What is salvation?

Isaiah 1:10-17

10 Hear the word of the Lord, you rulers of Sodom!  Listen to the teaching of our God,    you people of Gomorrah!

11 What to me is the multitude of your sacrifices? says the Lord; I have had enough of burnt offerings of rams and the fat of fed beasts;I do not delight in the blood of bulls    or of lambs or of goats.

12 When you come to appear before me,    who asked this from your hand?    Trample my courts no more!

13 Bringing offerings is futile;    incense is an abomination to me.New moon and Sabbath and calling of convocation— I cannot endure solemn assemblies with iniquity.

14 Your new moons and your appointed festivals    my soul hates; they have become a burden to me; I am weary of bearing them.

15 When you stretch out your hands,    I will hide my eyes from you;even though you make many prayers,    I will not listen; your hands are full of blood.

16 Wash yourselves; make yourselves clean;    remove your evil deeds from before my eyes; cease to do evil;

17  learn to do good; seek justice;    rescue the oppressed; defend the orphan;    plead for the widow.

Luke 19:1-10

1 He entered Jericho and was passing through it. 2 A man was there named Zacchaeus; he was a chief tax collector and was rich. 3 He was trying to see who Jesus was, but on account of the crowd he could not, because he was short in stature. 4 So he ran ahead and climbed a sycamore tree to see him, because he was going to pass that way. 5 When Jesus came to the place, he looked up and said to him, “Zacchaeus, hurry and come down, for I must stay at your house today.” 6 So he hurried down and was happy to welcome him. 7 All who saw it began to grumble and said, “He has gone to be the guest of one who is a sinner.” 8 Zacchaeus stood there and said to the Lord, “Look, half of my possessions, Lord, I will give to the poor, and if I have defrauded anyone of anything, I will pay back four times as much.” 9 Then Jesus said to him, “Today salvation has come to this house, because he, too, is a son of Abraham. 10 For the Son of Man came to seek out and to save the lost.”

Isaiah 1 provides a vivid picture of religion gone wrong.  The Lord is fed up with his people.  They offer their sacrifices, but the Lord will not receive them.  They bring their offerings, but the Lord rejects them.  They look to God, but he turns away.  They make their prayers, but the Lord refuses to hear them.  They are indeed gathering to worship to do all the things that God prescribes for them in the law, and yet God finds it all exasperating, an abomination.  Their worship smells like garbage.

And this for a very simple reason: Though they’re practicing their piety correctly, their deeds are evil, and they don’t really seem to care.  The Lord declares: “learn to do good; seek justice; rescue the oppressed; defend the orphan; plead for the widow.”  Presumably they are doing none of these things; they are blind to the needs of their neighbors; they’re not lifting a finger to help.  If you say you love God but you don’t love your neighbor, God takes it as an insult.  

You may have noticed that we generally avoid singing songs here that tell God we love him.  We’re commanded to love God, of course, but in the NT you never find  verbal expressions of love for God.  If you love me, obey my commands, said Jesus.  Don’t just say it with your words, show me with your actions.  We easily play the role of the lazy husband who thinks that if he says “I love you” and occasionally buys some flowers that he doesn’t ever need to do laundry or the dishes or pay attention.  The wife is not so easily fooled, and neither is God.  

This passage forces upon us the uncomfortable question of whether, to some extent, at least, our worship pays mere lip service to the love of God while we neglect actually loving the neighbor.  I fear being the sort of person who thinks and says the right things but whose actions don’t measure up.  Talk is cheap.  We come to worship not to say the things we think God might want to hear but to become the people who do the things God wants us to do.  Here we practice the faith so that we might actually live day by day.  The hope is that our worship doesn’t end here, but rather that we might be people - be a people - who do good, who seek justice, rescue the oppressed, defend the orphan, plead for the widow - and who love and serve whomever else is in need.  

It is, of course, quite easy to make our worship, our religion, about something else entirely.  Last week we saw, in Jesus’ parable, the Pharisee who came into God’s presence self-righteously, using prayer as an opportunity to elevate himself by putting others down.  He assumed that God would be impressed by the fact - or so he claimed - that he regularly fasted and tithed.  Turns out he was wrong. He’s contrasted with a tax collector who comes into God’s presence, not lifting himself up, but humbling himself.  Perhaps this wasn’t just a hypothetical story, however, for Zacchaeus seems to fit the description.  

We don’t know much about Zaccheaus.  Maybe he indeed went to the temple to pray only to have the Pharisees scoff at him.  But we do know that he was a little man and that he wanted to see Jesus, so he climbed a tree.  This was an undignified, humiliating thing to do; it suggests his desperation to see Jesus, to receive or experience something.  Much to his surprise (and to the surprise of the crowd), Jesus said to him, “Zacchaeus, hurry and come down, for I must stay at your house today.”  Zacchaeus scrambles down the tree and welcomes Jesus in.   The crowds disapprove of Zacchaeus and that Jesus would choose to visit the house of a “sinner” like him.  

Why does Jesus choose to stay with Zacchaeus?  Why not spend the night with a more righteous person rather than risking association with someone so disreputable?  I suppose there’s a kind of “greatest good / biggest impact” argument to make here, but even more that, perhaps Zaccaheus was the one - maybe the only one - prepared to welcome him in, who would rejoice at the Lord’s visit.  One possible moral of the story is that Jesus is quite happy to dwell with whomever will receive him, but it’s usually the “sinners”, not the righteous, who are happy to have him.  

Zacchaeus responds by saying “Look, half of my possessions, Lord, I will give to the poor, and if I have defrauded anyone of anything, I will pay back four times as much.”  And in response to this pronouncement Jesus declares: “Today salvation has come to this house, because he, too, is a son of Abraham. For the Son of Man came to seek out and to save the lost.”

What is salvation?  What does Jesus mean when he says that salvation has come today?  Salvation is a word that we - that I - don’t use so much, probably because it seems to have been tainted by theologies I don’t agree with.  The language of salvation, of getting saved, makes us uneasy.  I can remember being a teenager going door to door (mostly unwillingly) trying to tell lost people about Jesus in order to get them saved.  You knew you succeeded when you got them to recite a little prayer, then you’d leave and go to the next house.  I guess we hoped that salvation might manifest itself there and then, but the real emphasis was on the fact that when you died you’d go to heaven rather than to hell.  So when Jesus says to Zacchaeus that salvation as come today we might simply hear Jesus saying that this is the moment when Zacchaeus received his ticket to heaven.  

I suspect the standard way of reading the Zacchaeus story is to say that he welcomed Jesus in and that equals salvation, but it seems significant to me that Jesus make this declaration immediately after Zacchaeus has pledged to give half of his wealth away, to make fourfold restitution.  Salvation comes not simply when Zacchaeus welcomes Jesus in, but when Zacchaeus responds by pledging to do that which Isaiah commanded, that which the Gospel entails.  Salvation isn’t actually experienced until it’s lived into. 

You can imagine that Zacchaeus, though wealthy, has carried with himself the burden of being shunned, finding himself outside of community, knowing that the resentment directed his way is justified.  He responds to the Lord’s visit by unburdening himself of all this in the actual making of amends, of doing good, of practicing justice and then some.  No amount of sacrifices he could offer or prayer he could make at the temple were going to deliver him.  Not even welcoming Jesus then sending him on his way would “get him saved”.  Salvation meant embracing true religion.  

One of things at the core of this community is an attempt to invert the standard order of operation where faith leads to following and instead to emphasize that it’s following that leads to faith.  Belief doesn’t lead to action xo much as action leads to belief.  Similarly, we assume that salvation equals an experience that then leads to a response, when I want to suggest that for Zacchaeus and for us, the salvation comes to us in the response, in the leaving behind the old life in favor of the new. 

The language of salvation no longer resonates with Christians because we so rarely witness a life transformed.  As with so much else in the Christian life, because we cannot see it outwardly, we relegate the action to the inward realm, rendering salvation a spiritual status or a psychological state.  But maybe we’re ambivalent about our salvation because, though we’ve ostensibly received the Good News of the Gospel, we haven’t unburned ourselves of the ways that lead to death; we haven’t really responded.  We might be content with the same old religion. 

The best way to think about salvation is in tandem with the kingdom of God.  Where the kingdom is present, salvation has come.  When we pray for the kingdom to come every Sunday, we do indeed orient ourselves to a future hope, to a time when God makes everything right, but we also pray for our present reality, that in ways big and small the kingdom would come here and now, that our salvation is not deferred to the future, but can be known this very day.  Zacchaeus decided that day that he was going to live, not just in the hope that the kingdom would come, but in fact as if it were already here, and by giving away his wealth and making reparations to those whom he defrauded, he makes the kingdom present too.  That is what salvation looks like.