and amazed that Jesus would give them such an authority and not a little apprehensive that Jesus would give them such an agenda. But we know from the testimony of the Bible that they found themselves able to do all that Jesus had commanded, by the power of the Holy Spirit, and to grow in their ability and their dedication, and, along the way, to grow in their understanding of God’s loving purpose in Jesus Christ. They were, each one of them, a work of God in progress (even Judas Iscariot, until he lost faith), growing into the likeness of Christ Jesus their Lord.
Are you growing, maturing, becoming? Justification is merely the door to the life for which and to which God has saved us in Jesus Christ. It is the threshold of a new relationship with God and with others in which we experience God’s love and God’s peace. If we are grateful for what God has done for us, we move beyond being “acceptable” in God’s sight to being an active agent of God’s redeeming love in the likeness of God’s Son Jesus Christ. Our “forgiveness” ripens from simply getting off of the legal hook for our sins into the serenity of the relationship of parent and children, and the dedication of master and disciples, and the blessings of eternal life here and now. All of these together make up the fullness of what the Bible means by “salvation.”
“Are you saved?” someone may someday ask you as you walk down the street or through an airport. I hope you respond, “Yes, of course; God did that two thousand years ago. Now, I am a work in progress.”
Twelfth Sunday in Ordinary Time
Spanish Springs Presbyterian Church, Sparks, Nevada
June 22, 2008
Genesis 21:8–21
Romans 6:1b–11
Matthew 10:24–42
“God’s Other Life”
In November of 1961, my father delivered the keynote speech at the annual meeting of the Southwestern Section of the American Association of Petroleum Geologists in El Paso, Texas. At the time, he was the exploration manager for El Paso Natural Gas Company. That year’s meeting was a special international gathering of geologists from Mexico and other Latin American countries as well as the United States. The other major speaker at the meeting was Guillermo Salas, an internationally-acclaimed geologist who was then Mexico’s equivalent of the secretary of the interior. My mother had an important part in the meeting, too—she helped organize events for the wives who came to El Paso with their husbands—remember, there were not many female geologists in those days, and many wives did not work outside of the home—planning tours to Juárez and so forth, and employing her artistic skills to design the program cover and make posters to put up in the lobbies of the conference hotels. For several weeks before the convention, my father worked diligently on the speech, crafting it with just the right words and practicing his delivery, while the tables in our house were covered with poster boards and bottles of India ink and dozens of colored pencils.
At the time, I was ten years old, just two months into fifth grade at Mesita Elementary School. Even at that age, though, I understood that this was a significant event for my parents, and a distinct honor for my father, and the speech was something very important to him personally and professionally. I don’t know whose idea it was—my mother’s or my father’s—that I should be taken out of school that day to hear my father deliver his address. It was always a big deal when one of my fellow students was excused from class for something—even a dental appointment. So there was a buzz of attention when my mother came into the classroom to fetch me that day. My teacher, Mrs. McCreary, had been encouraging of my being present when my father spoke, and may even have said something to the class about it—I don’t remember. I had occasionally been out of school for illness, but never for any reason other than going to the doctor or staying home sick. On those occasions, my experience of life outside of the classroom on a school day had been limited to sitting in a waiting room or being confined to bed.
I remember much about my father’s speech. It focused on the dangers of reliance on foreign oil and gas exploration and production, comparing America’s growing dependence on such energy sources to ancient Rome’s increasing dependence on outlying provinces for its grain supplies (and we all know what happened to Rome). But one of my main impressions of the entire experience of driving down to the Plaza Theatre (which had been rented for the plenary meetings) and being surrounded by hundreds of adults was my astonishment that so much was going on in the city of El Paso on a school day. My world, Monday through Friday, nine months out of the year, was all within the schoolyard and buildings of Mesita Elementary School. There were rare occasions when I had some notion of the outside world during those hours—the cars whizzing by on Mesa Street during recess had to be going somewhere, after all, and I remember the times when my mother stopped by the school and hailed me through the chain-link fence at lunchtime recess to let me know that Alan Shepard and then John Glenn had landed safely from their space flights. But I was amazed to learn one day in November 1961 that the world was functioning, had a life totally separate and apart from and oblivious to what was going on at Mesita Elementary School.
I know that that experience was not unique to me. Most children make such a startling discovery at some point or another. But there is something about our basic egocentricity, as human beings, that renders us slow to appreciate the truth that our concerns and our activities are not the only things happening in the universe. And our limited vision as children sometimes survives or reasserts itself into our youth and adulthood and becomes a shared characteristic that affects us not only as individuals, but as families, as clubs, as companies and agencies, as communities, as nations, often as churches. It can lead to cultural or even spiritual myopia, even arrogance. Because we’re here, we can’t imagine that anything important is happening there. In fifth grade, I sort of assumed that everything going on at my house pretty much stopped when I left for school in the morning and didn’t resume until I got home again. As far as I was consciously concerned, nothing much was happening in the whole city of El Paso between eight-thirty and three o’clock on weekdays except pencils writing on paper and chalk writing on chalkboards in the city’s schools. And so I was fascinated, and maybe a little embarrassed, to see the city bustling that day as it never did whenever I might be downtown on Saturdays and Sundays. It had a whole ’nother life of which I had not really been aware.
As Christians, I think we are sometimes like I was as a schoolchild. We tend to assume that our experience of God is the full experience of God, the only experience of God. And that is natural, particularly given a certain interpretation of Jesus’ words about being the way, the truth, and the life, and that no one comes to the Father except through him. We do affirm, with the New Testament, that Jesus is uniquely the Son of God, the fullest revelation of who God is and what God is like and what God desires and expects from us, and that salvation, wholeness, eternal life, can be had only by having faith in Christ.
But that theological affirmation is quite different from the assumption that commonly accompanies it that God’s efforts toward salvation and wholeness and eternal life are confined to Christian history or even limited to the story told in the Bible. A little reflection on our part will confirm that God’s saving activity is not restricted to what we read on the Bible’s pages; it continued and expanded after the last word of the Bible was written, and continues today, among us, right here, for instance, not to mention historic events like the Protestant Reformation, and the opening of the church to women’s leadership, and the Civil Rights movement and the integration of churches. And if the history of the saving work of God is longer than the period covered by the Bible, it only makes sense that the scope of the saving work of God is even broader than the events chronicled in the Bible. The fact that God chose Abraham to be the ancestor of a great nation that would be blessed by God and be given a special role in the redemption of God’s creation does not mean that Israel is the only nation that God blesses, does not mean that God isn’t interested in other people or that God doesn’t love them, does not mean that God’s great work of salvation and wholeness and eternal life
