Posterous theme by Cory Watilo

Sermon--Love is Our Salvation (Romans 10:5-15)

Love is Our Salvation (Romans 10:5-15)           

I think that we confess with our mouths that Jesus is Lord when we say I love you.  If God is the author of love, then when we love we show God’s grace to the world.  At first glance, this turn toward love can seem easy.  Too easy.  After all, Paul calls us to ask ourselves, “what is salvation?  What is our confession?” both of which are two of the most challenging questions of our faith.             

I fear that I may lose something of Paul if I don’t spend this time wrestling with his words.  If we boil Paul’s message down to love, do we miss the point?  I don’t think so.  Paul is wrestling with righteousness, and how we can engage with God in this world.  Paul wants to know how we can become righteous.  Paul wants to know how we can feel God’s salvation in our lives.  Paul calls us to cling to the grace of God, which is a grace that we receive, because of God’s act of love.  We would not feel and see grace in our lives if we didn’t have the ineffable love of God being poured out to us.             

I’ve heard it said before that sometimes when we preach about love, we water down our very challenging gospel.  I don’t ever want to strip the gospel –and someone as passionate about the gospel as Paul – of zeal, urgency, and passion.  But proclaiming love doesn’t do that.  Those who think love is easy have love confused with something made with human hands.  There is nothing more urgent than love, and I think Paul would agree.              

What is it that we learn from the lawyer in Luke’s gospel? The lawyer says, ‘Teacher – what must I do to inherit eternal life?’ And Jesus says, ‘What is written in the law? What do you read there?’ to which the man answers ‘You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your strength, and with all your mind; and your neighbor as yourself.’ And then Jesus said to him, ‘You have given the right answer; do this, and you will live.’             

Love is how we inherit eternal life.  Love is how we have life.  Love is how we experience salvation.  We are bound to God by the love that God has shown us.  We are called to look to the God of love and offer God our loving worship and thanksgiving.  As I said before, one of the questions we’re called to today is “what is salvation?”  Salvation is when we love others so urgently and passionately that we forget about ourselves long enough to think about God.              

It is when we love so hard that we forget about ourselves, because we are too busy doing the work of the loving God that we believe is always saving the world.  It is salvation, because that humility that we’ve been given by God saves us from ourselves.  God saves us from ourselves by calling us to confess love.             

This text also calls us to wonder what our confession is, what it means to confess that we believe in God, and to wonder what it looks like to see a church that boldly proclaims that “the same Lord is Lord of all and is generous to all who call on him.”              

This summer as I studied in Canterbury, I had the privilege of worshiping with members of the Anglican Communion from every continent but Antarctica.  Every day we joined in various chapels at Canterbury Cathedral to pray early morning Matins, take Eucharist together, and end the day with Evensong.  In every service, we would reach the part of the liturgy for the Lord’s Prayer, and the officiant would say “And now we pray as Christ has taught us, each in our own language…” and everything would change just a little bit.              

I would begin to pray, noticing my language as distinctly different from the others.  My southern American accent mixed with Rebecca’s, the New Yorker beside me … all the way across the room I could hear Peter praying in Dinka … Kenneth was praying in Cantonese … Jean Jacques was praying in French … and even though she spoke English, I could hear the Austrailian accent coming from Joanne. I didn’t know some of the words that people were saying, and I don’t even know how to make some of those sounds with my lips and tongue, but strangely – I knew, in a very ethereal way, what they were saying … And I knew that this prayer is something we will always have in common.              

People joining their voices together, each in their own language, to say “your Kingdom come, your will be done” – now that is a confession.  That is the voice that is put behind the words that are near us, the words that are on our lips and in our hearts.  There is no better sound than the amalgam of worshiping languages to affirm that there is neither Jew nor Greek, because we are unified under the one God – Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.                

And this – this affirmation, this confession, this joining … This is love.  It is love because it is the product of centuries of Christians meeting together, praying together, and struggling together.  It is love because it has been difficult to stay together, as one Body… and it is love because it has survived those difficulties.              

Paul says there is neither Jew nor Greek… This was centuries ago… where are we now?  Are we defining ourselves by our differences, or by our similarities?  Are we letting our differences divide us, or are we letting our common prayers unite us?  Because Paul was calling the church in Rome to confess that God is a loving, unifying power, and that grace and salvation had become attainable to creation through Christ.  Does our church profess, in word and in deed, a belief that God can reach, and love, and restore anyone… Or are we still trying to figure out who is Jew, and who is Greek?             

It seems that we struggle to try to be one, not knowing that we are already one, and that which we perceive to be divisions can never divide that which God has united.  God has united us all – nation to nation, Jew to Greek, friend to enemy – and nothing we do can break that, because the unifying has already been done.  The act of love on the cross is what has made us one, and our judgments cannot obstruct God’s love. 

Amen.