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Jesus Saves

The Rev. Canon George M. Maxwell, Jr.
The Cathedral of St. Philip
Atlanta, Georgia
01 June 2008
Third Sunday after Pentecost: Proper 4  – Year A

Jesus saves.

Several years ago, a friend of mine came to visit.  He was from Scotland and, although he had lived in the Western United States for years, he had never been to the South.  After spending several days driving through Tennessee and North Georgia, he finally arrived in Atlanta.

He was struck – astounded really – by how many times he had been told that Jesus saves.  He had seen it on white crosses by the side of the road.  He had seen it on the marquees outside of small churches.  He had seen it on t-shirts.  And, he had seen it on tattoos.

“You know," he said wearily one night, “God must be really tired here!”

While he may not have fully appreciated Southern Protestant evangelism, my friend did get the theology right.  God is the one doing the heavy lifting.  No matter how many good works we may do, we are all ultimately depending on the grace of God.

The grace of God is another way of describing the forgiving presence of God.  We can’t earn it, but we can’t lose it either.  We can turn our back and walk away from it, but it will follow us.  We can throw it away, but it will come back.  We can forget about it, but it will remind us later that it is still there – often in unimaginable ways.

Although he wasn’t the first person to talk about grace this way, we often associate the idea of our dependence on grace with Martin Luther.  Writing almost five hundred years ago, Luther lived in a world gripped by crisis.  The plagues devastated whole villages without anyone knowing how or why.  Social, political and economic upheaval threatened almost everyone’s security.  When many people looked to the church for hope, they saw an all-too-human institution morally crippled by corruption.

Forced to make sense of all of this, Luther reasoned that we are saved not by the good works we do, but through God’s grace through faith in Jesus Christ.  In other words, the point of faith is that we are justified by something God has already done for us, not by something that we need to do for God.

Yet, over time, we seem to have grown uncomfortable with this sense of dependence.   As we have gained more control over the world around us, we seem to be less willing to trust grace and more willing to trust the power of our faith.

I served as a chaplain in a hospital years ago.  I don’t think I will ever forget the day that I watched one of the other chaplains – a good man with a good heart – tell a young mother not to worry because God never gave us more than we could handle.  She needed to have faith in Christ, he said, and everything would be all right.

Every part of my being screamed that everything would not be all right.  She was caring for her daughter, who lay in a hospital bed having just been diagnosed with what would in all likelihood prove to be a terminal illness.  Neither of their lives would ever be the same again.

We had walked into that room intending to offer a grieving young mother some relief, but we succeeded only in adding to her burden.  She was in pain, and we offered her guilt.  She was feeling overwhelmed, and we told her that there was something else she needed to do.

In retrospect, it feels like we reduced faith to something that looks a lot like the ultimate work.

But, that’s not what I think Luther meant and it’s not what I think the scripture says.  We just read one of the texts that influenced Luther – the twenty-second verse of Paul’s letter to the Romans.  In the translation we read, Paul talks about justifying the one who has “faith in Jesus.” 

With some humility, but plenty of confidence, I suggest to you that this verse is more properly translated as the “faith of Jesus.”  That is, we are justified not by our “faith in Jesus” but by the “faith of Jesus.”

Can you feel what a difference that makes?

The faith of Jesus is not something that we have to earn.  It is something that we are given.  The faith of Jesus is not something that we do for ourselves.  It is something that God does for us.  The faith of Jesus is not available to us because we are good.  We are good because the faith of Jesus is available to us.

We can deny it, to be sure.  It’s not as if our faith is irrelevant.  It’s difficult, after all, to enjoy a gift that we refuse to open.  Yet, when we recognize salvation as a gift, then the faith required of us looks more like simple gratitude than a demanding schedule of anxious striving.

Even when we are not facing a personal crisis of faith, this notion that everything would be all right if we just had enough faith seems universally unhelpful.  In most cases, it does little more than make us anxious.

And, ironically, the more anxious we feel -- the more we worry – the more we turn in on ourselves and the harder it becomes to actually feel the loving presence of God.  We begin to worry not only about whether we believe enough, but also about whether we believe the right things.

When we forget that grace is a gift, we spend more time comparing ourselves to each other.  It’s as if we need someone else to tell us who we are.  Am I part of the right crowd?  Do they approve of me?  Will I get in?

When we forget that grace is a gift, we feel a greater need to be different from others. To be the same seems strangely threatening.  It becomes harder and harder to see ourselves as just another part of God’s creation. And, it becomes more and more important to be right rather than to be in relationship.

When we forget that grace is a gift, we shy away from taking responsibility for ourselves.  We learn to blame someone else for all of our troubles.  We point an accusing finger at a putative villain and then, as the heads turn, we cast ourselves in the role of the victim.

All of this forgetting reminds me of the old joke about the two hikers who came across a grizzly bear on the trail.  As they started to run away, one of the hikers knelt down to tighten the laces on his boots.  The other, panting, leaned over and said, “what are you doing, the bear is chasing us?”   “Yes, he is,” the kneeling hiker replied, “but, I don’t have to outrun the bear.  I only have to outrun you!”

But, if we can remember that grace is a gift, then we can struggle free from the anxious need to control our own salvation.  And, that freedom gives us room to be together in a new way.  In other words, it is in learning to model the faith of Christ that we learn how to function as the Body of Christ. 

When we remember that grace is a gift, we don’t have the same need to compare ourselves to each other.  We look to God to tell us who we are.  We sense that we are already part of the right crowd.  We are already approved of.  We are already in.

When we remember that grace is a gift, we don’t have the same need to be different from each other.  We welcome our similarities as badges of our common humanity.  We see opportunities to care for creation as opportunities to experience God’s love more fully.  We look for safe ways to stay engaged, despite radical differences.

When we remember that grace is a gift, we don’t have the same need to blame others for our troubles.  We prefer the integrity of admitting our mistakes.  We know the difference between true oppression and emotional blackmail.
 
And, when we function as the Body of Christ, our communal faith can sometimes do what our individual faith cannot.  There are, in fact, times when we can enjoy a gift that we aren’t able to open. 

Life does sometimes give us more than we can handle by ourselves.  But, it does not give us more than God can handle.  Trusting grace more than we trust our own faith, and remembering that grace is a gift, allows us to act as the Body of Christ.  It allows us to stand with each other, rather than over against each other, and gives us the power to make the forgiving presence of God available to those who for whatever reason can’t accept it for themselves.

The good news is that the young mother in the hospital didn’t really need to have any faith at all, as long as we were willing to hold it for her.

Jesus saves, you see.

Jesus saves.

Amen.

Notes: 

*     I owe to James Alison the insight that justification by faith leads to a change of heart that is necessarily related to a change of the social order.  For more on this insight, see Alison’s first book, Knowing Jesus (Springfield, Il: Templegate Publishers, 1993), pages 61-88.

*     I owe to Paul Nuechterlein the insight that modern Protestantism has reduced “faith in Jesus” to the equivalent of a doctrine of works righteousness, and the implications of this move in the context of pastoral care.  For more on this insight, see Nuechterlein’s sermon, “Saved by the Faith of Jesus Christ,” which can be found at http://girardianlectionary.net/year_a/proper_4a_2002_ser.htm.

*     Paul uses the Greek pistis christou in several letters.  The expression can be translated as either “faith in Christ” or “faith of Christ” and, to be fair, Paul seems to mean both at different times.  For a more complete analysis, see Luke Timothy Johnson’s explanation in his book, The Writings of the New Testament: An Interpretation (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1999), pages 332-333.

Comments? Contact The Rev. Canon George M. Maxwell, Jr. at: gmaxwell@stphilipscathedral.org

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