Sacred Rivers: A Lenten Reflection on Salvation

I delivered the following sermon Sunday March 27, 2011 for the congregation of Harvard-Epworth United Methodist Church in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Following the text is an audio recording featuring my own photography that was presented to the congregation on the same day. As I am a student, please leave critique, comments, opinions, or reflections!!


I. OPENING

Greeting: Good Morning! I would like to first thank Harvard-Epworth for this opportunity and for those supporting me today. I would also like to apologize for my voice, as I have been sick.

A. INTRODUCTION
I struggled for a while in deciding how to approach today’s sermon. I was weighing options of preaching of my forthcoming graduation from Divinity School and lessons learned at my time here. I also thought of my many ministerial passions and even research interests. However, this being the liturgical season of Lent I have most often found myself contemplating the areas of faith I do not feel comfortable with.

Salvation, essentially being at the top of the list, is probably one of my least favorite subjects to talk about. Alas, in this Lenten season and in this area of divine scholarship, salvation seems to always be the elephant in the room- a subject that is both divisive and complicated. At the heart of any discussion of salvation lies a sacred dialogue of questions. My attempt here is to examine some of the questions that have been informative in my life and then use some new understanding and experience to reflect on a new understanding of salvation.

B. MY PROBLEM WITH WORDS
Growing up between Texas and North Carolina, my developmental years were spent steeped in Southern United Methodist culture. These sacred questions of salvation became, for me, a regular litany of inquisition. Are you saved? Do you have a personal relationship with the Lord, Jesus Christ? Do you know that Jesus shed his blood for you to save you?

Now, most folks that I know are accepting, loving people, however, this language became part-n-parcel for my cultural condition.

The fact was, I never really understood what any of those questions really meant. Saved? From what? Was always my mental rebuttal. I grew to become hyper critical and angry towards these kinds of questions and especially towards their language.

To this day I have a problem with certain words.

For instance, I can’t really pronounce “Jesus” without my suppressed southern accent peaking through, nor can I really pronounce “prayer” without the r’s colliding awkwardly. But “salvation” has always been such a loaded term. It has always presented as some State Fair blue ribbon, or the special key to the members only club. After experiencing the judgment of folks who wanted me to be “saved,” I rather decided against it.

C. THE WRITING ON THE WALL
As a teenager I was incredibly involved in my youth group. You name it, and I was there- car washes, community volunteer days, habitat for humanity, mission trips, camps, sending envelopes, meetings, committees, and potlucks galore. I would go to Sunday school every week, and I was the kid who always talked and asked questions- you know, the nerdy kind. The one thing I never did very much of at that time was question authority or doctrine- I simply tried my hardest to make sense out of everything set before me- whether or not it actually made sense to me. I thought that’s what a good Christian did- just believe.

In one of our youth rooms a poster hung on the wall- one of those gaudy, garish things made in bright colors to appeal to 14 year olds but really doesn’t impress anyone. In big bold letters it said: “Jesus dying for you was the most he could do; living for him is the least you can do.” Man, I h-a-ted that thing! Besides dripping with guilt, I couldn’t ever figure out what made it so wrong. I’ve now come to realize my issue with the writing on the wall was that it valued more the moment of death than it valued the acts of life.

The traditional view of salvation focuses on violence, destruction, and death and completely misses the awe-inspiring role of life.

II. THE TRADITIONAL VIEW OF SALVATION
I would like to clarify what I mean by the traditional view of salvation.
I am focusing so much on my own personal experience in order to highlight the modern, Protestant, evangelical concept of salvation. I should make note that there are many views on salvation within Christianity today, and even more when one considers the historical process of the Christian church establishing creeds and doctrines. Today, I would like to focus on some common images and phrases associated with salvation.

The basic process is this:
1. There is sin in the world
2. Christ, God incarnate, comes to Earth to forgive our sins
3. Christ crucified as a blood sacrifice to cleanse the world from sin, as a complete the ritual to purify through suffering body
4. Christ goes through a criminal’s death instead of the expected political, royal takeover
5. After three days in the tomb Christ is resurrected.

Theologians and ministers have spent their entire carriers studying just one of these tenets, and I have only this morning add in my thoughts –at least I don’t have to finish before the Cowboys kick off.

My heart has been called to this third tenet: Christ crucified as a blood sacrifice to cleanse the world from sin.

III. THE PROBLEM WITH THE TRADITIONAL VIEW
For such a long time I have had the same struggles with this tenant as I had with the poster hanging in my Youth Group room: I has always struck me as being wrong, or missing the point, but the reason for which eluded me.

During this Lenten season I have the gift of this sermon preparation in which to wrestle with these difficult, uncomfortable and long-standing questions of mine.

The doctrine of Christ as a blood-sacrifice has proven itself quite problematic both in its historical interpretation as well as its modern use.
(1) The historical interpretation has been used by Christians since the earliest church to justify and even courage violent blood-shed of fellow humans- from second-century martyrs, to the horrors of the Crusades, the Spanish inquisition, Manifest destiny, and various civil wars.
(2) A more contemporary use involves a valorization of Christian suffering, and places all of the importance of the Christ Event in the moment of his death and salvific value in accepting and propagating this view.

In this view the importance of Christ’s blood is that it ends up on the outside of his body. In other words, Christ’s blood is only useful to our relationship with God through the violent act of bloodshed. Friends, I want to change this.

IV. TEXTS
From the texts we have read this morning we are given a glimpse into the very complicated and nuanced process of the earliest Christians’ attempt to understand who/what Christ is and salvation.

John is the last gospel written, most likely after the Pauline letters. In this story of the Samaritan woman we can easily see the early church wrestle with the dual nature of Christ –both flesh and spirit, mortal and eternal- and what that means for the salvation of all –Jews, Samaritans, and Greeks.

In Paul’s letter to Rome, he is also striving to understand who has access to salvation and by what means. Does one need to be Jewish first in order to receive forgiveness and salvation? Paul answers no, that faith gives one access to justification, but that Christ and his followers are ultimately justified through Christ’s blood.

Justified, I often find as a better synonym for “salvation,” however, “right-wising” is my preference. This is because “right-wising” is not a commonly used word, and therefore caries with it less baggage and less meaning. In order to use it, we have to give it a meaning. “to be made right” “to find right-ness” “to make things balanced” There is so much action! So much involvement! “right-wising” is long journey and a constant adventure.

Then, according to Paul our right-wising is by means of Christ’s blood. Paul is referencing the violence of Christ’s death, but I would like to offer another vision of what this means.

V. BLOOD
As I have illustrated, discussions of Christian salvation center on suffering, blood, and death. At some point in the rhetoric these three separate conditions become synonymous. Suffering means death, blood is to suffer, and death comes with blood.

I want to stress that these conditions are very different from each other and each one occupies a their own significant role in the Gospel and in Christianity.

By focusing on the role of blood today I want to lead us into understand the value of salvation is not in death, but in life.

In our age of technology and modern science, we have proclivity to demonize blood. It is the disease carrier, it is contamination, a biohazard. We are afraid of “bad-blood,” just consider the social stigma placed on those with HIV/AIDS.

Somewhere, right now, some tv-network is playing an iteration of CSI: Crime Scene Investigation. And in that show there is a uniformed person with protective gear swabbing and searching, hoping to find that drop of blood linking a perpetrator to a crime.

Blood is a dirty, dangerous thing.

At least, that is what our culture teaches us. In my studies this semester I have been struck with the reverence ancient peoples all over the world had for blood: from the rituals in the Ancient Near East, to ceremonies in the Aztec world. We see these rituals as violent, nay, “bloody” examples of barbarism.

For these ancient peoples however, blood is not a symbol of death, but a symbol of life. In Classical Arabic, the language of the Qur’an and famous literature, the word “dam” literally means blood, but is used interchangeably with “hayaat,” which means life. For the Aztecs, human sacrifice was a way of releasing the spirit of life from the bonds of the material world so that it can go back to the gods and bring balance to the world.

We seem to have forgotten that blood is the center of life. What is important about being justified, or of right-wising, by Christ’s blood is not that Christ shed his blood, but in Christ having blood flow through his veins. Likewise, our right-wising has as much to do with our blood, flowing through our veins like a sacred river.

VI. SACRED RIVERS
Langston Hughes writes:

I've known rivers:
I've known rivers ancient as the world and older than the flow of human blood in human veins.

My soul has grown deep like the rivers.

I bathed in the Euphrates when dawns were young.
I built my hut near the Congo and it lulled me to sleep.
I looked upon the Nile and raised the pyramids above it.
I heard the singing of the Mississippi when Abe Lincoln went down to New Orleans, and I've seen its muddy bosom turn all golden in the sunset.

I've known rivers:
Ancient, dusky rivers.

My soul has grown deep like the rivers.

I first heard this poem in a Unitarian service, and I immediately felt the connection between my soul and the rivers that I have known. Cultures around the world worship rivers as the divine live-giving center. Water has a particular sacredness, or pneumenous role in the human experience.
-A scientist looking for signs of water on other planets, a sign of the potentiality of life.
-The flow of the Ganges in India, supporting culture for thousands of years and the dangers of re-routing the water.
-Just imagine an aerial view of the Nile, vast desert slashed by a ribbon of green- where there is water, there is life.

Spending last summer traveling through the Middle East I was surprised at how I began to note all the places I had been to by the waters that flowed through them. I swam in the Mediterranean in Beirut, I followed the Yarmouk River to get to Amman, I relaxed by Red Sea in Aqqaba, walked across the Dead Sea on my way through the desert, and I crossed the Jordan River to get to Jerusalem. I stood by the Nile and felt my soul grow deep like the rivers.

Flying from Cairo to Amman on a late Saturday afternoon I watched the rich orange sands engulf the earth in a seemingly endless expanse. Then, we flew over the Red Sea, and it appeared out of no where, a rich blue green interruption in the desert. The scene was a vibrant contrast, and the perfect image of our dependence on water to keep the land alive.

We call our rivers the “life-blood” of our lands. And just as the rivers flow keeping the land alive, blood is the sacred river flowing through our veins –keeping the soul alive.

It is easy for us to see the connection of life to rivers, and as has Langston Hughes elegantly written, the deep connection between the soul and the living waters.

VII. LENT- GETTING CLOSER TO THE LIFE OF CHRIST
Therefore I boldly claim that salvation is from the blood of Christ- but not through the act of violent suffering, not through the spilling of his blood, -but through Christ as the living God. The sacred river of life-blood flowing through Christ is where justification, right-wising, lies. For we too, have this same sacred river.

Unlike the message of the poster in my youth group, Living is not the least that we can do- but it is salvation itself. Recognizing the sanctity that is within all of us was also within God. Our veins are not filled with bio-hazard, but life.

However, recognizing that salvation flows through us is not the final step, it is the very beginning of a sacred journey of living- of flowing through the lands, cutting gorges and falling over great rocks, of flooding and receding, of lazy meandering and roaring rapids.

Go now and live, knowing that life is within you.