Rev. Susan Gilbert Zencka
Frame Memorial Presbyterian Church

Texts: Isaiah 12, Isaiah 65:17-25

When I was 13 years old, my mom, brother, grandmother and I went to Spain to visit my uncle – tough luck, Dad had to stay home and work. My uncle Jim lived on the island of Mallorca – it’s a Spanish island in the Mediterranean Sea. What a special vacation! One night during our stay, we went to a beach party on the other side of the island. We had to go by boat to get there, so a large group rented a fishing boat, and my family rode in Uncle Jim’s 2 seater speedboat, along with a Danish family named, I kid you not, Polack, and the American boyfriend of one of the Danish girls. There we were, my Uncle Jim, my mom, my grandmother, my brother Jon, Nita Polack, Eben Polack, both in their early twenties, Nita and Eben’s brother Jan Polack who was about my age, and Eben’s boyfriend Philip.

The party was fun, and about midnight, it was time to head back home. The nine of us piled into Jim’s little boat, and off we went. The sea was rough that night, and the boat’s engine was having some trouble, so as the boat went vroom, vroom, up and down on the waves, water kept splashing into the boat. I was sitting in the back, on the gunwale on the boat (that’s on the edge of the boat side for those of you who aren’t mariners). The water was almost up to my knees. I was tired, but I thought I’d better not sleep in case the boat sank. Eben noticed the water, turned to her boyfriend and said “Philip, there’s a bit of water in the boat.” Philip climbed over everyone, person by person to the front of the boat, where he reported to my uncle “Jimmy, there’s some water in the boat.” Jim was well aware that we were in trouble – “Yeah, yeah…” he replied, and Philip climbed back to where we were sitting. Eben turned to Philip again, “Philip! I do believe we’re sinking!” she said, and then whoosh! Down went the boat, into the water. All of a sudden, there we all were, swimming in the Mediterranean, after midnight, a mile from shore.

My grandmother had always been afraid of water, and Nita Polack held on to her. They emptied out the gas cans for her to hold onto to float. My poor mom! Her mother-in-law, recently recovered from cancer surgery and quite weak, and quite afraid. Her brother, with serious asthma, and certainly no athlete. Her two children, 10 and 13, probably not quite up to a mile swim. I was worried. I thought I could make it, but my brother was beginning to panic, and at 10 probably didn’t have the strength to swim to shore.

Soon, the fishing boat came near with the rest of the party-goers. We waved and yelled – my brother, in full panic now as the gas floating on the salt water was stinging his skin, screamed “Help us, we’re drowning! We’re burning up! Help us!” The people on the large boat thought that we were a group out for an evening swim, and laughed and waved to us. We looked like we were having fun, but in reality, we were in trouble and needed to be saved.

Salvation is a word that some people see as essential to Christianity, and others see as being anachronistic, conservative, and vaguely distasteful. Salvation is part of our hymnody “Praise Ye the Lord, the Almighty the King of Creation, Oh my soul praise him for he is thy health and salvation…” , “Amazing Grace how sweet the sound that saved a wretch like me….” Salvation is clearly a central theme in the Bible as well.

Some of us may feel like we don’t need to be saved. We think, “I’ve got things under control – I’m doing just fine!” Others of us may look like we’re doing fine, but we know that we’re not. Like my little group coming back from the beach party – we look like we’re having fun, but in reality we’re struggling to stay afloat. Eventually, people on the big boat recognized that we were in trouble, pulled us safely aboard, and took us to shore. [I know you were worrying about whether or not I drowned!] Eventually, we may realize that even though we look like we have it together, we don’t. We need to center our lives in God to live with the fullness and joy God intends for us.

Linguistically, in Hebrew, Salvation means deliverance. Salvation has meant different things at different times. In the Old Testament, when they talked about salvation, they meant right now – being saved from some immediate danger, like illness, or loss in battle, or death. Like, I was saved from drowning, when that big boat drew us to safety and delivered us to dry land. The writer of Isaiah is likely discussing some actual events in the passage from Isaiah 12 that we sang, “surely it is God who saves me, I will trust in him and not be afraid.” It’s important to understand that many of the Biblical passages about salvation, particularly Old Testament passages, are talking about being saved from physical danger, in an immediate sense.

Loren Mead, an Episcopalian priest who founded the Alban Institute which is perhaps the pre-eminent think-tank related to the mainline church in our era, has written several books on the mission of the church. In Transforming Congregations for the Future, he points out that in the ministry of Jesus, salvation seems to be contextual. The Gospel, the Good News of Jesus, comes to us in relation to the bad news we are experiencing. For the blind beggar, the bad news was blindness, and the good news is sight. For the woman at the well who suffered with guilt, his good news is forgiveness. For a wedding running short of refreshments, the good news is a few urns of the best wine. God’s good news, says Mead, comes in as many ways to us as our bad news. Still, as in the Old Testament, the Good News is related to our experience right now.

Douglas John Hall, retired professor of theology makes the point more clearly: “I am entirely convinced,” he writes in Why Christian?, “that ‘salvation’ as presented in the Bible and in the best traditions of Christian faith, does not mean being saved from our mortality, our finitude, our human creatureliness; nor does it mean being saved for an otherworldly state, immortality, heaven.”

It’s only later that both the Gospel and the overall view of salvation get turned away from what Jesus focused on: the Kingdom of God as we experience it here on earth, and got turned into a pie-in-the-sky-what-happens-when-we-die religion that is not consistent with the emphasis of the message or ministry of Jesus. As Hall describes in a recent book that I am reading: The Cross in Our Context: Jesus and the Suffering World, the focus of our understanding of salvation has changed era-to-era along with our sense of our deepest pain. Hall explains: “If earlier ages of Christendom were particularly fixated on the afterlife and heaven, it was at least in some considerable part because this life was for most people extraordinarily brutish and short…it is the great responsibility of the church in every age to try to discern the overarching predicament, the question behind the questions, that is the situational backdrop of all human striving. “ Hall details the changes in the church’s understanding of theology over time, reminding us that it wasn’t until the eleventh century when the anxiety of guilt and condemnation (to use Paul Tillich’s language) was answered by the satisfaction view of atonement developed by Anselm, Archbishop of Canterbury. Most modern Christians aren’t familiar with that term – the satisfaction theory of atonement – although it is the theology which most modern people understand as orthodox Christian theology. It is the theory that states that the death of Jesus on the cross was necessary in order to create the opportunity for a relationship between God and humans. According to this theory, God cannot be in relationship with a sinful creature, and so in order to get into relationship with God there must be a spilling of blood, and in order to save all of sinful humankind, only a perfect God-man could provide an adequate sacrifice, so God sent Jesus to die for the sins of all.

I want to be very clear about the foregoing theory: it is a misreading of Scripture and flies in the face of our human experience as well. That is to say, I absolutely believe it is wrong. There are certainly verses in the Bible that can be pulled out to support this view. But the whole history of the Bible is the history of God reaching out with infinite patience and desire for people. If the satisfaction theory of atonement were correct, how could we explain God being in relationship with faulty humans such as Noah, Abraham, Jacob, Moses, and King David all of whom sinned, some gloriously. How could we explain the ongoing Biblical witness of the prophets, who consistently describe God as yearning for people and a world in which justice rules? How could we explain God saying things like he said in Amos 5:21-24 “I hate, I despise your festivals, and I take no delight in your solemn assemblies.  Even though you offer me your burnt offerings and grain offerings, I will not accept them; and the offerings of well-being of your fatted animals I will not look upon.  Take away from me the noise of your songs; I will not listen to the melody of your harps.  But let justice roll down like waters, and righteousness like an ever-flowing stream.” Or how can we pretend that God is about sacrifice to provide individual salvation, and not about social justice, when Isaiah’s first chapter includes these words from God:

“What to me is the multitude of your sacrifices? says the Lord; I have had enough of burnt offerings of rams and the fat of fed beasts; I do not delight in the blood of bulls, or of lambs, or of goats. When you come to appear before me, who asked this from your hand? Trample my courts no more; bringing offerings is futile; incense is an abomination to me. New moon and sabbath and calling of convocation I cannot endure solemn assemblies with iniquity. Your new moons and your appointed festivals my soul hates; they have become a burden to me, I am weary of bearing them. When you stretch out your hands, I will hide my eyes from you; even though you make many prayers, I will not listen; your hands are full of blood.

“Wash yourselves; make yourselves clean; remove the evil of your doings from before my eyes; cease to do evil, learn to do good; seek justice, rescue the oppressed, defend the orphan, plead for the widow. Come now, let us argue it out, says the Lord: though your sins are like scarlet, they shall be like snow; though they are red like crimson, they shall become like wool.”

The teachings of the Bible including those of Jesus again and again describe the dream of God. This is the vision we heard in the reading from Isaiah 65 today: “For I am about to create new heavens and a new earth; the former things shall not be remembered or come to mind. But be glad and rejoice forever in what I am creating; for I am about to create Jerusalem as a joy, and its people as a delight. I will rejoice in Jerusalem, and delight in my people; no more shall the sound of weeping be heard in it, or the cry of distress.” The prophet went on to describe a world in which peace, health, and justice are the norm – where people live in the homes they build, lifespan will be long, and people will not exploit one another.

Salvation cannot be only concerned with one individual soul – that is self-involvement, self-centeredness which is also not consistent with the interdependent, relational view of life in the Word of God. We’re all in the same boat, and in fact some of the language of church architecture reflects that understanding: the part of the sanctuary where the congregation sits is called the nave, as in naval. We sail together through the storms of life, or we sink together. Douglas John Hall says that in our era, “The question of people in developed societies today is not ‘Is there anything after death?’ but ‘Is there anything before death?’ What the theology of salvation must address if it is going to speak to an age (or at least to a context) that is, as it were, condemned to life is whether life is purposeful.”

Of course people are also, as always, concerned with life after death. But all of us understand in the depths of our being that a life cannot be concerned in this world mostly with our own personal satisfaction and ignore the deep injustices for billions of people whom God loves, and then expect to waltz off into more happiness simply because of saying, I believe in Jesus.

The satisfaction theory of atonement doesn’t make sense because God cannot be looking for loopholes through which to condemn some of his children to death while letting some of the most privileged and greedy people in this world into the best future available in the next world simply because they know the password (“Jesus”). If this were true, it would mean that God were more superficial and unjust than any of us, and such a god should be resisted rather than worshipped.

The Bible tells the story of a God who created a world of abundant goodness and created people to share that goodness. The Bible tells the story of God who yearns for a world in which all are fed and cared for by each other, as we are by almighty God. And when we ask why God permits suffering, we should be aware that God is asking us why we are permitting it? Why are we letting billions go hungry when it is possible for all to be fed?

If we remember them, the stories of God and God’s people in the Bible tell the story of a God who believes deeply in us, and is ready and able to work transformation in us – the stories of Abraham, Moses, David, Isaiah, Jeremiah, Jonah, Jesus, Peter, and Paul tell the story of a God who is always ready to make us new, and trusts us with the fate of creation. When we know these stories, we can have the deep memory that results in exuberant hope, the hope of God for us and for the world God made.

At this point in human history, we need to understand that salvation is not an other-worldly dream, but is God’s hope for our world, and one in which we have a role. I am not saying that there is no life after death – what I am saying is that God has always and forever been deeply concerned with this life, and that the deepest desire of God’s heart is to transform us, so that we might live out God’s dreams for this world. Thy Kingdom come, thy will be done, on earth as it is in heaven. Amen.