Now is the day of salvation

 Let’s look at what today’s scripture readings have for us,

and I’ll start with the reading from Paul’s second letter to the church in Corinth.

 

Paul writes:

            “See, now is the acceptable time;

            see, now is the day of salvation!”

NOW is the acceptable time, the opportune moment, high time, 

NOW is the day of salvation.

 

Paul is really insistent about this.

Don’t keep waiting for some time in the future

            when everything seems right, 

            when you’ve got your act together, or you finally see a need for it.

Salvation is a NOW sort of thing,

            not what happens when you die and get to go to heaven.

Salvation is meant for the here and now.

 

So - what is salvation?

Salvation is more than being forgiven of your sins.

Salvation is what the name Jesus means – in the Hebrew original: Yeshua.

 

The root of the word in Hebrew means opening the space

            and the removal of constriction.

It means victory.

In this Old Testament sense of the word salvation 

            the saving power of God is exercised through God’s dominion over nature,

                        such as the parting of the Red Sea

            opening the way for the Children of Israel 

                                    to be freed from the bondage of slavery

                                    and to come out into the open space of a land of freedom.

 

In the New Testament the Greek word for salvation and the verb to save

            includes healing, restoring to wholeness.

The savior is a healer.

 

Salvation, as a spiritual process at work in us through the grace of God,             

    involves the death and transformation of the self.

Salvation brings one into the state of agaph love,            

            which in its fullness is the realization of being at one with God.

This is achieved by Jesus and in Jesus,

            by being taken into his death and being taken into the heart of God.

 

Jesus is what his name means.

He is the embodiment of salvation.  Can we see that?

 

Back to 2 Corinthians – 

Paul wrote, “…we urge you also not to accept the grace of God in vain.”

He made a huge effort on his part 

            to bring the message of salvation and God’s grace 

                        to whoever would hear him out.

He went through incredible 

            hardships, trials, afflictions, misunderstandings, and personal losses,

                        on behalf of those he was addressing.

 

He spoke out of what had changed his own life 

            from that of a religious terrorist condoning death in the name of his beliefs

            to someone who had such love for others

                        that he gladly suffered on their behalf.

 

He advised the faithful in Corinth, that just as he and the other apostles had done, 

            “open wide your hearts also.”

 

Now is the acceptable time; now is the day of salvation.

Open wide your hearts.

 

Open to whom?

 

            To the One who can save you, the One who brings salvation now, Jesus,

                        and who also can be revealed 

                                    in everyone you open your heart to.

 

Now, I’m big on Jesus.  I hope you know that.

That’s my main focus in preaching, in teaching, in meditation, in personal prayer, 

            in how I relate to others, in the values and priorities in my life.

It’s Jesus.

 

What I understand about Jesus and how I have experienced him,

            and especially how I experience his Presence here and now,

is something that has grown and evolved over the years as faith matures.

The seed of faith planted in me at baptism (at the tender are of 6 weeks),

            faith nurtured by scripture and the Holy Communion,

                        tried and tested through life challenges, crises, and losses,

has, through the grace of God, expanded and proved strong and true.

 

So who is Jesus, and why do we all, myself included, have times of being afraid             – afraid of him! ?

 

The gospel reading for today certainly can give us a good reason for that fear.

 

The disciples are in a boat with Jesus,

            just having left another huge crowd of people 

            to whom he had been relating one parable after another.

Now they were off across the Sea of Galilee for a night of travel

            before encountering new crowds on the other shore.

The wind comes up – okay so far – put up the sail,

            but the wind becomes a storm.

The storm intensifies and whips up the waves

            so much so that the boat is getting filled with water and is endangered.

Everyone is bailing like crazy,

            everyone but Jesus, who is in the stern asleep on a cushion.

Either he is so tired out from the crowds, OR

            he is so unconcerned about the wind and waves 

                        that they don’t disturb his sleep.

 

That would seem to be the case,

            because when the disciples wake Jesus, they say,

            “Do you not care that we are perishing?”

Perishing was not part of Jesus’ perception of the situation apparently!

 

Then Jesus did something that I don’t think any of us has ever seen done.

He spoke a word, “Peace, be still,”

            and there was a dead calm.

Fierce wind and crashing waves to dead calm – with just a word.

Well, that ought to make one’s hair stand up!

Who are we dealing with here?

 

You may belief this story or not.

But it’s related in all four gospels in one form or another.

So obviously it was a significant story for the very earliest Christians.

 

Who is this who is able to have such an influence upon the elements of nature?

            for whom the primal elements of wind and water obey at a word?

Who is this who acts outside of our conventional understanding of reality?

When this sort of power is recognized, power beyond our reality,

                        it leaves people without their usual grounding,

            and the result is fear, understandably and appropriately so.

 

When this sort of power comes up, 

            it is a clue to us that the Kingdom of God is breaking through.

 

Huge storm to dead calm at a word

            ranks right up there with the parting of the Red Sea.

 

Nobody drowned that night on the Sea of Galilee,

            no boat capsized, all hands accounted for.

 

Salvation.                        Now is the day of salvation.

 

Whatever storm threatens in your life,

            outside events or interior storms

                        creating fear, hopelessness, the sense of isolation,

now is the day of salvation.

 

And Jesus is the Way.

 

Continuing in our liturgy after the Creed

            we offer our prayers of intercession.

Can we pray for salvation in all its ramifications for each other?

 

Then comes the Confession.

Can we confess to ourselves and to God 

            the ways in which we need healing salvation?

 

Here today in this liturgy you have the chance 

                                                for you to act on the seed of faith planted in you.

It is not your own faith, you know, but the faith of Jesus.

Let it grow.

Let it grow by exercising it.

Let the combined faith of this community nurtured by Jesus, fed by Jesus,

            be a healing support for one another.

 

NOW is the acceptable time, the opportune moment, high time.

NOW is the day of salvation.

Growing Season

 At my home in Spokane I just received the supplies I needed

            to make two raised garden beds in the back yard,

and I am told that it is not too late in the season to plant the seeds I bought

            and get to see them grow and produce fresh veggies to eat

                        straight from the garden.

That has stimulated my meditations on today’s scriptures,

            the choice of which shows some shrewd wisdom

            timed with the natural cycle of the growing season.

 

First before looking at the readings for today,

            I want to call your attention to this Sunday’s collect:

“Keep, O Lord, your household the Church in your steadfast faith and love,

That through your grace we may proclaim your truth with boldness

and minister justice with compassion…”

 

Massey Shepherd, who was

            the great liturgy authority of the last century in the Episcopal Church, 

            is the author of this collect,

and he incorporated within the collect 

                        references from Galatians and Ephesians,

            and linked together twin ideals of truth and justice

                                    with courage and compassion:

            truth with the boldness of courage

            and justice linked with compassion.

 

This, he declared, was the fullness of Christian duty and service.

            If you want a good, solid guidepost for living out your faith,

                        there it is.

 

We have prayed that collect each year on this Sunday for decades.

We ask for God’s help in being steadfast in both faith and love.

That’s good that we keep asking, 

            because it takes God’s help to keep on being steadfast.

And note that in this collect we learn that faith and love go together.

 

With that in mind, let’s now turn to the Old Testament/Hebrew Bible

                                                            reading for today 

because then God’s help, God’s providence, God’s steadfast nurturing of us 

            is elucidated for us in the passage from the prophet Ezekiel.

An imagery from creation is given to us 

            in a small sprig from the tip of the new growth 

                                                            of a topmost twig of a tall cedar.

All the potential is there in this sprig.

            The entire DNA of a lofty cedar is present in that twig,

and God plants it in order that it may grow and fulfill its destiny 

                                                                                                to become a giant cedar.

            Ultimately the sapling will provide branches for the nests

                        of every winged creature.

Note that it is God who is in control of this growth

            and the Almighty Creator can make the tree flourish or bring it down,

                        make it green or dry it up.

 

The Apostle Paul must have realized all this.

In today’s reading from the second letter to the church in Corinth

            he states that we walk by faith and not by sight.

Things are not always as they appear.

            We can be deceived by appearances.

                        Something that appears so very small 

                        may actually contain something so very huge.

“…we walk by faith, not by sight…”

 

That great Apostle and missionary Paul wrote this 

            to the faith community in the Greek city of Corinth 2 millennia ago,

                        in a time of turbulence and uncertainty.

He was writing to people who knew the truth of these words,

            who experienced what it was like to enter the unknown

                        and place their faith in this new Savior,

            people who discovered the presence of this Savior 

                        in the Holy Spirit as an intimate encounter with the Divine

                                    in their innermost beings

                                    and in the midst of their fellowship with one another.

“…we walk by faith, not by sight…”

 

And that is why it is so important to be steadfast in faith and love,

            the two together help provide balance and give us perspective 

                        as we go about navigating a world that is so full of

                                    issues, problems, dangers, and contradictions

                        that loom so large that they can eclipse our seedling faith.

 

Paul continues,

            “For the love of Christ urges us on…”
It’s all there in the huge, loving act of salvation 

                                                through his death and Resurrection.

            That is what brings about a new creation in us.

Just like that sprig from the lofty cedar 

            that has within it all the DNA that makes it possible 

                        to become a new lofty cedar,

so in Christ there is a new creation, a new DNA, so to speak, Christ DNA,

            that makes it possible to actually live a new life.

 

Creation is giving us examples all over the place 

                                                in these scripture reading for today.            

The Gospel reading from Mark restates Ezekiel 

            with the example from the natural world, God’s creation.

You plant your garden with peas and green beans and carrots and cabbage,

                        you water the soil,

            but you can’t make the seeds sprout and grow.

They do that because they are faithful to the way God created them,

            fulfilling the blueprint of the DNA in the tiny seeds 

                        until they are full grown and fruitful,

                                                just as God intended.

 

Jesus said the Kingdom of God that he came to bring us into

            is like God’s Creation, natural, spontaneous, growing, abundant, 

                                    ever expanding.

If we could get that into our vision, that naturally occurring expansion,

            we would see that we are just like tiny mustard seeds,

                        tiny but with huge potential,

            potential beyond appearances, beyond what our eyes see.

 

Steadfast faith and love,

            keep us steadfast in your faith and love, we prayed.

 

That’s our big challenge, 

                        so that we are not just settling for stunted growth, 

            but have the audacity of faith to look beyond what we currently see.

 

The amazing grace that Ray keeps talking about

            is, continuing the gardening metaphor, God’s manure.

Yes, manure.

Jesus told another parable, one of so many about the Kingdom of God

                        in terms of the creation and spontaneous, abundant growth,

            a parable in which a fig tree was not thriving,

                        but it was given another chance.

And the instructions were to dig around it and work manure into the soil.

            Get that amazing grace worked into the soil of our lives.

 

We are not in this whole enterprise of being Church or living a Christian life

            on our own.

We are gifted all along the way

            in ways that sight cannot see, but faith can.

 

This last year has been so devastating to us in so many ways,

            but we are given new life in Christ, we are a new creation,

                        the DNA of the Kingdom of God is there,

but we need to walk by faith and not be distracted by what we see.

 

“…we walk by faith, not by sight…”

It is as if someone would scatter seed on the ground, 

and would sleep and rise night and day, 

and the seed would sprout and grow, 

he does not know how. 

The earth produces of itself, 

first the stalk, 

then the head, 

then the full grain in the head.

As sure and as certain as this natural, organic process 

                                                                                    of a seed sprouting and growing,

            so faith is planted by Holy Spirit in us where it sprouts and grows,

                                    and grows and grows 

                        with the same potential as a mustard seed.

 

This statement, “…we walk by faith, not by sight…”, becomes truth for us

            when we experience that Holy Presence in our loves,

                        moving us in that innermost part of our being

                                    that is so hard for us to put into words,

                        but which we know to be as real as anything.

“…we walk by faith, not by sight…”

This faith is putting our trust into that Holy Presence in the innermost being

            which has no tangible dimension to measure empirically.

This faith is a surrendering of the illusion we hold onto 

            about being in control of our lives.

This faith is a letting go, 

            like raising your hands on the roller coaster ride at the amusement park

            as you go over the top of that first big drop.

 

The Collect for today again:

 

“Keep, O Lord, your household the Church in your steadfast faith and love,

That through your grace we may proclaim your truth with boldness

and minister justice with compassion…”

 

So let us allow the Love of Christ to urge us on

            Christ’s love for us, the new creation in us

that we may be equipped to proclaim truth courageously

                        in a world of distrust

            and to minister justice with compassion

                        in all the multitude of situations that cry out for it.

Crazy

Jesus said,

            “This is my commandment, that you love one another.

            Just as I have love you, so you love one another.”

 

That commandment was not just for those disciples there with him at the time,

            but it quickly became the distinguishing mark of all followers of Jesus                                                                                                                                    after that.

We are called to love – 

            that New Commandment that Jesus gave his disciples             

                        on the night of violence when he was then betrayed 

                        and taken and tortured and handed over for execution. 

 

If that is what he asked of us 

                        at that incredibly tense and challenging moment in his own life, how can we not take his words without absolute seriousness?

 

So how are we doing with that?

            Looking at the Church as a whole, 

                        not just this congregation 

                        or this denomination of the Episcopal Church, 

                        but the whole enterprise, the whole institution,

it looks like we’re dying.

 

A recent Gallup poll now indicates that U.S. church membership 

            has fallen below the majority of the population for the first time – 47%.

That was their published findings on March 29 of this year.

 

In the eyes of the general society we are becoming irrelevant.

As you know our Presiding Bishop for the Episcopal Church, Michael Curry,

            has been calling us to a renewal in what he calls the Jesus Movement.

That is important for bringing us back to the realization 

            that Jesus has to be at the center of the life and ministry of the Church.

Because if it’s all just our own efforts 

                        to carry out that mission to love one another in truth and action, 

            we can’t put the world right 

just by the way we humans ordinarily do things.

 

It is not by a political answer, or by making the best deals, or by wielding power

            that the world can be put right.

Our society lives in that space

            and people suffer as a result: 

                        especially the weak, the powerless, the alien, the marginalized,

                        women and children,

            who all get exploited, taken advantage of,

while those at the top, the ones with the power,

                                    secure their power and wealth for themselves.

 

Jesus was not about that,

            even though some have addressed him as a king, ( that is, a power leader)

            even though our opening hymn says, “Crown him with many crowns,”

            and even though some have gone so far 

                        as to use their faith beliefs as a rationale 

                                    for judgment and moral exclusiveness.

A king is so different from 

            the liberating, healing power of Love

                        that a Crucified Savior brings.

 

No, Jesus is out of his mind.  

That’s what they said about him in the Gospel reading for today.

                                    “He has gone out of his mind.”

            He’s crazy.  

            That’s how this society, this culture would have characterize him also.

Say he’s crazy and you can discredit that whole love one another thing.

That’s a familiar tactic used over the ages.

            Call your opponent a liar, discredit their work.

And the culture we live in today has such a pervasive effect on us

            that we unconsciously start to accept those lies.

So I say to you today that here is what our problem as the faith community is:

It is our lack of yielding to the intimacy and awareness of the Presence of Jesus

            that is killing us off.

 

If we were to let down our guard 

and our tight grip on that pervasive belief in a merit based morality,

            and instead take our suffering in all its many forms to Jesus

there would be a huge break through in the spiritual potency of the Church.

We would experience the stunning intimacy of Love in the Presence of Jesus

            and we would discover how to love one another

                        with authenticity and genuine intention.

And that would rock the world.

 

Crazy – The Cross of Jesus is a mass pardon. 

                                                a mass pardon for all our sins – Crazy.

            The Cross stands between us and the condition of suffering in the world.

 

One might think Jesus was out of his mind to attempt that 

                                    – you know, saving the whole world – 

            but then he went farther and in one huge Resurrection appearance,

there is then the Holy Spirit, 

            the Resurrection Spirit and Presence of Jesus put on us,

                        into which we were baptized

            which provides in us a continuous source and process of sanctification

                                    provided in that space of the Cross, which we call salvation.

 

This is the experience accessible to all in the Church,

            accessible through our spiritual practices of 

                        prayer, meditation, 

                        the liturgy and sacraments, 

                        reading and hearing and reflecting on the scriptures, 

                        breaking bread together, forgiving one another.

That being in the Presence of Jesus style Love

            is what liberates us to freely love one another.

 

This is not the way of a king or any other type of political leader.

They called Jesus crazy, out of his mind.

And he didn’t do a thing to deny that.

They said to him, “Your family is here to collect you,

            your mother and brothers and sisters.”

And he looked around at those sitting there with him and said,

            “These are my mother and my brothers and sisters.”

Those doing the will of God, 

            those yielding to experiencing that Divine Presence 

                        as it was coming to them through Jesus at that moment.

Brothers and sisters in the same craziness as Jesus.

 

And mother also, in whom the divine seed is planted and grows

            and is born and comes forth into the world.            Crazy.

 

Matthew chapter 25, the story Jesus told 

about when the king would come and separate the sheep and the goats,

            you know the one: 

“Lord, when was it that we saw you hungry and gave you food, 

            or thirsty and gave you something to drink? 

And when was it that we saw you a stranger and welcomed you, 

            or naked and gave you clothing? 

And when was it that we saw you sick or in prison and visited you?” 

 

And the answer, “Truly I tell you, just as you did it to one of the least 

            of these who are brothers and sisters, you did it to me.”

 

Jesus tells us in this story that these are the people he identifies with,

                                                                                                not the power brokers.

            Crazy the world would say.            

                                                Those people?!            Those losers?!

Just look at how our society treats the homeless poor, 

            the aliens seeking refuge and asylum at our borders, 

            those needing to access health care 

            and the incarcerated.

But I have seen that those people, the ones in need, 

            are those who get it about Love.  That’s where Jesus really is.

Crazy.

 

Our presiding bishop, Michael Curry, has referred to the followers of Jesus

            as crazy Christians.  He even wrote a book with that as the title.

This way of Love in the heart of Jesus is craziness to the world

            that will call it names 

            and call what is good evil and of the devil

                        and seek to discount, discredit, ignore and push it aside.

But when you experience being loved by Jesus 

            then you can get crazy too

                        in that life-giving, liberating way for others.

 

So at the heart of it all, this is all that I want to say.

            Don’t be afraid to get close to that Love, 

                                                                                    to get close to Jesus.

Give up resisting, give up the merit based theology  

            and accept the fact that you are just as much in need of a free gift of Love                         as anyone else.

Let yourself be loved by Jesus, 

                                                and go crazy in that good way with him.

 Give yourself to Love.