Jesus Wants to Save Christians - Epilogue

There’s a pattern here- a pattern we find in the story of the Bible that gives us insight into the deepest truths of how the universe works – Egypt, Sinai, Jerusalem, Babylon. Salvation is what happens when we cry out in Egypt. Because we all have our Egypts, don’t we?

Addiction, suicidal thoughts, anger, rage – we’ve all got darkness and slavery in our hearts somewhere. Prejudice, hate, envy, lust, racism, ego, dishonesty, greed – we each could make our lists. And they would be long. The wrong and injustice we see around us every day right down to the smallest details involving how we think and feel and act. The Bible uses the word sin for this condition of slavery. The technical definition of sin in the Scriptures is “to miss the mark.” We’ve all missed the mark in some way.

At the center of the Christian experience is crying out in our slavery and being heard by God. Trust that through Jesus, God has done for us what we could never do for ourselves – rescue, redemption, grace. This grace takes us to Sinai. Sinai is where we find purpose and identity. God doesn’t just want to save us; God is looking for a body, a people to incarnate the divine.

We’re invited at Sinai to join the God of the oppressed in doing something about our broken world. And that always involves hearing the cry of the oppressed and then acting on their behalf. If we forget them, we lose track of our own story.

Our story then takes us from Sinai to Jerusalem. And Jerusalem raises the question, “what will we do with our blessing?” What will we do with what God has given us? Will we remember Egypt, or will we lose the plot?
And sometimes we lose the plot. We become proud, we start to feel entitled, we allow our abundance to isolate us from who we really are. And we find ourselves in exile, which can be abrupt and shocking, and sometimes exile can be so subtle, we don’t realize what’s happened until later. And in exile we can slip into despair, or we can re-imagine everything – confession, repentance, a fresh start, a clean slate. We cry out in our exile and God hears us and we experience rebirth.

Jesus wants to save churches from the exile of irrelevance. If we have any resources, any power, any voice, any influence, any energy, we must convert them into blessing for those who have no power, no voice, and no influence.

It begins with someone crying out and someone else hearing. And it’s hard to hear the cry when you’re isolated from it. (Luke 16:19-31) Walls isolate. So can gates and freeways. But when we hear the cry, everything changes. Because when we hear the cry, we’re with God. When God gets Moses’ attention and lays out for him what liberation is going to look like for his people, he tells Moses to “go.” (Exodus 3: 10)

“Listen,” and then “Go.” The going will take a multitude of forms. It will be movement, action, life. It will involve risk, it will mean conversations with people who are nothing like us, and it will probably involve questions and criticism and perhaps even rejection from people who haven’t heard what we’ve heard.

It isn’t just about trying to save the world. It’s about saving ourselves – form the kingdom of comfort – from the priority of preservation – from the empire of indifference – from the exile of irrelevance.

Jesus wants to save us from making the good news about another world and not this one. Jesus wants to save us from preaching a gospel that is only about individuals and not about systems that enslave them. Jesus wants to save us from shrinking the gospel down to a transaction about the removal of sin and not about every single particle of creation being reconciled to its maker and restored to wholeness.

Jesus wants to save us from religiously sanctioned despair, the kind that doesn’t believe the world can be made better, the kind that either blatantly or subtly teaches people to just be quiet and behave and wait for something big to happen “someday.”

The Bible begins with Abel’s blood “crying out from the ground.” The Bible ends with God wiping away every tear. (Revelation 21:4) No more death, or mourning, or crying, or pain. Hope – The Christian message is always about this hope.

Jesus chose the path of descent; he comes into Jerusalem on a donkey, not a horse, with children, not soldiers, weeping, humble. And he dies, naked, bleeding, thirsty, alone. Maybe that’s what he means when he says, “Do this in remembrance of me.” The “do this’ part is our lives. Opening ourselves up to the mystery of resurrection, open for the liberation of others, allowing our bodies to be broken and our blood to be poured, discovering our Eucharist – our “good gift.” – listening and then going. Because when we do this in remembrance of him, the world will never be the same; we will never be the same.