“What Can Save Us and What For?”

November 21, 2021 • 26th Sunday after Pentecost
Scripture Readings: Philippians 2:1-5, 12-13 (The Inclusive Bible)
Pastor Jeff Wells

Our worship series is entitled, “Difficult Texts: Questioning the Bible.” However, I did not choose a particularly difficult text and, I am not questioning the Bible, so much as I am challenging the way it has been understood by most Christians. So let’s begin by looking at that understanding of “salvation.”  

In the lesson John read, the apostle Paul exhorts the disciples in the ancient Greek city of Philippi to “work out your salvation with fear and trembling.” What could that mean? 

Well, for most of Christian history, both theology and spirituality have represented "salvation" as the saving of human beings from the consequences of sin – and, primarily, from death and separation from God. In this view, our salvation is accomplished by Jesus’ sacrificial death on a cross, which supposedly paid the debt to God for human sin and disobedience. To “be saved” then required the individual to ascribe to a doctrine of Jesus as the incarnation of God and proclaim Jesus as “Lord and Savior.” Frequently, this theology has focused not on “saving” human bodies, minds, and spirits in this life but on saving the human soul for eternal life with God.

This is the conception of “salvation” with which many of us grew up. Since I was quite young, it has felt contradictory to claim that God is loving, but we should be afraid of “him” – and God was always “him” in this narrative. This view does not align with how I experience God’s love. I believe this view of salvation is deeply flawed and has done great harm to many humans. It does not represent for me either who God is or who Jesus was.

In the Letter to the Philippians, the apostle Paul specifically connected “salvation” with values, attitudes, and behavior. He said, “Let your attitude be the same as that of Jesus.” Here is a paraphrase of the same passage we heard: 

“Love each other. Be deep-spirited friends and chosen family. As much as possible, work together for a common purpose and for the common good. Don’t try to push your way to the top. Put yourself aside, and help others rise up. Don’t be obsessed with your own self-interest. Always be willing to lend a helping hand. Be reverent and open before God as you work out your salvation together. Remember that God is luring, persuading, and showing you the way toward a better world, for a future with hope.”

The English word “salvation” comes from the Latin salvare and closely related to that is the word salve, which means a healing balm applied to a wound or more generally anything that soothes or brings healing. So another way to think of “salvation” is healing or repairing the woundedness and brokenness of our lives, our communities, and our social relations. We know from the Gospel record that individual healing was very important to Jesus. He wanted to save people from unnecessary suffering. He also wanted to heal larger groups of people – especially, but not exclusively, the Jewish people. 

As John Cobb shared with us when he preached on September 19, Jesus’ overarching mission was to help the Jewish people capture the vision of the basileia theou – the divine commonwealth. Jesus had a vision of a world in which all life could thrive, grounded in the goodness and love of God. In part, he inherited that broad vision from the Hebrew prophets. Yet, he also had a more immediate practical mission focused on the survival of the Jewish people. He saw his primary purpose as convincing them to work to transform the nature of their oppression and domination by the Roman Empire through loving their enemies – especially the Roman soldiers who they interacted with most closely. He knew that the solution many Jews sought – violently attacking or trying to militarily overthrow their Roman rulers – would lead to their destruction. Given the overwhelming power of Rome, it was suicidal. Jesus tried to promote a love-centered response to the Romans – love toward their enemies.

A few decades after Jesus’ death, Paul reinforced this message in his letter to the followers of Jesus in Rome:

“Do not repay evil with evil, but overcome evil with good. If your enemies are hungry, feed them; if they are thirsty, give them something to drink. Your goodness and generosity may change their hearts and minds.”

Unfortunately, Jesus failed in his mission to prevent the destruction of the temple and dispersal of the Jewish people, but Jesus did change the world.

Friends, we do need to be saved from human sin, but Christians have too often focused on a narrow set of supposed sins related to personal and, especially, sexual morality. Surely, it is God’s desire to lure us toward salvation and healing from the consequences of sin, but I don’t believe those consequences are hell or separation. They are the ways we have harmed ourselves, one another, and increasingly threaten to destroy all life on this planet through our actions.

A crucial aspect of salvation is repentance. To repent means, literally, “to change our minds.” Repentance requires recognizing the ways our attitudes and actions have led to widespread harm and then – individually and collectively – to change our attitudes and behaviors, the ways we organize our lives together, and the ways we act in relation to other humans and to the rest of the creating-evolving world.

While personal transformation can result from it, this radically re-imagined understanding of salvation is fundamentally communal. It is also deeply centered on the ecosphere and not on human beings alone. This salvation requires that we see every living creature and every non-biological element of the universe as having intrinsic worth and moral standing in our relations and our decisions.

Given that God’s power is relational and non-coercive, God cannot impose on us the choice to repent, to reduce harm, or to heal and save ourselves or the Earth. God actively and constantly persuades us to follow pathways toward these outcomes, but, as Paul wrote, we have to work out our salvation. We have to open ourselves to God’s luring. We have to examine our behaviors. We have to make decisions. We have to choose to change.

So, those of us who seek to follow Jesus today have a new mission. God calls us forward in this re-imagined understanding of salvation. God coaxes us to envision new ways of being, new ways of living together in community, and new ways in which humans act in concert with the needs of the rest of the ecosphere, rather than seeing all of nature as existing merely to benefit homo sapiens. 

Now, let me blow your minds. God is in everything and everything is in God. That’s called panentheism. Moreover, at the most basic level, we are not separate from all of the other entities in the universe. Our separateness is an illusion. Quantum physics tells us that “everything is enfolded into everything else” and everything is unfolding together. [1] Most of us do not have the senses – or the sense – to perceive it, but we are fundamentally intra-connected to animals, plants, microbes, air, water, energy, and quanta! This takes Martin Luther King Jr,’s famous statement to a cosmic level: “We are caught in an inescapable network of mutuality, tied in a single garment of destiny.” If the loving, healing, and restoring of salvation is always relational and communal, then we cannot “move toward salvation” unless the trees are saved. We cannot be saved until the elephants are saved. And the fungi. And plankton. 

The ecological crisis has awakened billions of people to this deep intra-connectedness – we are part of a vast web of being. God lures us and all entities toward our collective salvation. Our participation in this creative transformational process is the essence of our salvation. 

As John Cobb said to me during my visit, “The Good News of the Christian message is that human life can be made liveable. This planet can be a liveable planet.” But, friends, we don’t have much time. We need to get to work on creating ecological civilization. The trees, the bees, the soil, and the fungi, are all doing their part. This is the main way we humans can contribute to the thriving of the ecosphere. And this mission is not at all counterposed to the efforts we are already engaged in toward dismantling all forms of oppression, exploitation, gross disparities of wealth, and more. In fact, we cannot create an ecological civilization without recognizing, repenting, and overcoming these expressions of human sin. For any of us to thrive, all must thrive.

We can’t predict whether enough people will recognize the dangers, repent, and respond in dramatic and creative ways to change minds, hearts, and turn from the course we are on. But I believe God is calling us to try. Our chance of success may feel very small, yet we know from history that dramatic changes sometimes happen surprisingly quickly. As John Cobb wrote in his book on salvation, 

“There may be no other option that has any chance at all. Perhaps our work, like [Jesus’s], will bring about local communities that are islands of ecological civilization that can survive the storm and begin a process of reconstructing a human world.” [2]

The Church of the Village is a relatively small community of faith in denomination whose leadership is still overwhelmingly complacent and lacking courage to act on the ecological crisis. What can we do? We can help spread the good news that “this planet can be a liveable planet” and that all parts of the ecosphere can thrive…if we humans change. We can participate in efforts with others, like promoting John Cobb’s campaign to bring China and the U.S. together to take dramatic action against climate change. I am now serving on a committee engaged in that work. Along with our sibling church in Oregon, the Church for Our Common Home and others, we can join together with others in thinking creatively and acting as anticipatory communities [3] that already embrace and embody this message, this mission, this hope, this divine commonwealth. We can be an inspiration for, we can join with, and we can even help create other communities working together for this common purpose. 

[1] Catherine Keller creatively explicates this idea in her book, Cloud of the Impossible: Negative Negative Theology and Planetary Entanglement (New York: Columbia University Press, 2014).

[2] John B. Cobb, Jr., Salvation: Jesus’ Mission and Ours (Claremont, California: Process Century Press, 2020), p. 68.

[3] A phrase used by both John Cobb, Larry Rasmussen, and others.

(c) 2021 Jeffry Wells
All rights reserved.

Recommended Readings

Books:
John B. Cobb Jr., Salvation: Jesus’ Mission and Ours (Claremont, California: Process Century Press, 2020).

Catherine Keller, Cloud of the Impossible: Negative Theology and Planetary Entanglement (New York: Columbia University Press, 2014).