Prop 16c.04                                                      August 26, 2007

While I was working out at the gym this week,
        a man stopped me to ask
        if you can ever be sure you’re saved.
He’d recently had a heart attack and wasn’t confident
        of his visa into heaven.
So I delayed my lat pulls to have a talk.
I did what I could for him but it wasn’t easy,
        because he was stuck in the simplistic world view
                 that all too often passes for Christianity.
When he asked about “salvation,” he didn’t mean what Jesus meant.
So the Bible was more confusing than helpful.

For example, if I had talked about today’s Gospel lesson
        in the context of his assumptions,
        my answer would have been:
“No, there’s no way to know for sure,
        but the odds are that you’re going to hell.
So I’d recommend you have as good a time as you can now.”

Today’s lesson is pretty exclusive.
“The narrow door” sounds like God is a Marine recruiter
        only looking “for a few good men.”
But what about all the very different statements
        from Isaiah, Paul, and Jesus, himself?
“Ho everyone who thirsts,” says Isaiah. “Come to the waters.”
Some Scripture says God welcomes everyone,

        “causing his rain to fall and his sun to shine
        on good and evil alike” as Jesus puts it.
But then we have this narrow door.

Since our salvation is at stake,
        we need to find a way to make sense of this.
But to make sense of it,
        we have to think outside the box
                 of modern assumptions about Christianity.

In recent centuries, the rich, complex grace of salvation
        has been reduced to the simplistic carrot and stick religion
        of trying to go to heaven and stay out of hell.
But these lessons aren’t about that.

Throughout the ancient tradition,
        the Church has taught that “salvation”
        is a comprehensive term for everything good God does for us

        – it consists of different kinds of blessing

        – they don’t all work the same way

        – but together they add up to making us whole
                 and empowering us to live out our full human destiny.

Salvation begins with justification,
        being set right with God, forgiven, absolved, and accepted.
That’s the unconditional gift.
We don’t have to strive to enter that grace by any door.
God has already built the house around us.

The next step is very different. It’s called sanctification      

         – growing into the likeness of God so we can enjoy
                 a deeper relationship with him.
This is altogether different.
Sanctification takes a lifetime of striving,
         and the door to such holiness
                 is indeed narrow.
It requires the courage to encounter the majesty of God
         and be transformed by that encounter right down
                to the core of our being..

Now here’s the tricky part.
Justification is not to fretted over.
It’s a done deal.
Justification is not to be fretted over,
         but rejoiced in.

Worrying about justification is not just a waste of energy,
        it actually blocks the way to sanctification

        which is what this life is for.
Sanctification does not come from fear or threats
        or carrot and stick religion.
Those things prevent sanctification
        because they block the soul changing encounter
                 with God.

Only if we have abiding confidence in God’s love,
        do we dare look to see who God really is.
We must have absolute confidence in God’s good will
        because, without that confidence,
        the being of God is terrifying
        and sanctification can feel like death.

Buddhists and Christians alike call it ego-death.
That’s what makes the door narrow.
The broad, popular path knows only the God
        of little favors, consolations, and encouragements.
It doesn’t dare to approach the awesome God,
        the God of earthquake and majesty,
                 the God of wind and fire.

God loves us, yes, but that doesn’t make God
        our cozy old grandfather.
Listen to our lesson from Hebrews about what it’s like
        to encounter God.

        “You have not come to what may be touched, a blazing fire,
        and darkness, . . . and a tempest, . . .”

It’s a scary picture. In The Chronicles of Narnia,
        one of the boys complains of Aslan’s ferocity;
        and an older, wiser person reminds him,

                “Aslan isn’t a tame lion.”

Indeed, our God isn’t a tame God,
        though in our time, we have made him out to be.
We have tamed God in order to make him
        a more attractive product in the religious market.
For better or worse, our social, political, and economic orders
        shape our view of God.
In the Middle Ages, they saw God as a feudal king.
In today’s democratic capitalist society,
        we look at God as an option in the free market place of ideas,
        an option which has to be sold to the discriminating consumer,
        and that means a non-threatening, user-friendly God.
Such a God can be portrayed by an amiable Morgan Freeman
        or worse, George Burns in a baseball cap,
        and is nice enough but not to be taken seriously.
Such a God may entertain you for a Friday evening,
        but won't change your soul.

Scripture, however, says God is an awesome force

        – a nothingness out of which everything comes
        and to which everything will return.
God is “what may (not) be touched, a blazing fire,
        and a darkness, . . . and a tempest, . . .
        Our God is a consuming fire.”

If we think God is indifferent to us,
        an impersonal force that would destroy us
                as readily as we might swat mosquito,
        then the awesome majesty of God
                isn’t something we want to think about.

But if we trust that God is for us,
        even when God seems most terrifying,
                the power of God becomes a wonderful thing,
        something to contemplate with awe,
                the way we look at the desert sky
                or a huge waterfall – only infinitely greater.

This is the kind of God before whom we can lose ourselves,

        “in wonder, love and praise.”
Encountering this God isn’t just to hold a different opinion.
It changes us all the way down.

To encounter the God of wind and fire is to feel ones own smallness,
         to have one’s ego immolated.
That’s what reverence means.
Such reverence is the narrow door to sanctification.

Jesus said, “I have come to cast fire upon the earth.”
There is a fire which consumes everything in us
         that holds us back from union with God.
Some call that fire the Holy Spirit.

T. S. Eliot believed that the holy fire of divine love
         redeems us from the fire of a wasted existence.
He wrote:

         “The dove descending breaks the air
         with flame of incandescent terror . . . .
         The only hope, or else despair
                  lies in the choice of pyre or pyre –
                  to be redeemed from fire by fire. . . .

          Love is the unfamiliar Name
          behind the hands that wove the flame
          which human power cannot remove.
                   We only live, only suspire
                   consumed by either fire or fire.”

Eliot means the love of God is a painful thing

          – painful because encountering this all consuming love
          lead us into a life of sacrifice and detachment,
          of honest self-examination and repentance,
          of passionate longing for justice, mercy, and reconciliation.
Believe me, life lived out of that passion will get us in trouble.

That’s the fire of sacrifice, the fire of baptism.
That is the fire Jesus said in last week’s lesson
          he had come to cast upon the earth.
But he also spoke of another fire, the fire of Gehenna,
          the garbage dump outside Jerusalem
                   where refuse was burned.
That’s the fire of wasted life,
          of misusing our time and energy to gratify passing whims
          or build fortresses of crumbling clay around our egos.

Eliot says we have to choose between
          the fire of waste and meaninglessness
                   or the fire of sacrificial love.

The awesome majesty of God
          consumes our egos like a moth in a flame.
And yet we are drawn to that flame,
          for through it lies the path to our destiny,
                   our true selves, and our deepest joy.

                                                                 Amen.