Heard
Romans 10:5-15
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I was seventeen years old when I was first introduced to the four spiritual laws. Now, if you’ve spent time in more evangelically oriented circles you may know what I’m talking about. I was raised in a Presbyterian Church and had never heard of them until the summer I spent between my Junior and Senior years in high school working as a wrangler in the livery at the YMCA of the Rockies in Estes Park, Colorado. One of my fellow wranglers was my age and actively involved in something called Student Venture, the high school aged equivalent to a collegiate ministry known as Campus Crusade for Christ. Student Venture came to the Y camp that summer for a week-long conference, during which students were bussed to nearby Estes Park so that they could evangelize the tourists there by sharing with them the four spiritual laws. These laws detail the goodness of God, the sinfulness of humanity, and the need to accept Jesus Christ as the way of salvation. I’ll confess that it was all a little confusing seeing as how I’d been baptized and confirmed in my Presbyterian church and yet was told that I wasn’t saved because I hadn’t said the right words in order to seal the deal for myself. What I’ve since learned is that the booklet about the four spiritual laws that those students were using to talk about their faith was developed by a man name Bill Bright who was looking for a succinct way of communicating what he thought was the essential message of the Christian faith. By all accounts he was very successful and went on to build one of the largest Evangelical campus ministry organizations in the world. Certainly, if we take Paul’s words to the church in Rome at their face value, Bill Bright succeeded in leading many a person to call upon the name of the Lord in order to be saved. But what does that mean, exactly?
I know what it meant that summer I was seventeen. It meant something about afterlife, going to heaven when I died, my eternal destination. I was given to understand that to be saved in this way was the single most important thing that I could hope for as a person of the Christian faith. But the more I read these words from Paul, the less satisfied I am with that definition of salvation. For one thing Paul is drawing on his own Jewish upbringing as he paraphrases Moses words in the book of Deuteronomy to the people of Israel as they are preparing to end their time in the wilderness and cross over into the land that God had promised them. In that setting salvation wasn’t anything so remote and abstract as something that a person needed to die to receive. Salvation had a story. It was the account of a people who had been slaves, a people who had been oppressed, a people held captive by the Pharaoh and what scholar Walter Brueggemann has termed Egypt’s brick-making economy. When they attempted to flee and the Egyptian army was hot on their heels; when they came to the water’s edge and it looked like there was no escape from the certain death that was bearing down on them, God made a way where there was no way. God parted the waters of the sea and they were finally and fully liberated from their enslavement. They were set free from the dictates of a regime that had once ordered the death of all their male babies. Salvation wasn’t something they had to wait for to know, they had experienced it at the hand of God. What God had set right in setting them free wasn’t up in heaven, or across the sea. It was as near as the mouths they used to recount the story, as real as the beating of their hearts testifying to the fact that their lives had been saved.
But humans are complicated creatures. We like rules. We like formulas. We like to know that we’re right and to be able to prove it. In a recent podcast conversation that I was listening to, professor, social worker and writer Brené Brown was talking with bestselling author Austin Channing Brown about why it is that white people like to have rules when it comes to doing the work of racial justice. As a black woman, Austin Channing Brown thought that people like to have rules so that they know that they’re doing it right. Brené Brown countered that what she saw was that white people liked to have rules in order to protect themselves from criticism in doing the work. “They’re the fence around the ego,” she said, that keeps us safe from the uncomfortable vulnerability created by these hard conversations. Just this last week there was a story out of Aurora, Colorado about a black mom and her four kids who were ordered with guns drawn to exit their SUV. The mom and her kids were then handcuffed and made to lay down on the hot pavement in the August heat. A license plate check had indicated that the vehicle had been stolen. Well, a motorcycle with that plate, from another state had been stolen. But what was the defense for the actions taken against the mom and those kids? They were simply following procedure for a stolen vehicle stop. Yes, it was a terrible mistake, but they were just following the rules.
Likewise, we could easily turn these words from Paul into a rule, “if you confess with your lips that Jesus is Lord and believe in your heart that God raised him from the dead, you will be saved.” Great. Now all we need is the checklist. Said the thing, “Jesus is Lord,” check. Believe that God raised him from the dead, check. All set. Got my ticket punched and I’m ready for heaven. Can’t touch me. Can’t make me change. Can’t tell me I’m not saved.
Except we have this story that we heard in our first reading, out of Matthew’s gospel. The disciples are in their boat on the water, being battered by the waves. They see what they mistake at first for a ghost, but it’s Jesus coming to them on the water telling them not to be afraid. Peter calls Jesus, ‘Lord,’ check. At this point Jesus hasn’t been crucified yet, so Peter can’t believe in his heart that God raised him from the dead, so he does the next best thing- he believes an equally impossible thing. He believes Jesus can call him onto the water as well. It goes okay at first until the reality of the wind and the waves inks in- pun intended- and Peter also starts to sink. And what does he do? He calls on the name of the Lord, quite literally, “Lord, save me!” And Jesus does just that. He reaches out his hand, catches Peter before he can go under, and saves him from drowning in the sea. Here’s the thing about that story. There are no rules. Peter isn’t checking his four spiritual laws. He isn’t worried about doing it the right way, or protecting himself from criticism. He is simply responding to the situation that he is in. He probably couldn’t answer the first theological question about who Jesus is other than to say that he is clearly anointed by God for something special. Peter calls him ‘Lord’ because Jesus is the one that he looks to first. Jesus is the one that he looks to first to understand God, to understand himself, to understand anything about what his life means and how to live it in a way that matters, that makes a difference, that glorifies God. And Peter trusts that with him things that sound impossible- walking on water, rising from dead- become possible. Peter trusts that the things that might otherwise define his life, the things that might otherwise hold him captive and keep him from being exactly who God made him to be, things like fear and death, are somehow overcome with Jesus. Friends, you don’t have to be sinking in the water, you don’t have to be on death’s doorstep for something like that to save you and change your life.
Jesus isn’t magic, or some fast pass to the afterlife. Jesus is the one who we can call upon to save us from a life that is defined by all the wrong things, a life that is limited and held captive, and enslaved by the rules of brickmaking that inevitably steal our lives from us, and the lives of those around us day by day. Jesus saves us by loving us with a love that is stronger than death and as fierce as the grave; a love that will not let us believe we are anything less than God’s beloved. This is the good news that we have to share in both word and deed. This is the good news that is ours to proclaim not with pamphlets and rules, but with the same kind of love that saves us each and every day. It is the word that is on our lips as we tell our own stories of salvation, as present as the beating of hearts made new by the one who is saving us even now. How beautiful is that?
Amen!