I
Peter 2:1-3
It’s
Mothers’ Day, so I’m going to start with a memory not of my mother, but my
grandmother. She grew up as a coal
miner’s daughter and she raised two daughters on her own during the Depression,
after my grandfather died. So she was
thrifty. She made a lot of the family’s
clothing. When I was little, she made me
a suit coat that I loved. It was Black
Watch plaid and had gold buttons. Before
I was twelve she must have made about four or five editions of that same
jacket, each one always just a little too big for me at first. So when I would put my new one on every year
or two, she would tell me, “Don’t worry.
You’ll grow into it.”
It’s
her voice I hear when I Peter talks about growing into salvation.
“Salvation”
is such a big term. It means being saved
from sin and death, receiving forgiveness from God for the sake of Christ and
having the promise of eternal life beyond the grave. That part is the most straight-forward aspect
of the Christian faith. The Apostles’
Creed that gives us an outline of the faith talks about the work of the Holy
Spirit says,
“We believe in the Holy
Spirit, the holy catholic Church, the communion of saints, the forgiveness of
sins, the resurrection of the body, and the life everlasting.”
“Salvation”, like I say, though, is
a big term. It also refers to a process
that is ongoing. It may reach its
fulfillment at the completion of our lives on earth, but salvation is also
something we grow into. It’s bigger than
we are, and even if it’s prepared for us ahead of time by someone who both
knows us and loves us, there may be a bit of growing to do before it sits just
right.
Clothing got passed along in my
family, as well as being reproduced. A
cousin of mine had a sweater that he loved, like I loved the suit jacket, and
his mother knitted him a series of them, one larger than the next. These sweaters were dark blue with a sailboat
on the front. As he grew, these things
got passed on to me. I wasn’t so happy
about that. By the time I was in
elementary school, the sailboat was sort of embarrassing and I found myself
stretching my arms out sometimes to try to make it look like I was outgrowing
whichever version I was wearing, too.
Growing into salvation means growing
out of the ways and the practices that don’t suit us anymore, not if we keep
growing into the likeness of Christ. I
Peter says to
“Rid yourselves,
therefore, of all malice, and all guile, insincerity, envy, and all slander.”
There
comes the point where some things just don’t suit who you are growing to be.
Toward the beginning of “The Wizard of Oz”, there’s a confrontation between Almira
Gulch (who later turns into the Wicked Witch of the West) and Auntie Em. Almira Gulch has been mean to Dorothy and
Toto, and Auntie Em comes to their rescue.
That’s when she says,
“Almira Gulch, just
because you own half the county doesn't mean that you have the power to run the
rest of us. For 23 years, I've been dying to tell you what I thought of you,
and now... well, being a Christian woman, I can't say it!”[1]
Apparently,
some growing had gone on over that twenty-three years.
Growing into salvation is shown both
by what fits us better than when we first met Christ and what no longer fits us
the way it did then. The apostle Paul
became a Christian in response to a vision he had as he was on his way from
Jerusalem to Damascus, where he planned to arrest Jesus’ followers in order to
derail what he saw as a dangerous and heretical cult. Years later he told the story to one of the
churches he himself founded, neither denying his past nor the changes in
himself that he had experienced since then.
He told them,
“I am the least of the apostles, unfit to be called an apostle, because
I persecuted the church of God. But by the grace of God I am what I am,
and his grace toward me has not been in vain.”
[I Corinthians 15:9-10]
We
find ourselves living with that tension.
On the one hand, we are totally and utterly forgiven. On the other hand, God expects us to make
good use of the grace we’re given.
Therein is one of the ways that a
human mother may be very like God, where parental love (motherly or fatherly)
intersects with divine love. It is
unconditional and free, and it will always be there. But it also holds us, for our own sake, to
grow up, and to put away childish things.
If you are there already, praise
God.
If not, keep going. You’ll grow into it.
No comments:
Post a Comment