a whole new life in a whole new key, you will discover that this way of Christ and his cross, foolish though it is, is both the wisdom of God and the power of God. 

A sermon for the Third Sunday in Lent, March 4, 2018.

© Frank Gasque Dunn, 2018.

The Surprising Point of Halloween

Affirming Death, Celebrating Life

A sermon preached at St. Stephen and the Incarnation Episcopal Church, Washington, DC, on All Saints Day, November 1, 2009.

John 11:32-44

The story of the raising of Lazarus is perfect—for Halloween. Look at it. You have everything you need: a cemetery (of sorts), a grave, a corpse—looking something like a mummy—and a raising of the dead to life. I mean the gospel no harm by pointing this out. At first sight it is a stretch, however, to find something in this story that fits the theme of All Saints.

That is so because the Church has been busy telling itself for a generation or two that All Saints is about us. And, of course, to a large extent that is true. As we will sing later in the liturgy today, “They were all of them saints of God and I mean, God helping, to be one too,” the thrust of All Saints has been our being saints, or at least in becoming saints. It is a good thing that we be inspired to live virtuous lives. The great roll call of saints our litany powerfully trumpeted this morning not only stirs us to remember how many heroes stand beside us whispering words of encouragement, cheering us on, but also impels us to join that great caravan and become models, mentors, and guides ourselves.

But we would miss something enormously important if we simply took All Saints as a call to become satisfactorily, or even outstandingly, moral. We would miss the vein running through this entire celebration: the plain fact of death. There is no escaping death, and Christianity, beginning with Jesus, knows it. All those heroes, all those ancestors whom we invoked to stand beside us have one thing in common. Shot or tortured or burned or peacefully buried, all of them died. So that is why a story about death is particularly appropriate on All Saints Day. It reminds us that there is a deep connection between death and sainthood. But exactly what is that connection?

Things are not always what they seem. That is the underlying truth of the gospel. Sometimes something looks for all the world to be life-giving—wealth, status, prestige—and it turns out to be the very thing that saps Life itself. And sometimes something looks to be very clearly an example of death—letting go, giving oneself away, laying down one’s life for one’s friends, forgiving one’s enemies—and that very thing shows itself to be the opposite of death, an instance of true Life asserting itself. It is easy to get all mixed up about these things, because there is something counter-intuitive about the truth. What looks like life is really death and what looks like death is really life, so how in the world do you tell what’s what?

When we begin to get confused (as inevitably happens when we start to become conscious of complexities), our instinct is to simplify things. We categorize things easily as good and bad, helpful or dangerous, and we affix labels onto them that frequently don’t ever fall off. They stick. This tastes good, so it must be life-giving. That feels like loss and danger, so it must be the way of death. So we begin to divide the world into light and dark. The next step is that we begin to make stories out of our labels. Then we start believing our stories. Suddenly we have whole narratives of what we need to live—property, status, power, money, security, romance—and equally potent narratives of what we must avoid—giving in, compromising, letting go, giving our stuff and ourselves away, being shunned.

One of the best metaphors, to my mind, for seeing how this all plays out is the metaphor of mask. We wear masks, as it were, to conceal our vulnerable selves. Deep down we must have a suspicion that somehow we have it all backwards, for the simple reason that all those things that keep promising life turn out to be drearily disappointing more often than we’d like to admit. And every now and again we do in fact surprise ourselves by running some risk, taking some stand, acting out of some courage, showing some unnecessary love, giving away something precious to us, and we discover how thrilling and fulfilling it is to quit protecting and pretending and to live exuberantly and joyfully.

Leo Leonni, a writer of children’s books, composed a story called The Green Tail Mouse, in which he tells of a group of field mice. One day a city mouse happens by and tells them all about Mardi Gras. Enchanted with the idea, they decide to have a Mardi Gras celebration. They make themselves masks, with faces of monstrous bears and lions and tigers and cougars. They like their masks so much that they don’t stop playing. They become the ferocious animals of their masks. They frighten each other. This once peaceful community begins to be driven by fear. One day a mouse happens by. Someone cries out that a giant mouse has appeared, and they shudder for fear. “You silly mice,” says the newcomer, “I’m no giant. I’m a mouse like yourselves. And you could see that I am just like you and you are just like me if you would take off those idiotic masks you’re wearing.” So one by one they begin to take off their masks. They build a great fire and burn them, and have more fun becoming just plain real mice than they ever had wearing their masks.

Leonni’s is a story that gets at the truth through a different route than the story of Lazarus, but it is the same truth. Someone appears who sees clearly and who speaks the Truth powerfully. Jesus appears at the tomb of Lazarus as the Resurrection and Life, strong enough to pull Lazarus out of death into life. “Unbind him,” Jesus orders, “and let him go.” Lazarus is set free. But the story is not just about a dead man coming to life again. It is about a Truth-telling, life-giving power that names the death-games which, like Leonni’s mice, humans play all the time. Someone appears who is who he is, not wearing a mask, not pretending. “Take off those silly masks,” he says. “Quit playing those death-games.”

I wouldn’t be surprised if you were beginning to see what all this has to do with Halloween and death, All Saints and life. Before Hallmark got ahold of Halloween and made a season out of it, and before the Christian right began to lose its mind and get all crazy about the demonic on Halloween, we had a festival, an occasion which poked fun at death. It also did something else, which one day we might recover. Halloween used to give us permission to become monsters and tricksters and ghouls and goblins for a night. Children didn’t know it, but grown-ups knew, if they were conscious at all, that there were parts of us that acted like monsters, and that we were capable of being every bit as fiendish as any fiend whose mask we wore. Halloween functioned as a rite of reversal. We embraced our mischief and our meanness, but only for a night. When All Saints dawned the next day, the King of Saints called us in a loud voice to lay aside our masks, to lay off the death-games, and to reclaim our baptism into freedom and truth. He called us to come out of our tombs and into the light of day. And he made us dance.

That is how saints are made. Christ does not call us to be two-dimensional plastic goodie-goodies, but to be real people who have dark sides and monsters in them but who have learned to take off their masks, embrace their humanity, and live in freedom and peace. One year in one of my parishes we gathered together for the youth group’s annual Halloween haunted house, all the kids and some of the adults in costumes and masks. But at a certain point in the evening we all formed a circle around the altar, read some lessons (including the raising of Lazarus) and then pulled off our masks to celebrate and receive Holy Communion, reminding ourselves that we are not only dust, we are also glory; not only hideous, but also beautiful; not only ghouls and goblins but also saints of God in the making.

Baptism reminds us that the only death we have to worry about is not the death that will end our earthly life, but the death-games we play with utter seriousness to puff up ourselves and frighten others. Baptism flows like a river through the universe, sweeping away all our masks, baggage, and armor, leaving us washed and ready to put on the garments of justice and holiness. And through the raging flood calls the voice of one who is what he is, with no pretense and no mask, saying, “You can be as real as I am, and as holy. Come forth. Live in the light. Be free.”


© Frank G. Dunn, 2009