“Are you saved?”
It’s a question that some Christians like to ask. Or, if they know that you are a Christian, they might ask: “When did you get saved?”
How do you respond when asked that question?
It’s tricky.
It’s tricky, because for many Christians, if not most Christians, salvation and being saved is what it’s all about. As Marcus Borg has written, “it names the yearning, desire, hope and purpose of the Christian life.”
It’s also tricky, because many people think salvation is about going to heaven after one dies. The flip side of that coin, however, is that those who are not saved are condemned to hell.
So even though salvation “names the yearning, desire, hope, and purpose of the Christian life,” it has deeply negative connotations for a great many people, because all they hear in that term is judgment and condemnation.
Which makes it really awkward to hear or ask the question, “Are you saved?”
Some people are anxious their whole life, wondering if they are good enough or if their faith is strong enough for them to be saved.
Some wonder how it is that only Christians can be saved – only those who have said the magic words of what is called the “Jesus prayer” can gain entrance to heaven.
Some don’t understand how this “yearning, desire, hope, and purpose of the Christian life” can be so focused on life after death, and so unconcerned with this life, this world.
Two things you should know….
The first probably goes without saying. Salvation – along with related words like saved and savior – is a very important word. It is important scripturally, and it’s important to Christians today.
The second thing you need to know is that the way these words are most often used today is a lot different from the way these words were used and understood by people in biblical times.
In the ancient Hebrew language, the word that means “to be saved” is yasha.
Sometimes people would cry out, “yashana, which means, “save us, we pray.” Over the years, yashana became hosanna. Save us, we pray.
From the word yasha we also get the name Yeshua, which is the Hebrew pronunciation of Jesus, a name that means, “God is salvation.”
In the Hebrew Bible, yasha does not refer to an afterlife. Salvation was not spoken of in terms of some future existence.
In ancient Hebrew, salvation meant finding one’s place in society; to find the place where you belong, to take your rightful place among the community of people. It means to find that place where you can live out your potential, fulfill your purpose, and live the life that God intends for you: a life of meaning, a life of wholeness, a life of abundance.
Once upon a time there was a whole society of people who were denied their rightful place, a whole nation of people unable to fulfill the roles God intended for them. They were not allowed to live lives of meaning and purpose. They were denied freedom, and made to work as slaves.
“The Israelites groaned under their slavery. They cried out to God. Out of the slavery their cry for help rose up to God.
“God heard their groaning. God remembered his covenant with their ancestors. God looked upon the Israelites, and God took notice of them” [Exodus 2:23-25].
God called a man named Moses. At the burning bush God said to Moses: “I have observed the misery of my people who are in Egypt. I have heard their cry… I know their sufferings… so I am sending you to Pharaoh, to bring my people, the Israelites, out of Egypt” [Exodus 3:7, 10].
It took some time – a long time, in fact – but eventually the Israelites made it across the Red Sea and out of Egypt. And as the scripture says, “Thus the LORD saved Israel that day from the Egyptians” [Exodus 14:30].
And the Israelites worshiped God and sang a song of praise:
I will sing to the LORD, for he has triumphed gloriously;
Horse and rider he has thrown into the sea.
The LORD is my strength and my might,
And he has become my salvation.
-Exodus 15:1-2
Liberation and deliverance came to the Israelites, and they were saved.
Later writers, looking back on this event, would describe God as their “Savior,” he “who had done great things in Egypt,…and awesome deeds by the Red Sea” [Psalm
106:21-22].
Several times the prophet Isaiah refers to God as Savior. Again, this has nothing to do with a promised afterlife. Isaiah is talking about freedom from captivity in Babylon. “I am the LORD your God, the Holy One of Israel, your Savior” [Isaiah 43:3].
“Israel is saved by the LORD with everlasting salvation” [Isaiah 45:17].
The psalmist often prays for salvation. In Psalm 27, he prays for deliverance from “evildoers, adversaries, and foes,” calling upon the “God of my salvation.” In Psalm 51, the psalmist asks God to “restore unto me the joy of your salvation.” Evidently the psalmist had experienced salvation before, and wanted to be saved again.
And in Psalm 76, the psalmist speaks of salvation in terms of freedom from oppression: “God rose up … to save all the oppressed of the earth” [Psalm 76:9].
In the Greek Scriptures – that is, the New Testament – the word for salvation is sozo. However, sozo is sometimes translated as salvation, sometimes as healing, sometimes as wholeness … which is why you may notice me using those terms interchangeably: healing, wholeness, salvation.
Often, in his encounters with people, Jesus would end the encounter by saying something like: “Be on your way; your faith has made you well.” That’s sozo. Your faith has made you well. Your faith has healed you. Your faith has made you whole again. Your faith has saved you.
It’s very much a present-tense thing. Incidentally, when scripture speaks of eternal life, that’s a present-tense thing as well. More correctly translated, “eternal life” is “the life of the ages,” a life that is possible to experience starting right now. You don’t have to wait until you die to experience good news of salvation! After all, the kingdom of God is at hand; that’s what Jesus proclaimed.
Sozo is what we’re talking about when we say that “we are Disciples of Christ, a movement for wholeness … a movement for sozo … in a fragmented world. We are a people who have been called by God to bring healing, wholeness, and salvation to this world, in this time.
I am very passionate about Bixby Knolls Christian Church’s call to bring healing, wholeness, and salvation to our community. That is what we are here for: to make God’s kingdom of shalom real on earth today, as it is in heaven. To reach out with God’s love to our community, to bring salvation to our community.
In Paul’s first letter to the Corinthians, he wrote that “the message of the cross … is the power of God … to us who are being saved” [1 Cor. 1:18]. I find it very interesting that Paul talks about salvation in the present tense – “we who are being saved” – in a way that implies that we are still in the process of being saved, that it’s an ongoing thing.
This is very different from the way many people today talk about being saved. They speak of salvation as a one-time event that happened the moment they prayed the “Jesus prayer,” confessing their sins and asking for forgiveness.
But if salvation is a journey toward healing and wholeness, finding meaning and purpose in the midst of God’s people, then it makes sense to speak of it as Paul does, in the present tense.
It follows, then, that bringing salvation to people involves more than just telling people about Jesus. I had a friend in college who would talk to people about Jesus and try to get them to pray the Jesus prayer … and for every person who prayed that prayer, he could add another tally mark in his notebook, keeping track of how many people he “got saved.”
And I knew even then that there was much more to salvation than tally marks in a notebook.
Our scripture this morning – you thought I was never going to get to it, didn’t you? – features Jesus getting angry in the temple. There, in the temple courtyard, sellers were inflating the prices that the poor had to pay, an act that symbolized the class warfare against the poor in the first century.
That injustice was keeping from the people the opportunity to find healing and wholeness. It was keeping salvation from them, making it inaccessible. It was a wall, a barrier, between them and salvation. It was making it almost impossible for them to achieve lives of meaning and purpose, to fully participate in society. It was an oppressive system, designed to keep the poor in their place.
Hosanna. Save us, we pray.
Gandhi once said that “there are people in the world so hungry, that God cannot appear to them except in the form of bread.”
Salvation comes in the form of bread.
Salvation comes in the form of justice.
Salvation comes in the form of solidarity with those who suffer.
Salvation comes in the form of employment to those who are unemployed.
Salvation comes in the form of health care to those who cannot afford insurance.
Salvation comes in the form of adequately funded public education for our children.
Salvation comes in the form of welcome and affirmation to those who have been cast out.
Salvation comes whenever people experience healing, wholeness … sozo.
Conservative Christians will say that real salvation means being saved from eternal damnation in hell. For some reason, focusing on the literal existence of a fiery place of eternal torment is very important to a lot of people. Maybe because it allows them to overlook all the ways that salvation is denied to people right now, in this world….
But depending on which part of the Bible you’re reading, hell is described very differently. It even has different names: Sheol. Hades. Gehenna. With such varied descriptions, it makes it very hard to take any one of them literally.
Progressive Christians confess that for those who live without sozo, those whose lives are broken and lacking in wholeness, hell has already begun … which is why it is so important to understand that heaven has also already begun, that the kingdom is now and that salvation is present and ongoing.
Because people don’t have to wait until they die to experience good news of salvation.
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