Sermon Phil 2-1-13
A few years ago, I was regularly visiting an elderly woman in one of the hospitals in Toronto. She was a very faithful women. She trusted in the love of God. She liked to talk about Scripture. On my last visit to her, she said to me,
“Tony, you know what John says in the book of Revelation 7:4 . Before I could answer she quoted the passage for me:
“I heard the number of those who were sealed, one hundred forty-four thousand, sealed out of every tribe of the people of Israel”. She paused to let the message sink in and said:
Are you one of the 144,000 people who are saved?
There was only room in heaven for 144,000 and being a kindly woman, she was concerned that I might not have my entry visa. I said, “you know that the book of revelation was about a vision, so the language that John uses to describe his sense of heaven and earth and God’s salvation is symbolic”. Maybe, 144,000 is a symbolic number that represents not the few that God saves but the generousity of God who has room in heaven for everyone who wants to be there. What about the Gospel of John where Jesus says there are many rooms in my Father’s house.
Tony, she said, the bible says there are going to be 144,000 people saved.
I said but in the thousands of years of salvation history recorded in the bible since Abraham, from Genesis to Revelation is one long story of a relentless God constantly forgiving and loving people to salvation. There have been literally billions and billions of people. Don’t you think God’s love is available to more then just 144,000? Maybe we should not get so hung up on the numbers, I suggested.
She looked at me kind of funny, like I did not get her point. I guess I did not. The discussion was kind of abstract but upon reflection, we were together just two people in relationship attempting to work out our understanding of salvation. At least we both agreed that salvation is out there if you know where to look.
Gerald May, a psychologist who has worked to help people struggling with substance abuse addictions, wrote about a recovering alcoholic who was in a 12 step program. The man described himself as being a “grateful alcoholic.
“I was a willful, self-driven person before I realized I was addicted,” My addiction defeated my will and finally led me to admit my powerlessness. Without that defeat, I’m sure I would have continued to live as if I were the master of my fate. So I’m grateful because my addiction gave me the most important thing in my life: my relationship with God.”
A clue to salvation no matter what your theology includes a relationship with God revealed through Christ. Until we have that, we are as spiritually addicted to all kinds of other gods in ways that are just as tragic as this mans.
None of us here may suffer from a chemical dependency but we are all addicted to something that is unhealthy for us in one way or another. Addicted to ways of thinking perhaps that are unhealthy for our relationships. Addicted to a sense of an exaggerated power that we don’t need anyone’s help. Addicted to work and things that leave us exhausted and unfulfilled, and disconnected from one another at the end of the day. Addicted to a low level of daily anxiety because maybe we fear if people really knew us they might not accept us.
When I was doing some clinical pastoral education, I worked in the psychiatric wards of a couple of downtown hospitals. One afternoon I was invited to sit in on a meeting with a group of people who gathered together to support each other in their struggle to live whole lives with mental illness and associated drug addiction. It was a great honour and extension of trust to me an outsider to join their group. I was the only guy wearing a tie and this threatened them. So they promptly told me to take it off. I felt a little hidden shame welling up inside me. The point was that in this group all of them faced their shame and illness openly with humility and fearless truth. That was part of their path to salvation. They tried to uncover shame in order to take away its power to destroy them. They were well aware that the world out there thought they were crazy and they came here once a week or so to help each other find more options to live healthy relationships in a the crazy world out there.
They understood something about the meaning of salvation that I did not. I often feel the saving presence of God after listening to those who are broken like this because it partly reminds me that I am broken too, that I need God and the help of others to be whole.
The Hebrew word for salvation in the Old Testament describes the context of “making wide” or broadening the creation of space. When we come to recognize in our lives that the road we travel is not wide enough to give us meaningful life and that if we stay on this road, it will lead to our physical or spiritual death, then the good news is that we have already taken the first step on the path to salvation.
It is often in the lives of the most broken people where we see salvation being worked out in fear and trembling best. You know the 12-Step program which every support group consciously or unconsciously follows in various forms is not formally religious, it is disconnected from any denomination or religious Tradition, it does not define God, it has no sacraments or worship services, and is without any official clergy. Worst of all, it has very loose membership requirements. I don’t think it would ever subscribe to an interpretation of Scripture that suggests only 144,000 people will be saved. In fact, just the opposite. God is saving the other billions who are not healthy because the program makes the admission of one’s addiction and the need for help as the one requirement to experience what it means to be saved. The 12 step program describes the road to salvation in the first three steps:
We admitted we were powerless over the things in our lives that have become unmanageable.
· Through this powerlessness and pain we come to believe that a Power greater then ourselves could love us and help us back to life
· And in this love we made a decision to turn our will and our lives
I can’t speak for the apostle Paul directly but I think this is pretty close to what he meant when he said work out your salvation. Paul is saying, hey, in Christ you are already saved in a supernatural sense. That is your soul belongs to a loving God. There is a room in God’s heaven for us because of Jesus Christ. He is the one who has shown you what God is really like. A high God who is free to take up the form of a humble human servant in Jesus without ceasing to be God- that’s the awesome mystery of Jesus. Free to become poor so that others may be rich, free to suffer death in complete trust of God, so that others may know life. A servant who gave up divine power to enter into our human condition including a shameful death. So Paul says your already saved to the Philipians.
Now go out there and live this salvation. Go out and discover in your own lives this great truth about God in Jesus. But don’t think for a minute its easy. Its not, is about humility and respect- two virtues of the biblical definition of the word-fear. And seek it in trembling- why trembling. Because you have been redeemed by a God who allowed himself to be cruxified out of love. Tremble before the nature of that type of love. Tremble with the knowledge that no human among us can love like this but we are all called to try.
Orville James, the minister at Wellington Square UC in Burlington wrote an article in last year’s Observer about those who search for salvation through Church when he said that most individuals are looking for outlets for their compassion. He described Diane, a single mom, who came to church not looking for organized religion but rather a place to serve others, to maker her life count, to do something that mattered. Diane is not a religious expert or authority of Christian theology, all she knows is that the light of Christ is shining through her into the world around her.
But she too understands intuitively what it means to seek salvation with fear and trembling. You see the fear part does not mean that we fear a God who is a tyrant, a God who might literally only save 144,000 of us. Fear of God in the biblical sense means awe, reverence, respect for the power of divine love that is greater then any understanding we have of human love.
Let us then seek out our salvation with trembling reverence of the gift of life that God gives each of us through the sharing of our compassion and talents, through our honesty and vulnerability and in assurance that through Jesus Christ we are already saved for God. Amen.