July 24, 2011

Denise Kelsall

Pentecost 6     
Romans 8:26-39


Pauls letter to the Romans is grounded in the notion of divine salvation – what it is, how we need to behave, what we must refrain from doing, what we need to believe – to be saved.

This was meat to me after I first went forward at a Christian rally sometime in my mid-teenage years. My poor parents were going to burn in hell-fire if they didn’t believe or change their ways. True.

While growing up – in spite of an Anglican upbringing with baptism, Sunday school, choir girl for a year at 9, and confirmation around 13 – God was not really personal to me – a part of the fabric of life sure, but not something questioned, discussed, or embraced. Church and God just were.

I grew up and grew out of the madly evangelical phase within a couple of years and it wasn’t until I had children that I really felt moved to attend church regularly again. In the intervening years I had travelled and lived abroad for quite some time, mixed with all sorts of different people, worked at different occupations and had some wonderful and wild experiences. The idea of salvation, of being saved or not saved did not attract me any longer. My life to date had brought the knowledge of the goodness and truth that most people carry, to a greater or lesser degree – and that the world was an enormous place with lots people of various other faiths and that they were just as devoted as Christians – some people didn’t believe in anything at all.

I was in an ambivalent place and yet I deeply desired a spiritual base that was real, that would support grow and inform me, somewhere that I could, with confidence, know that my children would remember and enjoy and hopefully find a story, an idea of God that would carry them through their lives, adding a richness, a depth that could not be gained anywhere else. And as you might guess, I embraced my Anglican heritage and ... many lives later – here I am.

In my theological studies before and after ordination salvation has always been a concept, an idea, a powerful reality that has intrigued and frustrated me. Our prayer book and liturgical language is loaded with salvation. Ours is a salvation based faith – Jesus shows it and becomes it.

Salvation – I would like to explore what it means today – and what Paul is saying about it – Salvation.

In his many letters Paul is variously tough problematic and disturbingly prophetic, yet, also a powerful and visionary writer – he’s black and white, in or out, saved or damned – he is dauntless and passionate. He’s very doctrinal (not necessarily a bad thing) – often what we could call judgemental and moralistic – and profoundly beautiful. Pauls influence on Christian thinking is said to be more significant than any other NT author. His letter to the Romans is considered his most important legacy – many call it his masterpiece.

In our inspiring reading today, he is just beautiful. He tells us that salvation is in the Spirit – who prays with us and in us, who sees and feels with us – who pleads with God for us when we are sad or weak – I rather like the New English Bible translation which says that ‘ through our inarticulate groans the Spirit himself’ is pleading for us’ (much stronger than ‘sighs too deep for words’) – and I know what that means as I am sure we all do. Sometimes in great and terrible grief it is impossible to pray – sometimes an agonised ‘O God’ is all we can muster up or mutter – those 2 words contain our whole prayer, our body, our life - and the Spirit does the rest.

The Spirit is with us – dwells within us – intercedes for us – we are not alone is what Paul tells us.

The reading continues with the idea of being a family – that as believers we are drawn together as family – as followers of ‘the way’ as ancient early Christians were first called – we are all part of God’s family through Jesus, through being human – just like Jesus.

We are’ justified by faith,’ Paul writes – this was the catch cry for Luther that heralded the great Reformation with ‘sola fide’ and ‘sola gratia’ – by faith alone , by grace alone – the faith we assent to in the life death and power of Jesus, the grace of God in forgiveness.

For us in 21st century NZ that’s not a bad lot. We can safely live and worship with more than a modicum of comfort – we live lavishly really with all our stuff, our choices, our rights. For us salvation is variously – an inner awareness, a personal relationship, knowledge that God loves us and brings forgiveness, that we can know God, that God resides within ‘our hearts and in our minds’ as is often said and more. Maybe it is saying yes to the mystery of our existence and unfathomed yet deeply felt spiritual connections with the sacred in all life.

God has been good to us – where and how we live, we have no real complaints have we. Salvation is OK.

Well – just imagine you lived in the slums of Sao Paulo in Brazil , the 8th largest city in the world, where daily survival is a struggle, the streets mean – where Catholic theologian Ivone Gebara tells the story of a young girl who prostitutes herself to pay for a doctor for her brother who is ill, how the mother knows where her daughter is going and what the girl intends to do, and turns her head – the resigned and blind pain we can only glimpse at. In a place where unspoken cultural values define women’s bodies as usable and disposable – where is the salvation? Hoping that her mothers longing and love, that her brothers health is food enough for the day?

Gebara believes that salvation needs to be re-visioned in each different context – and that our absolute language does nothing to alleviate pain or heal in concrete terms or daily reality. For Gebara, salvation is a present divine reality, God is in every moment – that the way we live and our actions reveal and bring salvation – like Jesus, not some exclusionary notion of sin and forgiveness, but to be like Jesus – in acts of sharing, of mercy, of service, taking the last place, and washing one another’s feet.

Salvation is to be found in beauty – an unexpected smile, sharing a hot cup of tea or a glass of beer, a melody that catches us, an unselfish act of love. These are the small mercies and acts of salvation that are divine and bring life. She speaks of Jesus divinely as ‘the centre of a loving energy among us.’ [1]

Our faith, our hope, our spiritual heritage and experience come out of a very old liturgical tradition that I often identify as poetry – the poetry of our ancient forbears who lived in a 3 tiered universe and believed in a male all-powerful omnipotent deity. We still use language that reflects this and our concepts of salvation are still couched in the archaic terms of a bygone era.

Good theology takes us somewhere different and opens our eyes to present day realities and transforms our perceptions of what God and salvation can mean for people on different sides of the world in vastly different circumstances.

Paradoxically, Paul was really into sin and forgiveness, into heaven and hell in absolute terms – ‘we are all sinners’, and yet he created glorious and memorable words of beauty that still hold and are worth repeating

“In all things we are more than conquerors through him who loved us. For I am convinced that neither death, nor life, nor angels, nor rulers, nor things present, nor things to come, nor powers, nor height, nor depth, nor anything else in all creation, will be able to separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord.”  Amen.

[1] Ivone Gebara, Longing for Running Water, 1999.