This week my Lenten reading through Mark (chapters 9 & 10) took me directly to sermon-writing. I'll continue with the readings through Mark later this week (you can also find reflections 1 here and 2 here and 3 here)
No Safe Salvation
Mark 10:32-34
We have, in our Platte Valley Association of the Rocky Mountain Conference UCC,
a seminary student studying to become an ordained pastor.
This past month her class was given an assignment,
which she—according to her faith and values—
could not complete with integrity.
So she wrote a brief explanation to her professor enumerating her theological reasons why
this assignment was impossible for her.
Then she held her breath and waited for the inevitable consequence: a zero.
Which could, in turn, threaten (or at minimum delay) her path toward ordination.
When I heard about this student’s brave-but-foolish-seeming stand,
I wondered: would I have had the fortitude of faith to deny such an expectation?
From an authority person who had some power over my life?
When “security” might dictate that I just force my way through the assignment,
invent what I knew the professor wanted to hear?
Would you?
What if what were at stake were your deeply-held theological values versus your job?
Maybe your company expects you to spend more time away from your family
because work is calling you to bigger and better things;
or every couple of days you have to listen to your
supervisor make sexist or racist or religious remarks….
Which would you deem more important:
holding firmly to your moral compass,
or the security of a job and health insurance and house payments—
despite having to compromise your beliefs a little,
give up bits and pieces of your spirit, your truth?
These are questions that each of us lives with every moment of every day:
will I do the assignment as dictated?
(or drive daily to a distant job or school because it’s the only one,
or buy shoes made in a sweat shop because they’re what I can afford,
or pay my taxes that support war because the law tells me to,
or participate in a flawed political system because it’s the best we’ve got,
or whatever strains our individual integrity);
or will I face the consequences of following my faith?
~~~
I’m led to these questions today by our overarching Lenten story.
By the whole Gospel, really.
By the entirety of where the Bible’s prophets finally lead us.
Reading through Mark’s version of things alongside many of you has brought back to me the fullness of Jesus’ ministry.
The momentum that is building up as we re-read
his teachings to the crowds,
his confrontations with religious and civic leaders,
his utterly unsentimental compassion for those considered
unclean or less-than or not even considered in his society.
Reading passage to passage has taken me more consciously into the story than any single text can.
So where is the momentum leading us? leading Jesus and his disciples?
Within the larger context, the 4 Gospel-writers with their
different timing
and different emphases creating
different reactions in their
different audiences
all lead to the same place: Jesus’ execution on the cross.
But NOT, as has become popular belief, for the cross’s sake!
Not for salvation through a blood sacrifice to a tribal God—although that really was a first interpretation.
Rather, it seems to me that through
his whole life (not his death)
Jesus is showing us salvation.
Now that’s a loaded word in our context: salvation. So I’m going to give a brief argument for it.
In his recent book, Speaking Christian, Marcus Borg reminds us that the biblical understanding of the word salvation rarely had anything to do with an afterlife: being “saved” by God had little heaven-or-hell connotation.
No. When the Old and New Testaments—Exodus, Psalms, the Prophets, the Gospels—use the words salvation, saved, or savior, they “speak about the transformation of life this side of death—about personal transformation and political transformation. [These words, says Borg,] are about the transformation of our lives as individuals and as people living together in societies.”
[i]
Furthermore, the examples for salvation found in the Gospels
are so common to us that we sometimes forget that connection.
Archetypes like
from blindness to seeing,
from death to life,
from infirmity to well-being,
from fear to trust
all relate to the biblical understanding of salvation.
[ii]
The
Westminster Dictionary of Theological Terms defines salvation as “God’s activities in bringing humans into right relationship with God and with one another through Jesus Christ.”
[iii]And the Hebrew words for save and salvation “originally meant to be open or free from hindrance,”
while the Greek “meant [to] rescue or free from harm.”
[iv]
So how does this relate to the cross:
A very real form of harm?
All the stories we find in Matthew, Mark, Luke and John maneuver us toward Jesus’ climax confrontation with the authorities. Each brief passage—
about healing lepers or women or children;
about feeding 5000
or preaching kin-dom parables
or querying, “who do you think I am?”;
about eating with tax collectors and prostitutes;
all of it!—
all of these vignettes reveal the bigger picture of conflict between
Jesus’ faith values
and
the powers that be.
The powers of the Roman occupiers.
The powers of official religious teaching.
The powers of cultural expectations, status-quo, don’t-rock-the-boat-when-the-waters-are-somewhat-
calm-no-matter-that-we’re-in-waters-we-didn’t-help-create-nor-truly-believe-in-anyway.
The powers of our own inner voices begging us to keep safe.
All of the stories of Jesus turning the tables of power—
first to last and greatest to servant of all; religiously, politically, culturally, and personally—
all of these little stories compel us to remember the bigger story:
that, for promoting salvation—transformation in each action of his life—
Jesus is going to be rejected, gotten rid of, executed.
Because he’s countering the “way it is,” he’s heading for the cross and nowhere else.
He chose not to complete the professor’s assignment. And there are consequences to that.
Salvation is not safe.
~~~
Yet there are consequences to giving in to expectations as well.
We face compromising our integrity and truth and faith.
We face living in a world that is untransformed.
Of saying, “that’s just the way it is.”
Last week Jamie reminded me of the Bruce Hornsby song of that same title—“The Way It Is”—
and I haven’t been able to get it out of my head. For those of you not up on 80’s pop music, here are some of the lyrics:
Standing in line marking time--
Waiting for the welfare dime
'Cause they can't buy a job
The man in the silk suit hurries by
As he catches the poor old ladies' eyes
Just for fun he says "Get a job"
That's just the way it is
Some things will never change
That's just the way it is
But don't you believe them
They say hey little boy you can't go
Where the others go
'Cause you don't look like they do
Said hey old man how can you stand
To think that way
& Did you really think about it
Before you made the rules
He said, Son
That's just the way it is
Some things will never change….[v]
As I said just a moment ago, the inner voices (the “powers”) speak to us to “stay safe,”
don’t make things harder because they’re hard enough now
and also safe enough now because at least we know the rules of the game
in our particular time and place.
“That’s just the way it is,” so stay safe;
hand in the assignment;
stay in the incongruent job;
listen to the powerful because we need to live in this world,
so take care to abide by the rules…
Yet salvation as Jesus lived it demands just the opposite. It is not safe.
It doesn’t go by the rules of Caesar or Temple or Father or Mother.
Not when justice and liberation are at stake.
And these are exactly what Jesus is revealing in his every action and teaching
that goes against the powers: justice and liberation.
Not just from the tangible wrongs like
financial inequality or gender discrimination or other socially generated disparities;
but also from the spirit-binding ones of having to make do with “the way things are”
in order to get by as safely as possible.
~~~
Last week the weather was so amazing that Jamie and I decided to walk downtown for dinner.
As we strolled in the sunshine of Old Town Square, we passed a man resting up against a wall.
He had a baggy sweatshirt on over his lean frame, scraggly longish hair and mussed up beard.
He began coughing and lowered his eyes from us as we passed, and I was reminded of the cough and bronchitis I’d had a few weeks ago, when I’d needed my doctor to prescribe antibiotics.
I continued walking by him with heavy thoughts,
knowing I was heading to a decent meal out on the town.
What was his last meal? and would he get any antibiotics if he needed them?
I didn’t, at that time, think about Bruce Hornsby’s refrain—“that’s just the way it is”—
because, honestly, it’s already been so nurtured into me.
That IS just the way it is.
But I don’t believe that.
I believe that Jesus would have acted differently,
and so am I called to do differently also.
My soul was so not saved in that moment,
because I couldn’t come up with any response.
Not so I could feel good about myself
nor because I felt guilty,
but because as humans we are seeking salvation:
that right relationship with God and all.
~~~
And we do have opportunities for salvific transformation.
For example: on March 29, a representative from Governor Hickenlooper’s office will be at Plymouth to present a Homeward 2020 model of support to end homelessness in Fort Collins
(1 Congregation, 1 Family).
And I’m going to be there,
not just as a part of Plymouth or the Social Concerns Committee,
but because I want things to change.
I want to not walk past a person in Old Town Square and think, “I can’t do anything about that.”
~~~
Everything we do can, in some way, be a compromise of our faith or integrity.
Sometimes we must hand in the assignment as given—we’re not Jesus Christ.
But we are pulled toward salvation in every moment, in every transforming choice.
Which is not the safe path.
This morning’s reading from Mark says, “They were on the road going up to Jerusalem…and they were amazed, and those who followed were afraid.”
They were right to be afraid, because like Jesus, they see it all coming:
“the Son of Man will be handed over to the religious authorities;
then they will hand him over to the civic authorities;
they will mock him, and spit on him, and flog him, and kill him.”
This is not security. There is fear. But there is salvation.
And the hope of following this foolish but faithful Jesus is in his final words every time he foretells his death: “and in 3 days he will rise again.”
The death of going against the tide always has a resurrection.
There is no getting a zero on that assignment.
[i] Marcus J. Borg,
Speaking Christian: Why Christian Words have Lost Their Meaning and Power—And How They Can Be Restored (New York: HarperOne, 2011) p. 38.
[iii] Donald K. McKim,
Westminster Dictionary of Theological Terms (Louisville: Westminster John Knox, 1996) p. 247.
[iv] James Rowe Adams,
From Literal to Literary: The Essential Reference Book for Biblical Metaphors, second edition (Cleveland: The Pilgrim Press, 2005) p. 257.
[v] “The Way It Is” performed by Bruce Hornsby and the Range from the album
The Way It Is (released in 1986); written by Bruce & John Hornsby.
