Are you saved?

A sermon for the parish of St. Saviour, Penticton BC
Sunday, February 9^th 2025 / Fifth Sunday after the Epiphany
The Very Rev. Ken Gray

“Are you saved brother?” I used to hear this question a lot some years ago. It was spiritual lingua franca when I was coming into adulthood in the 1970s.  Christians, especially evangelicals, really wanted to know if friends, neighbours, colleagues—or the lady at the bus stop—were saved by the blood of Jesus. Of course what they really wanted to know was if they were saved. A certain insecurity led to overt and at times, annoying  curiosity.

It seems audacious to claim salvation for oneself, but this is how we have tended to read the bible, and the Gospels in particular. Put this way, the question is pretty self-centred. The written record and testimony of Jesus’ presence in our lives and in the life of the world is so much more profound, searching, and consequential. To reduce an assurance of salvation to verbal agreement with Romans 10:9, “If you declare with your mouth, ‘Jesus is Lord,’ and believe in your heart that God raised him from the dead, you will be saved” now seems to me awfully glib. Elsewhere Paul encourages us “to work out [y]our salvation with fear and trembling,  for it is God who works in you to will and to act in order to fulfill his good purpose. (PHILIPPIANS 2:12-13)

I don’t wish to deny the significance of a genuine moment of conversion. Evangelical churches are good at bringing people to a point of decision, for Christ; think of Billy Graham crusade altar calls. Catholic/Anglican traditions are better at nurturing believers through sanctification, in discovering “The Holy” within us and all around us. Despite growing up in an Anglican world where church, bible, Jesus, music, and friends were simply “there” I had my own conversion experience while accompanying a Lenten mid-week service in Victoria during Lent 1976. In time, the Spirit drove me forward to so much more spirit, a process continuing to this day. First experiences, such as an awareness of salvation are important—don’t call up the bishop and tell her that Ken no longer thinks salvation is important; (She may reply “Ken who?” or “not him again!)—but there’s more to faith than simply an awareness of sin. That said, Jesus speaks to Simon for instance:

“Put out into the deep water and let down your nets for a catch.” Simon answered, “Master, we have worked all night long but have caught nothing. Yet if you say so, I will let down the nets . . . When they had done this, they caught so many fish that their nets were beginning to break. So they signalled their partners in the other boat to come and help them. And they came and filled both boats, so that they began to sink. But when Simon Peter saw it, he fell down at Jesus’ knees, saying, ‘Go away from me, Lord, for I am a sinful man!’ . . . Then Jesus said to Simon, “Do not be afraid; from now on you will be catching people.” (LUKE 5:1-11, extracts)

Simon, a “sinful man” who will now fish for people. Then there’s Paul who reminds the Corinthians “of the good news that I proclaimed to you, which you in turn received, in which also you stand, through which also you are being saved . . .” Saved from what? The fires of hell? Estrangement from God through eternity? Saved from the perplexities of doubt, despair or self-loathing? The list can feel endless.

Alternatively, what then are we saved for? For each other? For Godly enjoyment? For the good of creation? Or as Malcolm Muggeridge described Mother Theresa, “Something beautiful for God.”

We are saved through the presence of Jesus in life, as he shared life and love with disciples, later to become apostles, who discovered his full presence through post-resurrection appearances. Of Jesus, they witnessed: “now we see you . . . now we don’t; but, what? You’re back.”  Paul tells the story this way:

“For I handed on to you as of first importance what I in turn had received: that Christ died for our sins in accordance with the scriptures, and that he was buried, and that he was raised on the third day in accordance with the scriptures, and that he appeared to Cephas, then to the twelve. Then he appeared to more than five hundred brothers and sisters at one time, most of whom are still alive, though some have died. Then he appeared to James, then to all the apostles.”

Paul personalizes this story: “Last of all, as to one untimely born, he appeared also to me. For I am the least of the apostles, unfit to be called an apostle, because I persecuted the church of God. But by the grace of God I am what I am, and his grace toward me has not been in vain.” (from 1 CORINTHIANS 15)

The consequence of all this, is that sin holds no power over the sinful who desire union with God. Later versions of “church” made this one process central in its thinking and liturgical practice. They overlaid the Jewish understanding of temple-based ritual atonement (at-one-ment) atop the witness of the early church. In doing so our forebearers have passed down to us a human-centric version of God’s Grace. Such a theology is not however the only way to understand and appreciate God’s gift of Salvation.

In a book titled Salvation Means Creation Healed: The Ecology of Sin and Grace: Overcoming the Divorce Between Earth and Heaven Howard Snyder and Joel Scandrett have distilled the entire Bible into four words: Salvation Means Creation Healed. They suggest that “our understanding of God’s salvation is far too limited. We understand salvation primarily as the salvation of individual humans, not the complete restoration of creation indicated by Romans 8 and Revelation 21 . . . The problem of sin is greater than we realized. It doesn’t just effect humanity’s relationship with God—it includes the suffering of all creation.”

Such teaching has directed my own witness and activism for some years now. Life with God, our relationship with and through salvation is not “all about us.” Neither is it restricted to the state of human beings or humanity itself. An experience of salvation received and conveyed connects us deeply with humanity, with all creation, and our Creator.

We have heard little from this year’s recent World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland. Other news has dominated news channels the past few weeks. But one person who attended Davos described seeing and hearing 19-year-old Nigerian-American poet Salome Agbaroji read her poem, HOPE. Her poem evidences a new prophetic voice, a clamor for justice, confidence, truth, and beauty. While the word “Salvation” is absent, the sense of salvation from despair, and salvation for truth and justice are equally present. Her poem ends with these words:

HOPE is not the way that we cope,
But the way that we conquer.
So this year and beyond,
We aren’t crossing our fingers,
We’re crossing finish lines.

Let’s write a finale worthy of applause
Because every life on this planet
Has its own narrative
Worthy and deserving
Of its own happily ever after.

Can I get an Amen?