Isaiah
12:2-6
I spent a little time last week thinking about
the word “salvation” and if I ever hear it outside of a religious context. The answer to that is “almost never”. Then I thought about the word “save” and
asked the same question. The answer to
that is “all the time”. Think about how
often you will see advertisements telling you how much you can save if you buy
now. Every bank invites you to save with
them. You might take a shortcut to save
time. Blocking a field goal might save
the game. A lot of saving goes on, but
only a person experiences salvation.
On the other hand, maybe we just
don’t use the word enough. Maybe we’ve
shoved it over into the corner to drag out on a Sunday morning and then push it
back out of the way after the benediction.
That’s too bad, because God is in the salvation business and if we
overlook how busy that keeps him, we end up overlooking the good that happens
from Monday to Saturday.
Kathleen Norris has written a good
book called Amazing Grace: A Vocabulary
of Faith in which she describes how a lot of religious terms like
“salvation” have come to mean something to her.
Often it has been through the Monday to Saturday experiences. As far as “salvation” goes, though, she
writes that she learned about it on a Sunday morning, but not in church. Here’s part of the story.
“It was Sunday morning, and with people
driving to church, traffic on our normally quiet street had picked up. I sat in our kitchen – my husband was still
asleep – and listened to our friend’s story. …
He had been raised in western North Dakota,
not far from our town, and when we first met him he was, like many young men,
working various jobs in the oil fields.
The boom was on, in the late 1970s and early 1980s, and he was fearless,
one of those death-defying people who actually like the roughest, meanest, most
dangerous jobs on a rig. He’d made a
bunch of money, and had drunk through much of it. Most days, to get through the shift on the
oil rig, he would take a little speed.
The cheap stuff, known as crank.
Much of it home-made.
He was between jobs now, visiting his parents
and kid brothers. He had thought of
working the pipeline in Alaska; he knew some people who were making big money
there. But he had met some drug dealers
in Wyoming and dreamed up a scheme with them to make even more money. He came back home, he told me, because it had
gotten too rough for him. …
He said that he had thought things were
working out fine. He and the guy he was
in business with were making good contacts, setting up a network, and he felt
lucky to have fallen in with someone with so much experience. Then, one day, as they were driving on the
outskirts of the small city that was to be the base of their operations, his
friend veered, suddenly, onto the shoulder of the road. He had seen an acquaintance driving past in
the other direction and was debating whether to turn his car around and follow
him. ‘I need to kill him,’ he said matter-of-factly, reaching for a gun that
our friend had not known was stashed under the front seat. ‘I need to kill him but he’s with someone,
and I don’t know who. So it’ll have to
wait.’
‘It was right then I decided to get out,’ he
said. ‘This was over my head.’ And that is salvation, or at least the
beginning of it.”[1]
After I read that, it occurred to me
that yes, the man had been saved, but given the stuff he’d been mixed up in, if
his former associate lived long enough and happened to pass him on the road one
day and recognize him, then he might need to be saved again. Salvation is not just a once-and-done
experience. It’s a way of life. It’s having someone with us in the car when
unknown danger drives by. It’s having
somebody beside us who is not part of our mess.
It’s having somebody to turn to when you need to take refuge. It’s having someone to listen when we need to
confess what we’ve gotten mixed up in.
Salvation is someone who can keep us safe.
The witness of the scriptures is
that there is someone like that, who is on hand all the time. It is someone who spoke clearly to that man’s
heart and mind when he suddenly saw the danger he had chosen to live with. It is someone who reaches out to us in those
crisis moments, but who stays with us as things get better, too. Isaiah identified that someone.
“Surely God is my salvation;
I will trust, and will not be afraid,
for the Lord God is my strength and my might;
he has become my salvation.” [Isaiah 12:2]
I will trust, and will not be afraid,
for the Lord God is my strength and my might;
he has become my salvation.” [Isaiah 12:2]
It isn’t just criminal syndicates
and addictions that get people tangled up.
Wrongdoing and sin take a million different forms. Hear the words of Isaiah again, and the
witness of not only the man Kathleen Norris talked about but also of millions
of people who have found the strength and wisdom to take God up on the safety
that he offers, with freedom from fear and with freedom to live in healthy and
creative and life-giving ways.
“With
joy you will draw water from the wells of salvation. And you will say on that
day:
Give thanks to the Lord,
call on his name;
make known his deeds among the nations;
proclaim that his name is exalted.
Give thanks to the Lord,
call on his name;
make known his deeds among the nations;
proclaim that his name is exalted.
Sing
praises to the Lord, for he
has done gloriously;
let this be known in all the earth.
Shout aloud and sing for joy, O royal Zion,
for great in your midst is the Holy One of Israel.” [Isaiah 12:3-6]
let this be known in all the earth.
Shout aloud and sing for joy, O royal Zion,
for great in your midst is the Holy One of Israel.” [Isaiah 12:3-6]
Salvation is wherever
the Lord is, and that is everywhere. It
is even here and now.
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