Journey to Jerusalem: Salvaged

A Sermon Preached by the Rev. Dr. E. Scott Winnette

March 22, 2009

Luke 15: 11-32, Ephesians 2:1-10

God is good, good. But God’s rap sheet keeps attracting false claims of callousness. Deep in our collective consciousness we fear God as a punishing, unhappy and unsatisfied Creator.   We cannot seem to stop murmuring, “What did I/we do wrong?” and “Why did God send them that tornado?” But we know the truth – God is good. God is good. God is good and in Christ so are we.   So are we. We are good, but before we launch ourselves up high and mightily let’s remember poor Pelagius.   Poor heretic Pelagius was an optimist who was tackled by Saint Augustine. Pelagius taught that humanity was intrinsically good, that through our solemn piety and good works we could perfect ourselves. We could push away the big burden of sin and be fine, holy people.  Augustine smacked him down with a less-than-optimistic anthropology. He argued moral depravity. He argued that human sinfulness was greater than our pious and moral will. Regardless of our good intentions we cannot avoid sin. When I was young I hoped as a Pelagius, but no longer. I sit solidly now with Augustine and his student John Calvin; we cannot do right, not all the time, not alone.   I have read too many Washington Posts and heard too many NPR broadcasts smelling too often putrid self-centeredness and dehumanizing disunity in people. Poor Pelagius did not grasp the dynamic nature of human freedom. 

We are created in the very image of God’s generative power and enabled to use it to build and nurture community. But we are also free to use it to disconnect and destroy community. And we cannot stop ourselves from flexing our holy muscles to hurt others.   You were dead through the trespasses and sins in which you once lived…we were by nature children of wrath. Children of wrath.

Now, don’t get depressed. We have a more mature hope. The Apostle Paul in his letter to the Ephesians preaches us out of despair. God is Good and by God’s Grace we are Good.   A saint in our midst, our own Dorothy Kirkendall summed up Paul’s theology by sharing with the Wednesday Bible Study group, “As warped and twisted as we are God will use us somehow.”  It’s true; regardless of our natural negative tendencies God teases goodness up in us. God is good, and we are dependent on God’s help for our goodness.  

I won an award in high school. During our last senior assembly they gave out awards and I received the “Car Pushers Award.” My best friend and his girl joined me to study late one night in an of office building he and I used to clean. Taking a break I went outside and saw her car sitting innocently in the parking lot.   With a touch of depravity I decided to move the car to the other side of the building. I could picture her fear-filled face as she thought her car stolen. It was a stick-shift, medium sized car. It should have been a simple task with my teenaged muscles. So I put the car in neutral, turned the steering wheel and pushed. 

Whoa, it was hard and heavy. But I pushed, and I pushed, and pushed against the weight. The car inched forward slowly. Inch by inch I persisted with all my strength pushing and panting -- until I heard the chuckling. They sat on the sidewalk and giggled as they watched me shove. I had been pushing so long; they had missed me and come out to find me. We laughed and they came over to help me push. But before we started, she remarked that it would be easier if we took off the emergency break.  With their help we had that car hidden in no time. I was the Best Car Pusher of the Riverdale High School in 1985. 

About the same time I lived out my faith as a Pelagius. I tried to push away all the sins of the world from myself and others by force of will. I was a student of Christian morality. I was one of those pious do-gooder, holier-than-thou folks. I fooled myself and I fooled a few others into thinking I had made my salvation. My Freshman year in college a young math professor came to me to discuss God’s love. I saddens me that often the persons who project a good relationship with God, are far from it. They easily disrupt other’s relationships with God. He wanted to know if God could love him as a gay man, and I fervently communicated a “yes.” “Oh, Yes God loved him.” But he needed to push away the sin of that inclination to be right before God. I broke a part of his heart by my piety pushing him bit farther from God with my false moral certainty. God loves you, “but.” It’s not true; there is no “but.”   God loves. 

No matter how hard I pushed I stumbled.   No matter how hard I pushed my friends suffered. No matter how hard I pushed to be perfect, I couldn’t get the burden to move far enough.  But God, who is rich in mercy, out of the great love with which he loved us when we were dead through our trespasses, made us alive together with Christ – by grace you have been saved. BY GRACE YOU HAVE BEEN SAVED.   No matter how hard we try, we cannot push away our sins; we are dependent on the gift of God’s amazing grace. It is good news. God is Good and by God’s Grace we are Good!

The Apostle Paul poetically asserts that humanity followed the ruler of the power of the air, a spirit that works in the disobedient.   The devil, the power of non-being, worldly systemic evil, this power of the air represents the sinful inclinations and principalities of our lives. Ponder with me sin at its base spiritual level.   We discussed a month ago in Confirmation that the Holy Spirit is that part of the Trinity that serves as the connective tissue of life. The Spirit webs good relationships between things. God’s Spirit connects us into a world community of wholeness. With that said evil spirits disconnect. They tear us from each other. They tear us from God.   We sin when we give into the motives that separate us from God and each other and God’s good creation. We sin when we give into pride and then start amassing fortunes to signify our worth or provide gluttonous living. 

Our country has sighed imagining why some Wall Street brothers and sisters expect millions for their daily labor while their neighbors are losing jobs left and right.   We sin when we craft moral expectations for others that declare their insignificance or even distaste to God. We sin when we follow the ruler of the power of the air into becoming islands unto ourselves.   We fragment and dismember God’s world community.  We wound each other with lashings and silences and we cannot stop it alone. We cannot make it right alone.

The second son gathered his legacy early from his dad. He wounded his dad asking that the father make-believe his own death. And that he then give the son an early inheritance. He wounded his brother leaving him all the family chores. He wounded the family by leaving snubbing his communal responsibility. And he wounded himself squandering the good, sweat-earned benevolence of his dad on selfish living.    But the grace of God whispered a chance. God’s Grace whispered a possibility that he could go home. And he returned home to the surprise of his father’s embrace and bounty.  God is Good and by the Grace of God we are Good.   The second son was surprised by grace, salvaged by God’s grace.

For by grace you have been saved through faith, and this is not your own doing; it is the gift of God… We Christians have disabled the word salvation through over-use and bad theology.   So I give you a new word, salvaged. Salvaged, yes like junk yard.

They share the same root, the Latin Salvare, which means to save, to deliver from sin, to protect. It also means to heal. It has medical connotations involving soothing and mending. Our salvation comes as the Balm of Gilead. Imagine God wandering through the junk yards of our lives and picking up our pieces. Gently carrying them to a shed and lovingly reassembling us – healing us. We are salvaged, made good again and again by the grace of our God. The broken relationships are mended.   We Humpty Dumpt-ies can be mended into wholeness. We are invited home again and again. God is Good and by the Grace of God we are Good.[1] 

We cannot make ourselves good. We cannot push that weight from us. We need God’s help. We are dependent upon God’s grace. And as Christ’s Body we are called to be Fred Samford’s too, we are called to assist God in salvaging each other. We are empowered to participate in God’s communal and relational reality living lives of justice and compassion, living as healers of disunity, and menders of separation. We don’t do good works for merit. We do not live healthy lives to make our own salvation. We strive with God to salvage the world and our brothers and sisters from dislocation and dismemberment. 

I close with a story of Pastor Fred Craddock in which he describes his father’s separation from the church. My mother took us to church and Sunday School; my father didn’t go. 

He complained about Sunday dinner being late when she came home. Sometimes the preacher would call, and my father would say, “I know what the church want. Church doesn’t care about me. Church wants another name, another pledge, another name, another pledge. Right? Isn’t that the name of it? Another name, another pledge.” That’s what he always said….

One day he didn’t say it. He was in the veteran’s hospital, and he was down to seventy-three pounds. They’d taken out his throat, and said, “It’s too late.” They put in a metal tube, and X rays burned him to pieces. I flew to see him. He couldn’t speak, couldn’t eat. I looked around the room, potted plants and cut flowers on all the windowsills, a stack of cards twenty inches deep beside his bed. And even that tray where they put food, if you can eat, on that was a flower. And all the flowers beside the bed, every card, every blossom, were from persons or groups from the church.

He saw me read a card. He could not speak, so he took a Kleenex box and wrote on the side of it a line from Shakespeare. If he had not written this line, I would not tell you this story. He wrote: “In this harsh world, draw your breath in pain to tell my story.” I said, “What is your story, Daddy?” And he wrote, “I was wrong.”[2] 

Add a mantra to your Lenten practices, God is Good and by the Grace of God we are Good. Believe it with me.   God is Good and by the Grace of God we are Good. Say it with me. God is Good and by the Grace of God we are Good. Amen.