Pastor, Western Presbyterian Church
Washington, D.C.
March 7, 2010
Text: Luke 13:1-9
About a month ago, I delivered a sermon in which I described and critiqued the church’s traditional teaching about salvation. These doctrines have what is called an objective view of salvation. We are the objects of God’s redemptive work, basically bystanders while God accomplishes our redemption in the death and resurrection of Jesus. God takes away our sins; sins we are incapable of removing ourselves.
While such a theology has a certain allure (it is always great to have someone else do odious tasks for us) and a certain amount of truth (our sins are greater than our ability to atone for them), this approach to salvation leaves many of us cold. It is rooted in a worldview we no longer embrace. It envisions a judge-like God angrily demanding satisfaction for the sins of humanity, a satisfaction humanity cannot provide. Switching from anger to grace, God is forced to become human to make the sacrifice on our behalf.
An omnipotent, omniscient God can only come up with a plan that entails sending Jesus into the world to die a brutal death on a cross for us? This is simply too weird by half for many of us in the 21st century. Indeed, it was too weird for many of us in the 20th century.
While our tradition’s explanation as to how salvation is accomplished may leave us cold, the desire to believe that one is redeemed, saved, made whole, call it what you want, remains at the heart of our spiritual quest. One of my favorite contemporary Gospel songs, a tune by Jessy Dixon, has as its chorus, “If anybody asks you, just who I am, tell them I am redeemed.” A huge part of my self-understanding/identity is that of a person redeemed by God. I am not just John. I am also Redeemed.
So dissatisfied with traditional teachings on redemption but very much wanting an explanation for my profound sense of being redeemed, I have always kept an eye out for explanations of how God redeems us. While I was doing my PhD work in systematic theology years ago, I was pleased to learn that many, many of the church’s greatest theologians had the same dissatisfaction with orthodox teaching. They came up with explanations of how God redeems us that are more consistent with Jesus’ ministry than the traditional teaching on atonement.
During my doctoral program, I was blessed with some amazing professors—women and men who had astounding intellects and hearts filled with faith, hope and love. I have never worked so hard academically. For each of my five comprehensive exams I read more books than I read for all my courses combined in seminary. However, it was easy to work hard when the results were so important.
Among my professors was Elizabeth Johnson, a Sisters of St. Joseph nun who remains a major feminist theologian at Fordham University. Dr. Johnson contends that in today’s world, the questions about God’s redemptive work are no longer oriented toward what God has saved us from. We aren’t as concerned as our ancestors with righting a wrong committed by Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden. Instead we want to know what God has saved us for. Put in other words, we are not so concerned with undoing past sins as we are with living faithful lives in the present and future.
Why has God put us here on earth? To what end does God forgive us our sins? These are the questions that motivate our spiritual journeys.
From such questions flow the conundrum of human freedom. Are we truly free to live the life to which we feel God is calling us or are we constrained by sin and other realities that limit our ability to act freely? There are many today who believe that, at best, we are perhaps free and, at worst, not free at all. They contend that our freedom, if it even exists, is extremely limited by forces, internal and external, that are greater than us.
For example, some scholars suggest genetics determine human behavior. Following this theory, if we come from a family system inundated with depression, our days on earth are doomed to be covered by the dark cloud of depression. If we come from a long line of alcoholics, particularly males in that family have a high likelihood that they too will become alcoholics. Such theories are sophisticated forms of the biology is destiny argument that has been used to limit and box in women, people of color and others since the beginning of time.
Others say our economic and sociological surroundings, not human freedom, determine our choices and decisions. So they argue: because poor people live in bad housing conditions or their kids attend deteriorating schools, they won’t be able to be able to accomplish much. People who grow up in an abusive family are told they will likely be abusers themselves. According to these theorists, our environment is more determinative of the outcomes of our lives than any other factor. The primary difference between the outcome of a child in a bad neighborhood in Calcutta and a child in Montgomery County is the happenstance of them being born where they were born.
Conspiracy theories are another attack on human freedom. Conspiracy advocates suggest that everything is controlled by dark, insidious forces working behind the scenes. Listening to such disempowering nonsense, we begin to question whether our actions can make any difference in the world.
Modern theories suggesting that we are not masters of our own destiny are the latest form of predestination. Rather than being theologically rooted as has happened in the past, they are rooted in pseudo-science. Their attack on human freedom is a powerful subtext in our culture today.
A gang recruits a kid saying, “Who do you think you can be on your own? You’re a Salvadoran living in the U.S. What chance do you have to succeed in life? If you don’t become one of us, you will be nothing. We can shape your life. You cannot.” The gang claims for itself redemptive power to infuse the young person’s life with direction, purpose and meaning. A company says to an employee, “If you don’t like what we are doing, go and try to find another job. Good luck.” It is a modern version of threatening to cast people into the darkness where they will weep and gnash their teeth. The company suggests that the employee is powerless apart from it.
Every individual in each generation faces the question: “Am I my own person, in control of my own destiny or am I ruled by forces beyond my control?” No one stated the question more succinctly than Shakespeare when young Hamlet wonders, “To be or not to be.” To Hamlet, the choice is ours. Jesus told us precisely the same thing.
In our Gospel lesson, Jesus tells his listeners that the first step to redemption is repentance. Acknowledging our failures is how we start taking control of our lives. Freeing ourselves of the past, we open ourselves to a future in which we have new choices and options.
Jesus then went on to tell a parable about a fig tree that wasn’t fruitful. A landowner told his gardener to cut the fig tree down. The gardener became the tree’s advocate, asking for time to fertilize the tree and give it another chance to grow. Parenthetically, it is a wonderful illustration of how humans can be advocates for the trees, animals, waters and other parts of the creation.
The gardener knew what the landowner ignored. Life is not a simple matter of being or not being productive. Productivity can be increased with application of human will power to a project. As we assert our free will, as did the gardener, things change. The fruitless becomes fruitful.
Redemption is not about some cosmic re-balancing of the scales of justice as traditional theological doctrine suggests. It is not about being washed by the blood of Jesus. It is about God restoring, every day, our ability to make free choices in faithful, hopeful and loving ways. God’s redemptive act is the ongoing re-creation of free will in the midst of a family system plagued with addiction, in the heart of a devastated neighborhood in Haiti, in the center of an organization filled with corruption, in the soul of a person who has just been told that she is terminally ill.
We are free to abuse or be abused. We are free to reject being abusers or victims of abuse. We are free not to care for our bodies, destroying them with an unhealthy diet and lack of exercise. We are free to care for our bodies by treating them as the holy temples they are.
We see this redemptive process at work every day in the choices people freely make here at Western. Volunteers freely and joyfully come to feed the homeless; enable 200 of some of the world’s poorest people in Addis Ababa to receive monthly medical care; create a loving, affirming church environment for our kids here. We see it as people search through the rubble in Haiti and Chile looking for life; as LGBT folks say “I do” in a marriage ceremony; as many members of Congress refuse to accept our overpriced, non-universal health care system as fated to continue as is.
In one of the most beautiful passages in Scripture, the prophet Isaiah records God asking us, “Why do you spend your money for that which is not bread, and your labor for that which does not satisfy? Listen carefully to me, and eat what is good, and delight yourselves in rich food. Incline your ear, and come to me; listen, so that you may live. I will make with you an everlasting covenant….” Why do we spend our money on foolish things and work so many hours on matters that ultimately leave us unsatisfied? Why do we eat and drink that which leaves us simply wanting more to eat and drink? The choices are ours.
As we come to the Lord’s Table this morning, let us incline our ear to God and listen so that we may choose life, a redeemed life built on choices freely made and freely lived. Salvation is about God’s offer of freedom. Freedom to live faithfully not sinfully. Freedom to overcome the circumstances into which we are born or live. Freedom to manage rather than be managed by our own genes or health. Let us embrace the freedom with which God blesses us.
Let us pray: Gracious God, you save us by giving us the opportunity to save ourselves. Help us to embrace our freedom and make the choices we see Jesus making, the choices we see his faithful disciples making throughout history. As we do so, may the sense of our own limitless possibilities grow and produce the fruits of faithfulness. Amen.