ON BEING SAVED
A Dialog Sermon

James Ishmael Ford

19 September 2001

Today is the first of this year’s dialog sermons. These are a slight adaptation of a worship structure brought to us by Gerry Krick all those years ago when he first came to FUSN from the western wilds of suburban Chicago. The undergirding theological principle which inspires the dialog sermon is that we all have contained within us, each and every one of us, resonances with deepest truths about our individual nature and the nature of the cosmos.

These resonances as they arise within moments of insight are the jewels of our spiritual intuitions. When brought together within a lively community concerned with seeking the deep of human life, these insights, these deeper but individual perspectives are tumbled together with the insights of others, sorted a little, cleaned and polished. What may be revealed within this process can be a profound wisdom.

This tumbling that sorts and polishes is a very simple and human thing, following much the same inspiration that guides our small group ministries. I speak for a few minutes on a subject of, hopefully, central concern: love, god, fear. I try to define the term a little, and then share some of my own perspectives. Then I walk into the congregation with a microphone.

All are invited to this conversation. The only necessary caveat for us to go deep is mutual respect and genuine courtesy for each other. Each of us has a facet of the jewel that is wisdom, or as that old Indian story about the blind seekers reveals, out of our own quest, each of us comes to understand one aspect of the elephant. It is bringing those individual insights into a community like this that takes us to the next level, toward a broader understanding.

Together we may well prove to be useful to the many beings in all their suffering and longing. This is not just a chat. It really is about the first things of our lives. So, this said, today, let’s reflect on the nature of salvation. Religions are concerned with any number of things. At one end of the spectrum religions have to do with social stability, they inform the standards and norms of a culture. This is the conservative impulse of religion.

It is easy to see and often appropriate to challenge the myriad evils that have poured forth from purity codes and other such structures that aim at preserving order. Still there is also much good and necessary in preserving a society, and so to my mind this support of a culture while shadowed, and needing constant correction, is nonetheless a legitimate function of religions.

That said there is at the same time a vastly more important focus, I believe, within the spiritual impulse, within the formation of religions. At the far end of that spectrum from holding a society together, religions also address the most intimate and personal concerns we all come to in our lives: Why do I die? What is the meaning of my existence? What is to become of me, and those I love? All this can be distilled into that great longing cry of the human mind and heart: Why?

Here as we approach the why, we stand on holy ground. Here we open the deeper questions, the existential longing of all human beings to know our place within the cosmos. With those questions, with that why, we engage everything which constellates around that ancient theological term salvation.

Salvation comes to our English language through the Latin, salvatio. That old standard Webster’s Revised Unabridged Dictionary says salvation is "the act of saving; preservation or deliverance from destruction, danger, or great calamity." The root word is the Latin salvare, to save, which means, "to make safe."

Webster expands upon this to include procuring "the safety of; to preserve from injury, destruction, or evil of any kind; to rescue from impending danger; as, to save a house from… flames." To be safe is to be free from "Harm, injury, or risk; untouched or unthreatened by danger or injury; unharmed; unhurt; secure; whole; as safe from disease; safe from storms; safe from foes."

I think this use points rather directly to our common human longing in the face of uncertainty and suffering, the disasters and small agonies which seem to pile one upon the other in our ordinary lived lives. Every fear we have for our children or their children, for our parents and for ourselves; all are contained in this ancient longing for salvation.

Here, therefore is the greatest work of religion. So, of course, I think while there would be an element concerned with social stability, the preservation of culture, there is also about religion all that is magic, the many attempts at engaging and sometimes appeasing uncertain and dangerous forces that seem to fill the world. Religion is concerned with encountering forces beyond our ken, and somehow engaging them in a positive manner. This act of engagement really has magic about it.

Magic. I find magic is a very good term for this process of ours, what with all its ambiguities, all its shadings. There is indeed an element of desperation, and futile attempts at appeasing what seem to be disinterested or malign forces. I suggest we need to be aware and wary of such aspects of our spiritual quest. There are shadows at this end of the spectrum just as there are at the societal preservation end.

Still, magic can mean much more. As Lawrence Sullivan, who teaches over at Harvard once observed, "Magic is the science of hope because it cultivates the human capacity to face the future—and all other forms of unknown, hidden reality. Magic allows hope to become a dominant, concrete force in structuring the world and restructuring the world and restructuring time and space; through magic human hope allies itself with the forces that order the cosmos."

This lively and magical engagement is like all that is good in human affairs, I believe, and flows out of our conscious and unconscious quest for salvation. And at the same time, of course, all that is weak and fearful is apparent at this moment, within this engagement, as well. Like religion itself, magic is nuanced, shadowed, and contains the useless and harmful at the same time it engages the most important things. Walking the spiritual path we need to be careful, and we need, I believe, the guidance and correction that only comes from others.

In the world religions there appear to be two fundamental ways of seeking salvation. In the religions of the Book, Judaism, Christianity and Islam, salvation comes from submission to the revealed wisdom of God. Here the teachings of the prophets, or in that one particular version of the revealed way, through the actual son of God; salvation is found within recognition, assent and acceptance of God’s path presented from above.

The other great religions such as Hinduism and Buddhism speak of salvation as liberation. Here liberation is a kind of knowing, a deep wisdom within us that as we come to know it, releases us from bondage to our illusions. It is deeply internal. Hinduism and its child Buddhism as well as Taoism have different understandings of what that liberating knowledge is, but they agree it is a way of seeing, of being that relies on no force outside one’s self.

Of course, as we explore these religions, it is easy to see how facile divisions never completely hold. Indeed sometimes they come crashing together. Our own faith, Unitarian Universalism, was birthed in the first family, out of Protestant Puritan Christianity. But, it has grown and deepened over the years and in some dramatic ways has taken on major characteristics of the second family.

Hence our attention to uncovering hidden treasures within the depths of our individual being, revealed in part through the arts of conversation. As such in some ways we UUs present a bridge faith between east and west. We are inheritors of the wisdom of the written word, being gifted with the depths of others, truly the magic of revelation. I suggest it is hard to openly read some passages in the Bible or even from the poets and not believe God is speaking directly to us. At least that has been my experience.
At the same time, we have come to be a people who mostly believe each of us contains authentic wisdom within us living and vital from before the creation of the stars. And I believe the larger majority of us believe that this inherent wisdom is something that simply needs to be uncovered through reflection, contemplation, prayer, meditation or conversation.

So now maybe its time for the proof of that pudding, to engage that conversation in hopes we can learn more about the mystery of healing, of saving, of making safe. What are your considered reflections on the nature of salvation? Is it a completely useless term? Does it point to something powerful and true? How do you engage it? What does that ancient and shadowed word salvation mean in your life and in the lives of those who matter most to you?

(The Conversation)

Let me wind this up with two quotes. First, a poem I love so much from Mary Oliver: "Look, the trees/are turning/their own bodies/into pillars//of light,/are giving off the rich/fragrance of cinnamon/and fulfillment//the long tapers/of cattails/are bursting and floating away over/the blue shoulders//of the ponds,/and every pond,/no matter what its/name is, is//nameless now./Every year/everything/I have ever learned/in my lifetime/leads back to this: the fires/and the black river of loss/whose other side//is salvation,/whose meaning/none of us will ever know./To live in this world//you must be able/to do three things:/to love what is mortal,/to hold it//against your bones knowing/your own life depends on it;/and, when the time comes to let it go,/to let it go."

And finally, from that sage who teaches me so much, Jan Seymour-Ford, "What a mosquito-bite-on-the-butt, cat-barf-on-the-floor, knocked-over-glass joy is life."

Amen.