Salvation
Luke 19:1-10
Click here to view the full sermon video, titled "Salvation"
In the spring of my junior year in high school, over the course of several weekends, I dutifully showed up at the Green Mountain recreation center for a Red Cross Advanced Lifesaving class. All my plans for the summer ahead depended on gaining this certification so that I could apply for lifeguarding jobs at the local outdoor swimming pools. I could already see myself sitting on the lifeguard stand working on my tan. In retrospect, I might have been better served dreaming a little less about being a lifeguard and working a little harder to absorb the lessons of the class. Because when it came time to take the water test that would gauge whether or not we would be certified, I failed. As it was explained to me by the very nice instructor, “you let go of the victim. You can’t do that.”
Now when the reformer Martin Luther nailed his famous 95 theses to the door of the castle church in Wittenberg, Germany all the way back in 1517, I’m pretty certain he was not concerned with who would be occupying the lifeguard stands of the municipal pools of the Foothills recreation district in the western suburbs of Denver, Colorado. None of the things in that sentence were even a blip on the radar of existence. But, what he was trying to engage was a conversation of a kind about advanced lifesaving, or rather the nature of salvation itself. You see, salvation had become big business for the church. But then, who are we kidding? Selling salvation continues to be a cash cow for churches of all kinds. Yes, ostensibly the Reformation of the Christianity that we celebrate this Sunday came in response to practices of the medieval Roman Catholic church. But make no mistake, Luther’s beef was never with the Roman church per se. He himself was an Augustinian priest in that church. He simply wanted to call attention to certain attitudes and practices so that the church could be reformed. The fact that this led to historic amounts of bloodshed between so-called protestants and Catholics until as recently as the twentieth century is a scandal to Christ that should not be overlooked. While the reformation led to a great many things that we now take for granted like the proliferation of literacy through bibles and liturgy made available in our native tongue, at the heart of Luther’s initial protest was the sale of salvation in a doctrine of works and the practice of indulgence. Just to recap. Church doctrine held that one’s salvation was essentially a question of afterlife destinations, and that one’s life and afterlife were the product of actions that were either pleasing or displeasing to God. So, if you lived a good life you were rewarded by God with heaven, and if you lived a bad life you were punished. Over time, questions arose about what might be done to move the meter. Like a delinquent student who comes to the teacher late in the semester looking for extra credit to make up for their lackluster effort at the work assigned to that point, people began looking for ways to nudge the favor of God more in their direction. The institution of the church was only happy to oblige and began selling indulgences. According to this system the confession and absolution of one’s sins was not sufficient to erase the offense against God, a penalty or punishment was needed to satisfy God’s honor. Sometimes this took the form of corporal punishment, but soon was translated into a debt that one could pay monetarily to the church. A further step came from family who, worried about the fate of a loved one’s eternal soul, would pay the church to say masses that would release them from purgatory and allow them to enter paradise. It was a lucrative system that funded the construction of many a magnificent cathedral. Nowadays, salvation is still sold on the threat of hell that banks on that fear to meet its budget. But Luther identified the critical theological flaw in this system, which is that if Jesus’ death is sufficient to free us from the debt of our sin, then what more do we have to offer than our trust that this is so. Our salvation, said Luther, was not dependent on whatever works we might perform to God’s satisfaction. Our salvation was only something to be accepted and lived into as we had faith in what God had done on our behalf in Jesus. Thank you for coming to my TED talk on the reformation.
One of the great short story collections of the late 20th century came from Raymond Carver entitled What We Talk About When We Talk About Love. What often gets lost in the rhetoric of reformation and all this talk about salvation by faith and not works, is what exactly we are talking about when we talk about salvation. Because, listening to this story about Zacchaeus’ encounter with Jesus makes me wonder if the way Christians talk about and profit from salvation might not be different than the way Jesus talks about salvation. When we talk about salvation, or at least when I hear other people talking about salvation, I can’t help wondering if we’ve moved past the middle ages at all. For the most part what I hear when people raise questions about salvation is that they are predominantly concerned with the question of who gets into heaven when they die and who goes to hell. It kind of reduces salvation the final grade each of us gets on our lives. If we pass, then hallelujah we are saved and get to enter heaven. And if we fail, then sad trombone, wah-wah, we’re sent to a fiery abyss of torment for all of eternity.
Then we hear a story like the one from Luke this morning. In it, a truly unlikely hero named Zacchaeus is saved. Only Jesus doesn’t say one word about what’s going to happen to good ol’ Zach when he dies. It’s a tricky story too, because they way we talk about it and the way it’s translated might lead us to think that this is a conversion story about a mean little man who meets Jesus, turns his life around, and begins giving WAY more than your standard tithe. Only that isn’t exactly what happens here. You know the set up. Jesus is on his way to Jerusalem. He’s been on his way to Jerusalem. And the route Jesus is taking to get there takes him through Jericho. That is where Zacchaeus lives. We are told three things about this character. One, he is chief tax collector. So, he isn’t just your ordinary, everyday rat fink of a tax collector. He is the king rat. Not surprisingly, then, we learn the second thing about him, which is that he is rich. Aren’t they all? And third, even though he’s trying to see Jesus, he can’t, because there is a crowd of people surrounding the rabbi and Zacchaeus isn’t tall enough to see over all of them, he’s short. Maybe you sang the song about this wee little man at church camp. Then Zacchaeus does something a little surprising. He runs ahead and climbs a tree to get a better look. As a general rule, men of standing and wealth do not debase themselves by climbing a tree just to see some itinerant rabbi. This is the first clue that our assumptions about Zacchaeus- assumptions by the way that everyone around him likely made too- those assumptions may be way off base. What happens next sounds so random. As he’s walking on his way, Jesus happens to look up and see Zacchaeus in the tree. Remember there’s a crowd around him, lots of people pushing in to see him, say something to him, maybe get a little of that healing mojo from Jesus. Which is to say that Jesus has plenty of people in front of him to attend to, but nevertheless he’s looking up at who is in the tree. And because he is Jesus, he sees something. Who knows what. Maybe he just recognizes the unusual effort Zacchaeus has made to see him. Maybe he sees that he is smaller than the average person. What he likely doesn’t know, and certainly doesn’t seem to care about is his position or his wealth. I’m pretty sure that’s still true today. I’m pretty sure Jesus still doesn’t really care how important we or other people think we are because of what we do or the positions we hold, or how much wealth we may or may not have. What Jesus can see is a man removed from the crowd, maybe in more ways than one, so he invites himself over for dinner. It's a bold move, to be sure. The crowd isn’t really having it. “Don’t you know who this is, Jesus?” They grumble. “Sure he’s rich. Ask him how he got all that money? You can’t have dinner with him. Don’t you know that he’s been cancelled?” Zacchaeus is understandably defensive. The translation doesn’t help, because it sounds like he’s trying to make a deal, that he’ll give half his money to poor in the future. But in the Greek it sounds more like him protesting that this is already his practice. He is already giving half his money to the poor, he’s already paying back four times as much if he defrauds anyone. Jesus’ response is important. Read the wrong way, we might conclude that Jesus says what he does to reward Zacchaeus for his pledge to give and make restitution on fraud. In which case, Luther was wrong. In which case it would sound like this man’s works are rewarded with salvation. Instead, what Jesus says is that salvation has come to Zacchaeus’ house, not because of anything he’s done to earn or deserve it, but rather because he too is a son of Abraham. Effectively what he’s saying is that Zacchaeus isn’t any different than any one of us. His position, his wealth, heck even the shortness of his stature has led him to be cut off from a community that only sees him as a sinner. But that isn’t how God sees him. That certainly isn’t what Jesus saw up in that tree. What Jesus saw is a child of God in need of restoration to his community. Which makes me wonder if salvation has less to do with pearly gates and more to do with seeing ourselves not as the world would see us, not in terms of all that we might struggle against, all that would define us according the categories the world uses to label us and put us in a box, but rather seeing ourselves as God does, and Jesus does and restoring us to one another. Seeing ourselves and one another as beloved and worth saving because God says so, without exception, and would never let us go no matter how hard we might struggle because we are fearfully and wonderfully made in God’s image. If that’s the case, then salvation by faith simply means believing that what God says about us in Jesus is true. That not only are we worth saving, but that trusting that it’s true is the only thing needed to make it so. And that when we do, then the prayer Jesus taught us to say is answered. The kingdom comes on earth as it is in heaven, and we don’t even have to wait until we’re dead to enter into it.