Salvation: Saved from What?

Liturgical Materials for Sunday the 24^th of March, 2002

Mark Belletini, Minister First Unitarian Universalist Church of Columbus, Ohio

Opening Words [Next] [back to top]

We are here
in a first cold, and very cold week of spring
to worship, to give thanks for every moment
of our lives alone, and our lives together,
to remember the stores of liberation
that inspire us, and remind us
that to be humane is even better
than just being human. And to this end

may our reason and our passion keep us true to ourselves, true to each other,
and true to those shared visions of what we can together become….

Preface to the Silence [Next] [back to top]

The ancient stories of Passover
haunted my silences this week.
The familiar themes echoed in my head,
"No one is free unless all are free."
"We travel together, with our young and old."
"Freedom is urgent; we'll have no time to
let the bread rise."

And most amazing of all, "The waters
of the Red Sea did not split in two until
the first slaves dared to step into the water."

And so now I find myself wondering,
not why the ancients imagined
that seas could split in two,
but rather, why they ever imagined such courage, such trust, such confidence…
uncertain people walking forward into the water with faith that future freedom could open up
and be more wonderful than the predictable certainties of enslavement.
For in such risky hope is a wonder greater than rivers turning to blood, or seas rolling back like wings.

Save me, I pray today, from the certainties
That bind me up tight, and turn me toward the uncertainties that reveal just how spacious and wide the future can be when my hope does not make hesitation its god, and my mouth renounces for all time the terrible phrase: "Yes, but…"

To my hope for a more spacious future, yes.
Pure Yes, I mean, pure as bread without yeast,
pure Yes, no one left behind…

Now let silence hold this Yes in its great arms…

Silence

"We shall go with our young and old," the ritual reads. And so we do to this very day.

Remembering all those who are on our journey with us, the young and the old, the sick and the lonely, the loving and the difficult, we bring to our silent heart (or our speaking mouths), the sounds that are their names, that we might remember we are all in this together.

Naming

Hope glides across the waters toward us like a swan, the poet Mary Oliver reminds us all. The time to claim our freedom doesn't arrive tomorrow; it glides toward our shore right now, for it's "in the imagination with which we perceive the world, and in the gestures with which we honor it," the poet reminds us, that our true lives begin…

First Reading [Next] [back to top] comes from the scroll of Shemoth, found in the Torah, which we know by its Latin name of Exodus, meaning, The Book of Going Forth. It was put in final form c.500 BCE by an editor we think was named Ezra, from the strands of four distinct authors who had composed pieces of this story over a period of 500 years.

And so the great Joseph died, and all of his family, and their generations. A new king, who did not know of the story of how Joseph saved Egypt, was crowned in Egypt.

He said to the people: "Look at how many immigrants there are these days! Far too many! And see how their influence grows! We must handle this situation well, lest their numbers grow so much they take sides with our enemies in some war, revolt against us, and then escape." So from that day he put the Israelites under order to report to labor gangs. This was to crush them down with heavy labor. They built the treasure-towns of Pi Thom and Rameses for the king. But the more they were oppressed, the more they multiplied, until the Egyptians came to resent the Israelites deeply.

Then the Egyptian King called two midwives to court, midwives often used by slaves. One was named Shifra, the other, P'ua. He said to them: When you are delivering a Hebrew mother as she sits on the birthing stool, note right away if it's a boy or a girl. If it's a boy, kill it. Let the girls live. But the midwives held God in awe, and they disobeyed the king, and saved the male children. The king called them back to court.

"What is it I hear?" he cried.

"You have let the male children live."

"You don't understand," Shifra and P'ua said. "Unlike Egyptian women, the Hebrew women are very lively, and their labor is over so fast they have delivered before we even show up!"

So it was that the Hebrew population thickened across the land, and the midwives themselves thickened with pregnancies of their own, since they held G-d in higher regard than the king.

Second Reading [Next] [back to top] is excerpted from a brilliant theological essay by Genna Rae McNeil, with the long title, "Waymaking and Dimensions of Responsibility… an African American perspective on Salvation, from 1999 Beacon Press book: Waymaking and Dimensions of Responsibility An African American Perspective on Salvation Genna Rae McNeil.

It is of enormous significance that for centuries, countless African American Christians have affirmed "Salvation" as vitally connected with spaciousness, deliverance, rescue, liberation or freedom, consistent with the original Hebrew understanding of Yashua. In the African American experience, the nature of salvation is to provide space - physical and spiritual - in which to function as a free being.

For theologian Howard Thurman, the mark of a free being was the unshakable belief that "no experience, no event at any particular moment in time or space exhausts what life is trying to do," there ought not be the sinking down of "our hopes and our dreams and our yearnings to the level of the events of our lives." Salvation challenges each believer to assume responsibility for self and nurture within the society. Living one's faith and transmitting the message of salvation are part and parcel of recognizing one's responsibility for human nurture.

Such salvation includes three critical elements. First, salvation is a revolutionary spaciousness and freedom through the assertion of inner authority, breaking bonds of confinement and invalidating the reality of dead-ends. To have salvation is to know through experience and faith that, in Martin Luther King's words, "God will make a way out of no way."

Second, to be saved is to have engaged in dissent and resistance. Having salvation is to transpose terrors, absurdities, angst, depression, and all manner of external and mental demons into a new harmonious song.

Third, to be saved is to live acknowledging the reality of infinite creative possibilities, the inexhaustibility of hope, and a divine invitation for all persons - regardless of race, class or sex - to experience life.

Sermon - Salvation: Saved from What? [Next][back to top]

A few years ago, before the City Hall of New York City turned 42nd Street and Broadway into the glitzy, blinding neon showplace it is today, it used to be a totally different place.

I didn't know that when I went there, of course, back in the spring of 1990. I hadn't even intended on visiting that part of the City. I had just been riding the endless New York City subways for a couple of hours. (This seems weird to some folk, I know, but exploring the underground train systems of the great cities of the world brings unexplainable joy to me. Just trust me. And the New York system is clearly the best, the biggest, and the most complex on the planet. I was in subway heaven.)

Anyway, I had seen both the movie and the musical called "42nd Street," and read books about its heyday. So I decided to check out the venerable site myself. I wanted to see the glitter, glamour and glitz with my own eyes.

When I came up to the street, however, there were no neon lights, no dazzling marquees. There was darkness silvered by only a few streetlights. 42nd Street and Broadway had clearly fallen onto hard times.

As I walked down the street, thinking that maybe I had come to the wrong exit, and looking for the expected dazzle, I saw instead such human degradation that I could hardly believe my eyes. Drug dealers on every corner, heroin and crack-cocaine users lying in every gutter, needles and spoons at their side. Drunks sprawled everywhere under the boarded-up theaters with letters hanging precariously off the damaged marquees.

Collapsing buildings with cornices hanging loose, and trash pasted to the glistening streets by a soft and misty rain. As I scurried along, practically running to the nearest subway entrance a block away, hookers called to me, addicts begged me for hard cash, and tough and undeniably scary-looking punks reviled me for even being there.

As I moved toward the nearest subway, however, which I calculated to be only a block away, I suddenly saw a strange neon blue glow peeping out from behind a tall building. With every step I took, the glow grew brighter, until it began to come into view. Rising high above the end of the street, a bright neon sign! I saw the word "Jesus" made of blue light come into full view. But as I continued to walk, another word began to come into focus. And I did not see what I expected, namely, the ubiquitous "Jesus saves" sign. Instead I saw this phrase, "Jesus knows."

Whoever commissioned the sign, I figured, was a realist. I reasoned that whatever church official created that sign took one look at 42nd Street and realized that even the other-worldly salvation of the Christ they preach would have little meaning to people already living in Hell, a Hell that would have shocked Dante himself.

"Jesus knows," the sign said. In other words, "Let's not even talk about saving anybody from this present Hell, because we can't imagine how that could be done. All we can honestly say is that Jesus must know and simply weeps with you."

You have to give them points for a certain amount of humility.

Now visiting 42nd Street in 1990 was hardly the first time I have visited Hell. I have been there a few times in my life… to hospital rooms where those I love are dying by inches, to neighbor-hoods where gangs and poverty rule like tyrants, and hard drugs destroy families and nearby lives. Sometimes even sitting in the comfort of my office, I hear stories right on the phone that sound as if they are coming up straight from hell, so horrible and impossible are the circumstances they describe to me. And whenever I visit these hellish places, I find myself thinking about the possible meanings of the word "salvation." After all, the idea of leaving people to suffer and die in their own misery hardly sounds anything less than completely heartless, and I have to wonder what might save them.

Now some of us here who were raised in conservative Christian traditions will surely feel some discomfort even hearing the tainted word "salvation." Some will surely tell me that you were taught that hell comes after death, and that salvation has to do with Jesus saving people later, not now, and that you gave up believing such nonsense long ago, and are not so sure you want to even hear the word "salvation" talked about at all.

But I assure you that the Christian tradition that taught you such things was not the tradition out of which this church grew All the way back in 1828, yes 1828, the Unitarian Christian, William Ellery Channing, the so-called Father of North American Unitarianism, wrote the following amazing words:

"Human ignorance is seen in the low ideas attached to the word 'salvation.' People think that salvation is something which another may achieve for them. The word Hell, which all persons acquainted with Jewish geography know to be a metaphor… this word has done unspeakable injury. It has possessed the diseased human imagination with thoughts of torture, and turned their thoughts to Jesus as someone outside them who will deliver them. But the salvation which humanity needs is not from outside things, but is from the evil within the mind, which hardens itself against love, which makes gain its god, which shuts itself up in a dungeon of self-interest, which consents to be a slave, and which allows itself to be formed by custom, opinion and changing events. To save, in the highest sense of that word, is to heal the diseased mind, and restore it to freedom of thought, conscience and love."

You see, our Unitarian ancestors like Channing were never literalistic or cruel about their understanding of the Christian religion. They knew 170 years ago that Hell was a figure of speech, and that we did not need to be saved from a figure of speech. For our ancestors, Jesus' death was no different than our own; he was just a human being. His death saved nothing.

Of course, plenty of modern people in America think that everyone here needs to be saved from hellfire, which they assure us is real. They believe that the Jewish teacher Jesus was a God who allows people to go to Hell after they die to languish in misery for all eternity. Personally, I think such doctrines are foolish, cruel and mean-spirited.

It strikes me as sad that so many people think Hell happens after we die, and not before, as I have witnessed a thousand times in my life. And I suppose I will have to live with that sadness the rest of my life. For if the reality of Auschwitz all by itself does not convince absolutely everyone that Hell is on this side of the mystery of death, then I for one cannot come up with any better evidence. I'm not sure I would survive finding such evidence.

Channing knew almost 200 years ago that "salvation" said something about this world. But, along with Genna McNeil, the theologian of our second reading, I decided to go back to the Hebrew texts of the Western Scriptures. I found, somewhat to my surprise, that words translated as "save" and "salvation" are found 400 times in the Hebrew and Greek tests. However, there is not one word that actually means "salvation" in the modern Evangelical sense.

No, you heard me, not one.

In the Hebrew scriptures, the word "yashua" is translated salvation, but it actually means something more like "safety" or "ease" in English. "Teshua" means the same thing. "Soterion" in the New Testament means "soundness" or "safety." "Soter," the word for Savior, actually just means healer, one who makes whole; and thus we should not be surprised that medical doctors like the great Hippokrates were also called "soter, healer," because that was their business.

And last of all there is the Hebrew word "chayah," the meaning of which you already know in a slightly different form. Have you not raised a glass in toast sometime, and whether you are Jewish or not, said, "L'chayim"? To Life!

In the story from Shemoth/Exodus you heard this morning, the story of the two midwives, Pu'a and Shifra, the editor uses that word, "chaya," when it says that they "save" the baby boys.

How do they save the baby boys? They "save" the babies by refusing to kill them. They "save" the babies by daring to resist and refrain from following orders to kill. They "save" the babies by refusing to cooperate with a clear injustice.

What they did saved the babies. It was an act of salvation as the Western Scriptures understand it, not swaggering television preachers.

To save, in short, is to bless life, not death. To save someone is therefore to enhance their possibility of life, to make life easier for them, safer for them.

My own doctor once saved me. I had a case of conjunctivitis, "pink-eye" it's often called. And it looked terrible. I was afraid I was going to lose my sight. The doctor set me at ease, however, ease, "yashua" in Hebrew. She made me feel safe by telling me that pink-eye looks worse than it is, that I had nothing to worry about, and that she would give me some salve (a clear cognate of the word salvation!) which would fix things up in a jiff. She defused my panic, and set me at ease; and my healing, my return to soundness of eye, and thus sight, began.

Now Channing was a man relatively at ease. He lived in a nice house, had national fame, was esteemed even by his enemies as a good and gracious man. He lived at a time when, and in a city where, poverty and degradation were not as exorbitant as they are in our own age and city. He did not trip over drug users on his way to the church. He did not often have to witness Hell on Charles Street. So, unexposed to great doses of Hell on earth, and having already decided that "salvation" was a this-worldly event, Channing tried to make it "psychological."

The salvation humanity needs, he says, is not from outside things, but is from the evil within the mind, which hardens against love and shuts itself up in a dungeon of self interest.

This is all well and good, I suppose. Learning to love better, to be more generous of spirit, is all to the better, sure, I agree.

But, my life has not convinced me that Hell is simply bad intentions in the mind, selfishness and a hard heart. I am sure that some of these problems contribute to the building up of Hells on this earth, but in my experience, people don't just need to be saved from their minds, but from their conditions and situations.

How will this happen? Well, the blue sign I saw in New York was not all wrong. "Jesus knows," the sign said. This is a touching statement. The gospels after all go out of their way to tell us that the human teacher Jesus made it his goal to spend time with the sick, the poor, the downtrodden and the scapegoats of his society. He did not shield his eye from the tears of the world. He actually knew something about the hard conditions of life. Like some sort of Jewish Hippocrates, he seems to have had a knack for helping people get better, to become more healthy and sound of body.

But the teacher is dead now and has no power to save anybody on this side of death or on any other side. So what then is to be done by those of us who live? Is it possible that the work of salvation, of abolishing Hell on earth as we have abolished Hell after death, is something that belongs to us?

Genna McNeil certainly thinks so. She says that, for her kind of African American religion, "the nature of salvation is to provide space… physical and spiritual.. in which to function as a human being." She reminds us that to be saved is to be "responsible for human nurture." To be saved, therefore, is to participate in tearing down the structures imprisoning those who cannot save themselves. Like the midwives in the store, to be saved, says McNeil so elegantly, is "to invalidate the reality of dead-ends," in the world. It's "to have engaged "in dissent and resistance." It's to promote the "inexhaustibility of hope."

These are great lines, more in line with what the Western Scriptures actually say. They are very inspiring to me. But, unlike Channing, I think that these words need to apply to real Hells on earth, not mere psychological ones. And remember, one of the definitions of Hell is that it's a place you can't just leave on your own accord.

So, for me, to be saved is to not just tell men lying in their own vomit on the street to just pick themselves up by their own bootstraps and start dancing. Instead, to be saved is to work together to build up the best possible treatment programs for men so broken.

To be saved is to never preach little homilies on love to abusive husbands. It's to pack up the abused wife and move her out pronto.

To be saved is not to preach to a mother in the fourth generation of poverty to just get up and go to work at McDonald's for minimum wage, a salary with which she cannot even pay the sitter. It's to work with social agencies, and in the realm of politics, long and hard enough to slowly change the whole situation and "invalidate the dead end."

To be saved is not to tell drug addicts strung out on speed, crack cocaine, or even ecstasy or alcohol to "just say no." It's certainly not to lecture anyone on how they shouldn't have gotten onto drugs in the first place, or accuse them of moral weakness. To be saved in this case is to work steadily to change the whole attitude in this country about drugs, addiction and responsibility, and to encourage holistic treatments that treat the person as a person, and not a bag full of symptoms.

To be saved is not to tell a person with brain chemistry out of whack that they just can go it alone without their expensive medication because the insurance industries will not pay for such medications. To be saved is to begin to work to transform the American health-care system into something humane.

To be saved is to be a real Universalist, to say that soundness and ease and safety, i.e. salvation, belong to everyone equally. It's to not only preach against the concept of torture in the next world, but to work to stop torture, and a lack of safety, soundness and ease in this world. To be saved is to understand the power of mutuality. In the children's story this morning, the great Bellini and the fragile Mirette saved each other, gave each other spaciousness and soundness, even though they were very different. There are, after all, no excuses and no exceptions for a Universalist.

There are several opportunities available right now in this congregation to be saved in a most practical way… we need someone to coordinate the Friday afternoon meal transportation down to Faith Mission, and bodies who can take the time to do the deliveries. We need bodies…lots of them… at the BREAD meeting on April 22 to pressure for justice in the Health Care arena in Columbus. These are all opportunities for real, practical salvation for us all. I pray some of us might be able to find the time to share in this great work.

So from now on, if someone buttonholes you to ask if you "are saved, " don't get indignant, say "No, not yet, but I am working on it… both for me and the people with whom I share this planet. Would you like to join me in being a savior?"

That's right, there is no arrogance at all in choosing to call oneself a savior. It's arrogance, rather, to refuse to be a savior. It's arrogance to refuse to do the work that all religious people of good will have been called to… to douse hell here on earth, and let the garden of paradise grow once again under our feet… safe, secure, sound, spacious, resistant, and free. Like the Jesus in the sign on 42nd Street, we have to know these things deep inside us, and then we can begin to be saved, by how we let that knowledge transform us and our ways in the world. It will take time, sure, and lots of creativity we don't know we have yet, but really, can you imagine a better use of your time, your life, and your love?

Prayer of Going Forth [back to top]

May our exodus in this season look like this: that we go forth and notice, actually notice, the buds slowly sleeving every branch in lace. That we go forth and allow ourselves to be moved to some real response by those who beg at freeway exits. That we allow ourselves to wonder, "What has passed over them in this season of Passover? Can I do anything to hasten their salvation?"

That we go forth remembering that daffodils don't give a whit about our problems… they just haul off with this spring business and beauty us into a state we can barely escape.

May we try not to escape.

That we go forth remembering that there is much festal bread to share, and many seas to cross, and fiery bushes are burning everywhere, calling to us, yes, calling to every one of us. Amen.

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