Sermon from June 9, 2024 by the Rev. Dr. Tara W. Bulger

For the past few weeks, we have been looking at the doctrines, or teachings, of the church. Today, we will look at the doctrine or teaching of salvation. Our reading comes from the book of Titus, the third chapter verses one through seven:

Remind them to be subject to rulers and authorities, to be obedient, to be ready for every good work, to speak evil of no one, to avoid quarreling, to be gentle, and to show every courtesy to everyone. For we ourselves were once foolish, disobedient, led astray, slaves to various passions and pleasures, passing our days in malice and envy, despicable, hating one another. But when the goodness and loving kindness of God our Savior appeared, he saved us not because of any works of righteousness that we had done, but according to his mercy, through the water of rebirth and renewal by the Holy Spirit. This spirit he poured out on us richly through Jesus Christ, our Savior, so that having been justified by His grace, we might become heirs according to the hope of eternal life.

In 2011, a novel called "To the End of The Land" by David Grossman was published. It's the story of a family who live in modern-day Israel. In part of the story, they have a 13-year-old son named Adam, who begins to show the first signs of obsessive-compulsive disorder. It starts with little things. He likes to count and count everything, but it slowly takes over Adam's life. He begins to count his steps that he must take across a room, and if it's not the right number of steps, he has to go back and do it again. 

He starts to obsess about different television shows that he watches. He always has to see them at the right place. And he begins to wash his hands compulsively after he touches anything. Adam's life is miserable because this compulsion has overtaken it until one day, his 9-year-old brother Ofer decides to take charge. Ofer gets an idea, and he says to his big brother, Adam, "Hey Adam, just for today, why don't I do the counting for you? Why don't I count for you the number of steps? Why don't I do that for you just for today? And you won't have to worry about it." And Adam says, okay. And so for one day, Adam doesn't do all of the counting and Ofer doesn't suffer from this disorder, so it's no problem for him to do it. 

And then the next day, Ofer says, "Hey Adam, just for today, why don't I be the one to wash my hands? I'll wash my hands and make sure they're clean and you won't have to worry about it." And Adam says, okay. And so Adam has this day where he's finally freed from this compulsion because Ofer is doing it for him. And little by little, this seemed to workfor Adam. It was something that worked when none of the doctors or psychiatrists he had visited could help him. Later in the novel, the mother is speaking to a friend, and she says, "I don't know how it happened. They played video games together. They made dinner together, they argued together, but somehow day by day, one of them saved the other." 

If you want to know what salvation is, at its core, it is the idea that we went about our lives day by day, and one of us saved all of us. That one person is the person of Jesus Christ, and he took on all of our sin and frailty, died for us, and saved us from the consequences of sin.

Maybe I should back up a bit. Last week we talked about what sin was, and there are a lot of different ways to talk about sin, but the one that resonates with me the most is that sin is a disruption in our relationship with God and in our relationship with one another. That's what sin is. We are to be a people who are focused on God and on loving one another. But sin is the thing that distorts that and disrupts that. The early church father Augustine called it, in Latin,incurvatus in se, which means the self turns inward on itself and is bent and broken. 

That's what sin does to us. You may remember from last week that we talked about personal sin, the things that we do that are wrong, to be sure, but we talked more about the idea that sin is a human condition. It is a part of who we are. Andbefore Christ, none of us could stand in front of God and claim that our relationship with God and one another wasn't distorted. All of humanity suffers from the condition of sin, which means that we can never do the right thing completely.If you think this isn't a part of humanity, I encourage you to think of standing before Almighty God, knowing that God knows everything you think and everything you've said and everything you've done, and God holds you up to the example of Christ. How'd you do? Not so good? Because sin has curved us into ourselves. But in the person of Jesus Christ, we are saved from that. 

That word save in the Bible has a lot of different meanings. Sometimes it has an adjudicatory definition, meaning we're saved from the consequences of something, like punishment. Sometimes save in the Bible means "to be healed." When Jesus heals the woman who is hemorrhaging, he says, go, your faith has saved you. The root word for save in Hebrew and in Greek means "to make spacious, to widen," and that's what being freed from sin does. It allows us to live not within the confines of sin, but in the bigger way that God has called us to live. But I think my favorite definition of save and salvation in the New Testament is the translation "to made well." 

Salvation means that Jesus Christ made well our relationship with God, where before we could not stand in the presence of God because of our sinfulness. Jesus has made us well in the work of the cross and saved us from our relationships with others, since they are not what they should be. Jesus makes us well and enables us to love our neighbor as ourselves. We are saved, made well of that condition of sin that defines humanity.

We are also made well in our personal lives of sin, in all of the ways that we stray from who God has called us to be. There are alcoholics who are able to stop drinking through the work of Jesus Christ. There are marriages that you thought could never be saved, but are through the work of Jesus Christ. We see over and over again through the power of Christ that we are saved from difficulty, but we're not struck perfect are we? 

We're not made sinless. I actually think that's God's grace too. If God took all of the sin out of my life, I might not even recognize myself. But instead, God graciously meets us where we are and begins this process of saving us slowly from our sins over time. That's a process called sanctification, another doctrine we'll get to on another day.

But the important part to remember is that our saving happened not when we were baptized or came to faith. Our saving happened on Golgotha, when Jesus Christ went to the cross for all of humanity, died, and rose again. That's when we were all saved from the consequences of sin and death. 

I love this passage from Titus because it clearly explains why God did this. It tells us that God saved us through Jesus Christ because of his loving-kindness. Love is at the root of God's saving of us. Just like Ofer loved his big brother Adam so much, he was willing to help him out of that compulsion. So too, out of God's love, are we saved in Jesus Christ. And the author of Titus would say, we should be so grateful for that salvation that you can see it in how we live our lives. The author of Titus wants Titus to know that you should live your life in such a way that you are a witness to God's saving grace, that we should be good citizens, that we should build a good society, that we should turn from our own sin when and where our will allows, trusting in God always to help us.

The good news is that while we were sinners, Christ died for us. We have been made well with God and with one another. Sometimes the process is slow. Sometimes my own sinfulness makes the process unbearably slow. But we are promisedin all things that Jesus Christ can make us well with God and with one another, and we look forward, with hope, to the second coming of Christ when all will be made wee. Until that day, let us never forget the saving grace of our Lord and Savior, Jesus Christ, which is rooted in nothing but loving-kindness. Amen.