Saved by Grace, From a Lost World

Making a case for Jesus

(the “red letter quotes”)!

Are we too reliant on “saving grace” while the World “Goes to Hell in a hand basket?” Betting on a heavenly afterlife, while our blindness and deafness obscure pain and suffering in an ethically gutted fallen-world! Fifty-four percent (3.67 billion people in the Abrahamic, Monotheist Faiths) of the world’s population in their religions believe (at least, by doctrine for most) in a heavenly, paradisiacal, eternal-afterlife.

Recently, after a Salvation Army Board meeting, a friend asked to have a word with me: To begin, he commented favorably on a proposal I had just offered; however, as we sat face to face across the table, the conversation quickly turned to religion. My friend, a few years my senior with some health problems, commented, “Religion is a personal thing.” He was raised Methodist but beginning with his marriage of many years has attended a Baptist church with his wife. “My wife gives to the Baptist and I give likewise to the Methodist Church where I was reared,” he said. Thirty-two years earlier, this friend had invited me to become an advisory board member of the local Salvation Army (SA). He, like me, I believe, considers the SA his second church. Also, that our commitment to the William Booth Principle, “Man’s soul can’t be saved until his physical needs of food and personal cares are met,” is no less an integral, if not an overriding, law of Christianity. Jesus’ prescribed “social justice” is mandated throughout the scriptures. Jesus the greatest ethical teacher of all time, in fact, urgently demands it as a prerequisite to “salvation’s gateway.”

Sharing our thoughts with each other, I told my friend of a recent personal revelation: I discovered after reading a Memorial to my great granddaddy, how uncannily my Christian beliefs may be comparable to his, Micajah Cox, a Quaker (or Society of Friends). In this tribute, written after his death in 1914, Mathew 25 (a strong emphasis of my own, verses 34 and following) was referenced as justification for his Heavenly resting place: “After many trials, and we believe many triumphs, when the time came to hear the voice of his Master saying: “Come ye blessed of my Father, inherit the kingdom prepared for you from the foundation of the world,” Matt. 25:34, it found him at his post doing the work of his earthly home and serving his Heavenly Father. Without a moment’s warning the call came and he took his cross home to lay at his Master’s feet, and we doubt not he received a crown with many stars in it.”

Perhaps it was, in part, William Booth’s life, 1829–1912; his founding of the Salvation Army in 1865 that strongly influenced Micajah Cox’s life, 1847-1914, when in the 1880s there was a social gospel, a “social justice” movement which carried an enhanced importance to Jesus’ ethical teachings. I now realize this explicit “theological spirituality” by some vein must have descended to my personal religious belief.

There now seems to be a revival, resurgence, a new sense of urgency for Jesus’ social justice and ethical teachings. It is exemplified in ministries such as Rick Warren, Jim Wallis and Tony Campolo ---- and in theological studies, such as at Union Theological Seminary. Attesting to the homiletic values of such ministry is this succinct, manifold sermon (a table-discussion) on Faith and Social Justice. This discussion, lead by the ordained Baptist minister and scholar, Bill Moyers, is guaranteed to provoke your sensibilities to what went wrong in the current world financial debacle. It is a call for our ethical responsibility, to our nation, our world. Three theologians: Gary Dorrien and Serene Jones of Union Theological Seminary and Cornel West of Princeton University challenge us, in our shortcoming-Christianity that fails the populous of “a fallen world.”

Salvation by grace is easy: baptized at 13; made a Profession of Faith; saved forever! Or is it not so easy? For Jesus said, "The most important one (commandment) is this: Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind and with all your strength. The second is this: 'Love your neighbor as yourself. There is no commandment greater than these." Is that so easy? “How deep is your love?” Cornel West begs to question. Serene Jones says, “Justice is nothing but love with legs.” Gary Dorrien says, “It's the love that, that's what holds you in the struggle, you know. Even if you're not succeeding!” (Listen for the “religious transformation/ reformation” that I wrote about in Has Anyone Seen God?)

These theologians remind us of our nature (forgetting ethics) to keep repeating our failures ---- as Harold Myerson puts straightforward in his Whiz Kids, Wall Street Division: comparing the whiz kids, Rumsfeld and McNamara, to Wall Street’s hubris: “like McNamara, of a system perfected by the best minds of his time, a system that should have worked but that failed catastrophically. (Robert) Rubin's repentance is a private matter, but the lessons that his protégés Larry Summers and Tim Geithner derive from the failure of deregulated hypercapitalism are of the utmost public concern. Whiz kids themselves, do they still believe in the capacity of their fellow whizzes to concoct financial devices so mathematically sound that strong regulation would be superfluous?”

In our human imperfections, our brokenness, our financial security/insecurity, our inebriated materiality, we too easily find justification to overlook the “deep truth” of LOVE --- Jesus’ love that demands the “legs of justice.” Tony Campolo in his book, “Red Letter Christians (You know those Bible ‘red letter’ words that Jesus spoke!),” refers to Charles Finney’s nineteenth-century evangelical preaching that won a group of firebrand followers who became a major force in the American anti-slavery movement. When his salvation-seeking listeners came down the aisle, Finney gave them the invitation to accept Christ, immediately asking them, if they were willing to become abolitionist (Love’s legs for justice!).

Could a “party in the afterlife” by unmerited “saving grace” make us happy, knowing we did nothing to alleviate a sickened world? Where’s the grace for those left here on earth we so dearly love? I would not discount grace for one moment, for I need it; everyone needs grace. “Unmerited grace for salvation” is scripturally derived doctrine. Even so, the Bible gives other different ways to Salvation, one according to Jesus’ “red letter words,” maybe, exclusive of unmerited grace. Rev. Samuel Gregory Jones, rector of St. Michael's Episcopal Church in Raleigh, NC says, “I am not primarily concerned with my eternal destination. As a Christian, I believe I should be primarily concerned with following Christ as one already made a citizen of the Kingdom, and should therefore seek to follow Christ in discipleship and mission. As Johnny Cash once sang, God is not calling us to be "so heavenly minded we're no earthly good." Winkler of Faith in Action, United Methodist Board of Church and Society writes: “We can focus on personal salvation and social justice. John Wesley and Jesus certainly did so. These are two sides of the same coin. In today’s world it is irresponsible to turn inward while God’s very creation is at risk.”

In Bottom Line Beliefs (a Sunday school lesson book we are now using in the Good News Class at Centenary UM), by Michael Brown (pastor of Marble Collegiate Church), he points to: “the Greek word for “salvation,” which is soteria and does not refer to doctrinal rigidity or even to one’s destination in afterlife, but simply means “to become whole.”

If unmerited “SALVATION by GRACE” becomes the “main theme” disguising Jesus’ other “red letter truth,” what good is that to lessen the pain and make safer an unjust and perilous world? We leave behind a world of grief, perishing humans, a world that spends 1.46 trillion dollars a year (In 2008, 42% [not included: intelligence gathering, nuclear weapon programs and homeland security] of that was spent by USA which has only 4.5% of the world’s population); a nuclear proliferation triggered to blow us to Kingdom Come. Do we not have a lot of work yet to do on this planet? I often wonder: How would Jesus’ teachings and parables read, if He was in today’s worldly experiences? The money changers in the temple would be a very mild irritation, compared to beyond-belief judgments He would surely have on greed, outrageous absurdities, hypocrisy, disparagements, denigrations, racism, healthcare inequities, legislative lobbyist; the political, economic, social, and the military complex of nations or the unsettling, much debated and questioned, climate issues.

The last stanza of my favorite, Hymn of Promise, expresses hope for salvation to eternal life: In our end is our beginning; in our time, infinity; in our doubt there is believing; in our life eternity. In our death, a resurrection; at last, a victory, unrevealed until its season, something God alone can see (Natalie Sleeth, 1986). In If Grace Is True, Gulley and Mulholland provide “abundant salvation” for all mankind. If that’s true, the comforting “words of salvation” for a deceased loved one extended to the bereaved is a prevenient grace.

A different longtime friend recently told me he believed very few people would enter Heaven. If we are to be honest, we don’t know about any of this; only God is the Omnipotent, All Knowing One; we only have our beliefs. However, we can be assured of one thing: Our honoring Jesus’ teaching for a life of ethical conduct and social justice is the only hope for those we leave behind to live in this world. Albert Nolan, in Jesus before Christianity, said orthopraxis (true practice of Jesus’ ethics) as opposed to orthodoxy (true doctrine) will lead us to the true essence of Jesus. Only by orthopraxis, can Jesus’ “love legs of Grace and Justice” permeate God’s infinite love, mercy, and goodwill to humankind, to become the “salvation for this world.” This is the noblest cause for our loved ones and for our eternal life, irrespective of what one believes about personal Salvation.