May the words of my mouth, and the meditations of all our hearts,
be acceptable to you, O Lord, our strength and our redeemer” AMEN.
“If you confess with your lips
that Jesus is Lord and
believe in your heart that God
raised him from the dead,
you will be saved.”
I was raised in the deep South.
Jacksonville is in the Northeast corner of Florida.
Trust me, it is not Miami.
It’s Georgia – somewhere between Hotlanta and the backwoods.
When I was a child, it was a fairly common event
for someone to ask: “Are you saved?”
The question could come from a friend or classmate. From a neighbor or a complete stranger. It might shout out from a billboard,
with big block letters in black and white.
With cartoonish red-hot flames
licking at the edges of the words.
“Are you saved?!”
You might find this question shouting out
from a graffiti message on a bathroom door,
or on a Bible tract conspicuously left in a phone booth.
For a long time that question made me squirm.
Honesty I’m not sure I understood what they were asking. At times I have envied those who could say with certainty
“Yes, I’ve been saved.”
Don’t get me wrong. Jesus does save. I know that to be true. That is why God became flesh and dwelt among us. To save us. All of us. But exactly what does that mean? To be saved? How does it happen? What should we expect?
At Yale Divinity School, there are students from 40 different Christian denominations. Forty! I had no idea there could be so many.
And that’s not even an exhaustive list.
Why do you imagine there are so many?
I think part of the reason is that we humans have a hard time agreeing on exactly what it means to be saved. I don’t have the Big answer. But it is a question that, as Christians, we can live into. In some ways, our salvation is something we continue to work out for our entire lives.
The reading tells us” “If you confess with your lips that Jesus is Lord and believe in your heart that God raised him from the dead, you will be saved.”
It sounds pretty simple – cut and dried.
First you are in a state of condemnation—
Then you do these things:
Confess with your mouth and believe in your heart -- And now you’re saved. Voila.
On the one hand, we truly have been saved in an instant. In our holy baptism we are “sealed as Christ’s Own Forever!” Forever.
We witnessed that last week at this font.
Those of us who were present got to renew our baptismal covenant. Isn’t it great that our liturgy reminds us to whom we belong?
Every time we attend a baptism we get to use our entire bodies, our voices and our breath, to affirm what God has already done for us.
It’s been done by the grace of God through Jesus Christ.
Some of us might even recall a particular moment in time, when we asked for God’s mercy, or when we asked Jesus to save us.
We have a memory that stays with us of the exact moment we believe to be our conversion.
For me, there have been many such moments in time. Many experiences of conversion.
Once, when I was about 20 years old, I was really struggling. I found it hard to believe that God cared about saving me. I was coming out of a very rebellious period of time. It was hard to imagine that God could love me.
During this time, I spent a week at the beach with my parents. One day I went out for a run, thinking that the exercise would help me feel better. After a couple of miles, it started to rain fairly hard, so I turned around and headed back along the beach, walking in hip-deep water, with the rain coming down hard. I was crying.
Obviously the endorphins did not have the desired effect. So, desperate for relief, I decided to sing. Singing always makes me feel better. The words that came were from Psalm 63: “Oh God, thou art my God. Early will I seek thee. My soul thirsts for thee in a dry and barren land where no water is.”
Here I was in hip-deep water, in the pouring rain, weeping. Singing about a dry and thirsty land without water. The irony was not lost on me.
Suddenly I found myself laughing. This was a conversion experience for me, to realize that just because I am not aware of God’s presence does not mean that God is absent.
In that moment I was coming to believe in my heart --- not so much that Christ was raised from the dead – but that He loves me.
That He is with me, holding me, even in my darkest moments. There was consolation in that experience. Could it be that, in my own baptism, I had been “sealed as Christ’s own forever”?
We are fortunate when we are gifted with
these conversion moments. And yet, conversion is not just about a single moment in time -- is it?
Last week, Marilyn used the image of our kitchen cabinets – She had expected to send them out and have them restored in a week or two.
But the process took months of work to carefully
remove the layers of grime and veneer that had accumulated over decades. Salvaging the wood – transforming it -- took time.
It involved a painstakingly slow process.
I want to take a moment to tell you a story
that should help us gather all these things together:
The idea of being saved -- and the event of our baptism with a capital “B” –
meaning that baptism that happens at the font
or in the river Jordan. We want to gather this together with all those life experiences –
those baptisms with a little ‘b” that help us grow in Christ as we continue to work out our salvation.
So, here’s the story:
About 12 years ago, I was at an Academy Awards party. I lived in Southern California at the time, where watching the Oscars on TV is like gathering to watch the Super Bowl when your home team is playing. That year, Roberto Benigni’s film Life is Beautiful was nominated for 7 awards. Do some of y’all remember that movie?
Life is Beautiful was set in Nazi Germany.
The main character – a young father named Guido – uses his gifts of humor and imagination to help save the life of his young son.
Though the film was set during the holocaust,
more than anything it was a love story.
It was about the love of a father for his son.
A love so deep and generous that this father would gladly give up his own life for his son.
The film won three Oscars, including Best Actor and Best Foreign Language Film.
I will never forget the way Roberto Begnini literally glided across the tops of the auditorium seats as he danced his way onto the stage to receive his Oscar. He didn’t just embody pure joy, he gushed with it. As the camera panned across the audience, other actors and directors looked at him almost in disbelief. How could anyone be so shamelessly joyful? But it was how Begnini began his acceptance speech
that struck the deepest chord: In that wonderful thick Italian accent, he said: First, I want to thank my parents for giving me the greatest gift of all: Poverty.
“What!? Poverty?!”
I certainly was not expecting him to say that.
And neither was any of the other umpteen millions who were watching. The faces in that audience were absolutely stunned. Some even appeared to be a little bit horrified. Begnini was not being glib. He simply could not contain his joy. He beamed: “I want to thank them for the gift of poverty!” You could tell he meant what he said with every fiber of his being.
But what could he mean by “poverty”?
And what does it have to do with our salvation?
In today’s Gospel, Jesus has just been baptized in the Jordan; He is full of the Holy Spirit.
Our own baptism is a sacrament through which we enter Jesus’s story. We don’t just read about it or observe it from a safe distance. We actually become a part of it. We are right there with him.
Immediately after his baptism, Jesus headed into
the wilderness where he was tempted.
In this season of Lent we too are invited to go into the Wilderness. We are invited to enter a time of honest reflection. To gather up anything that blocks us from an awareness of God’s love and deep generosity toward us.
For some of us, it might be a broken relationship,
an old disappointment, or fear about what the future holds.
Perhaps it is just a general sense of boredom or
loss of any sense of meaning in life. Whatever is weighing us down, Lent is a time when we are invited to gather it up, to prepare to lay it all at the foot of the cross.
It takes courage and a willingness to be that vulnerable. To take stock of ourselves in such a way that we can acknowledge and sit with our own poverty. Believe me, we are all poor.
To be willing to do that -- even just a little bit --
is a tremendous gift that opens the door.
For those of you, who were not able to be with us on Ash Wednesday, I encourage you to pray the Litany of Penitence. You’ll find it in the Ash Wednesday service in the Book of Common Prayer. Or you can Google it!
It is absolutely beautiful – and it covers everything. You do not want to miss this!
Getting on our knees and praying those prayers is a way to ground the season of Lent, to make it real for ourselves. Because it is real.
Each year we are invited to make this sacred journey. Each year we have the opportunity to go a little deeper.
We are fond of saying that we are Easter people, living in the resurrection of Christ.
But, if we truly want to be Easter people –
if we want to experience all the richness and holiness of what that means, we have to be willing to venture, time and again, into the wilderness of our own hearts. It is there, with Christ, that we are saved.
