I am grateful to Christ Jesus our Lord, who has strengthened me, because he judged me faithful and appointed me to his service, even though I was formerly a blasphemer, a persecutor, and a man of violence. But I received mercy because I had acted ignorantly in unbelief, and the grace of our Lord overflowed for me with the faith and love that are in Christ Jesus. The saying is sure and worthy of full acceptance, that Christ Jesus came into the world to save sinners - of whom I am the foremost. But for that very reason I received mercy, so that in me, as the foremost, Jesus Christ might display the utmost patience, making me an example to those who would come to believe in him for eternal life. To the King of the ages, immortal, invisible, the only God, be honor and glory forever and ever. Amen.
(1 Timothy 1:12-17)
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Hope is a very strange thing. There's the story of a plane that was making a trans-Atlantic flight. As they were partway through their journey, the captain's voice suddenly came over the intercom: “Ladies and gentleman, this is your captain. I don't want to alarm anyone, but I have to advice you that one of our plane's four engines is no longer working. There's nothing to be alarmed about. The plane is perfectly capable of flying with three engines, but we are going to be 15 minutes late arriving at our destination.” The flight continued. A little while later, the intercom came alive again, and the passengers heard, “Ladies and gentlemen, this is your captain again. Please don't be alarmed, but we have a second engine that has stopped working. This isn't a problem because the plane can fly with two engines. But we are now going to be a half hour late arriving at our destination.” The flight continued. A while later the intercom crackled to life again: “Ladies and gentlemen, this is your captain. I regret having to tell you that a third engine has stopped working. There's no reason for concern, because this plane is designed to fly with just one engine. But I want you to know that we are now going to be one hour late arriving at our destination.” As the intercom went silent, one man turned to the passenger beside him and said, “First it was 15 minutes, then a half hour, now and hour. I sure hope that last engine is all right, because if it stops working we'll never get back on the ground!” Yes, indeed – hope is a strange thing. Sometimes we find hope when there seems to be no reason for hope. At other times we fall into despair even though reasons for hope abound. Hope is a strange thing, and we don't know quite what to do with it.
Christian hope is a strange and even sometimes unsettling thing. As Christians we've usually tied the concept of hope into the idea of salvation – which is exactly what's stated in this passage: “Christ Jesus came into the world to save sinners.” Those words are hopeful in that they remind us that God’s love and grace and mercy are so powerful that we can be forgiven no matter what's in our past; no matter what we’ve done. This passage got me thinking about the concept of salvation or “being saved.” In the United Church we don't talk in those terms very much because we're generally uncomfortable with the way those words are often used. They can become sort of like a hammer to hit someone with or an accusation to make against someone. When someone asks “are you saved” it usually isn't a question – it's usually an expression of doubt about someone's faith and their relationship with God. So I started to think: is there a way to reclaim the concept of being saved in a way that both honours the gospel and takes away the baggage connected to the concept. And the more I thought about it, the more I realized that in general terms you can think of being saved in two ways: you can either be saved from something or you can be saved for something. Which of those we choose says a lot about how we view the gospel and the work of Christ and the Christian hope. So I wondered:
Is our faith based on fear or is our faith based on assurance? When we think of the word “saved” if our first idea is that we're being saved “from” something then we're explicitly basing our faith on fear. We must be afraid of something. We have to be saved from something. People think of being saved from sin, or saved from death or saved from hell – but one way or another there's an assumption that we have to be afraid of something, and that our faith is primarily about saving us from that thing that we're afraid of. And yet, as we listen to the words of Jesus, we hear him over and over again say things like “do not be afraid.” For far too many people the image of Christianity is of pulpit and Bible thumping preachers essentially issuing threats to those who are listening (and maybe even more to those who aren't listening) about what's going to happen to them if they don't get saved. That also tends to take things out of God's hands and put them squarely into our hands – because if we have to “get saved” then there must be something we have to do to earn it. That's essentially a works-based faith that offers no assurance, because we can never be sure that we've done exactly the right thing in exactly the right way. It ca also paralyze us by making us afraid that we might do the wrong thing, and so we choose not to do anything. Fear does that. Fear not only saps the joy out of living, it makes us rather useless to anyone else because it makes us afraid to do anything. Which then made me wonder:
Is our faith based on what it does for us or is our faith based on what it challenges us to do for others? Am I in this just for myself? Do I believe in Jesus only because I think I'm going to get some really neat reward for what I believe? If a faith based on fear is primarily about keeping me out of hell, then a faith based on what I get from it is primarily about getting me into heaven! It's all about me, in other words. A faith that's based on what I get out of it is also satisfied with what I get out of it. It's that type of attitude that helps give birth to the criticism that often gets made of Christians: that we're so heavenly-minded we're of no earthly use. Now, that attitude might suit the general tenor of the times, but I'm not sure at all that it matches up with anything that Jesus ever taught. I think that faith is supposed to inspire us. Our faith isn't so much about heaven, you see, it's about earth. Our faith isn't about sitting back and waiting for a divine reward; it's about getting up and getting out into the world and engaging in a divine calling to bring good news to those who in this life don't have much good news. It's not about me; it's about you. It's not about us; it's about them. It's not about the self; it's about the other. Because that's where Jesus was always focused. Essentially, it all boils down to this:
Is our faith about a God who loves us and offers us grace, or is it about a God who sits back and looks for reasons to punish us? I believe in a God of love. I believe in a God of grace. The author of 1 Timothy could write “that Christ Jesus came into the world to save sinners - of whom I am the foremost,” because he had been released from fear and he had been released from the desire for reward and now he could focus on putting the will of God into practice through his own life. What this all reminds me is that I have to accept that the depth of God’s grace is a mystery that I can’t fully understand, but that I have to celebrate it not so much for its impact on both my life but for the way it frees me to impact the lives of those around me.
Mary Hinkle Shore wrote that “saving ... is not moving a name from one column to another. Saving is certainly not ignoring sin and the harm it does. Saving is re-commissioning someone for new work. It is taking a persecutor of the church and turning him into an ambassador of Christ. Saving is the human equivalent of fashioning swords into plowshares.” To really be saved in the way that Mary Shore describes is not to be saved from something – it is to be saved for something. To be saved for something is a positive thing. To be saved in this way means to be given a purpose in this life. It means that this life isn't only – as I've heard some people describe it – a rehearsal for heaven. This life is meaningful, because it's in this life that we have the ability to touch the lives of others and to make those lives more enjoyable and more meaningful. That is our hope as Christians: that we're going to be able to make a change for the better in the lives of those we encounter. That's what we've been saved for.
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