Postscript

“Were the Whole Realm of Nature Mine”

12. "Postscript"

First Presbyterian Church of Jamestown, New York

The Reverend Thomas A. Sweet

September 12, 2010

Worship at the Jamestown Audubon Center

It hardly seemed right to me to do an all summer sermon series called “Were the Whole Realm of Nature Mine” and then give up on it when we have come outdoors to worship. Don said when he preached last week that we had come to the close of the series and that is what we had planned, so I have entitled my little addendum today, simply, “Postscript.”

(By the way, Don and I agreed at the beginning of the summer that whoever of us was scheduled to preach would lead the whole service so that the other of us could sit in the pews and worship without having to be “on” for part of it. And I really did worship when Don preached. His sermons were magnificent and I want to say it in public and if you missed them, go to the website and read them. It is not quite like being there in person, but even the approximation will be worth your while.)

So, now: the “postscript”:

Do you find yourself numbered among the great throng of people who find refreshment, renewal, and re-creation when you spend time outside in nature? Who perhaps in nature are able to shed some of your anxiety and stress? Who seem to be able to “breathe” and relax better? Who feel a heightened sense of peace? No doubt the sheer beauty of the natural world has something to do with it. And the change of pace. And the fact that so many different species, ten million all told, so marvelously share earth’s garden. I suspect, though, it is the immensity of the out-of-doors, the spaciousness of it, the vast openness that plays the most significant part in making nature the balm it seems to be for many of us including David who blessed the Lord for making him lie down in green pastures and leading him beside still waters where his soul was restored.

In our biblical text for the day, we find this verse: “The saying is sure and worthy of full acceptance, that Christ Jesus came into the world to save sinners…” Now, I happen to believe that this is so, but with a twist. Salvation is a word that, going back into its Hebrew roots, means “space, roominess, broadness.” So salvation, etymologically speaking with a dose of good theology sprinkled in, salvation in its original and deepest sense means entering into largeness, entering into God’s largeness.

Consider Israel of Bible times and into the present day: space matters. Part of the significant history of Israel is that it constantly is being hemmed in and pressured and constricted by other world powers. So, the ancient Israelites, as Israelis still do today, construed their salvation in terms of room, space, a place sufficient to live freely and securely. Their archetypical story involved deliverance from the confines and constraints of Egyptian slavery into a broad land flowing with milk and honey and freedom. For the Israelites, salvation took the form of ample space to be, to live, to thrive, to raise their families in peace, to practice their religion. We can understand that. The hymn-prayer of our own country begins with the elegant acclamation – “O beautiful for spacious skies…” and concludes with this petition – “ America , America , God shed his grace on thee. And crown thy good with brotherhood”…now get the largeness of this…“from sea to shining sea.”

But the spaciousness to which the words “save” and “salvation” points also apply metaphorically. Time after time in the Psalms, the psalmists talk about salvation in terms of being brought into a more expansive life, into greater freedom, into a bigger way of thinking and living, into God’s largeness. A couple of examples:

Psalm 18 – After detailing the press of enemies and pressures crowding in on him, the psalmist says, “God brought me out into a broad place and delivered me because God delighted in me.”

Psalm 4 says in like manner – “When I was in distress, God gave me room.”

And yet another psalm says, “Though I am hemmed in, you, God, will lead me into a wide, open space.”

How many times we, too, say something similar to that. When we feel stressed, we say we need space. When we feel beleaguered, we plead for room to figure things out. When worries besiege us and pressures crowd in on us, we say we feel claustrophobic and need to get into a more open place.

Would it surprise you to learn that, in the Bible, salvation rarely means being rescued from eternal condemnation? When Christians of a certain ilk ask the question, Are you saved?, that is the meaning they usually attach to it. But the Bible has at most only passing interest in such a thing. Why? Because we already belong to God. Because we already live and move and have our being in God. Because the father already has forgiven his prodigals and welcomed them home. Because the shepherd already has left the gathered flock to go and bring back the sheep that has strayed. We already are the children of God and we cannot be in a better position than that. But God wants us to grow up and to live into the fullness that God intends and hopes for us and the world.

This life is not about getting into some later one. If we trust that God loves us, if we entrust our lives to God, we do not have to be about the selfish endeavor of trying to score a ticket to heaven. Heaven is the experience of living in God and with God and we do not have to wait on that. We pray it every week. Thy will be done on earth as it is in heaven. The life that matters most is the one we are living. Now. In the present. Here. In us. Among us.

This life, the Westminster Shorter Catechism says, is about glorifying God and enjoying God forever. And St. Irenaeus says that the glory of God is a human being fully alive. So salvation is about being given the room – physically, mentally, socially, emotionally, spiritually, whatever we need – to live into the largeness of God, the spaciousness of God, to have, as St. Paul put it, “the same mind as was in Christ Jesus.” “There is a wideness in God’s mercy,” says one of our bedrock hymns, “like the wideness of the sea” and it is in that wideness that we have the space, the room, the freedom to grow our big mind, our big heart, our big love that banishes in us the pride and prejudice and provincialism of a small mind, a small heart, a small love.

Barbara Brown Taylor in one of her books has written that “Salvation is so much more than many of its proponents would have us believe…Salvation is a word for the divine spaciousness that comes to human beings in all the tight places where their lives are at risk…It opens a door in what looked like for all the world a wall. This is the way of life, and God alone knows how it works.” Our lives are all the time at risk of being too small, of settling for being pale imitations of what they otherwise might be. When our scripture says that “Christ Jesus came into the world to save sinners,” the besetting sin from which we need to be saved – for it leads to all other sins – is the failure of our imaginations to see a life rife with the creative presence and resourceful power of God that caused one biblical witness to say that “with God all things are possible” and another to say, “I can do all things through Christ who strengthens me.”

C.S. Lewis puts our predicament this way, saying we too often are “like an ignorant child who wants to go on making mud pies in a slum because he cannot imagine what is meant by the offer of a holiday at the sea.” And nineteenth century British statesman and journalist John Morley cautioned that “even good opinions are worth very little unless we hold them in the broad, intelligent, spacious way.”

So, we need to hold our opinions – dare I say our convictions – in a broad, intelligent, spacious way. That is not only what the Christ in Jesus teaches us, but even how he teaches. Not lectures, but stories. Not polemics, but parables. Not compulsion, but invitation. Not coercion, but compassion. He wants to give his hearers and followers room and space to move into the largeness of God instead of holding on to religion and life that are too small and stale. Or, as Emily Dickinson put it in one of her poems:

Tell all the Truth but tell it slant –

Success in Circuit lies

Too bright for our infirm Delight

The Truth’s superb surprise

As Lightning to the Children eased

With Explanation kind

The Truth must dazzle gradually

Or every man be blind –

Religion that tries to beat us over the head with its truth is really just a beating, the farthest thing from salvation and a larger life. It is Truth told slant and Truth that dazzles gradually that allow us the spaciousness to move past preconceptions and prejudices, beyond defenses, stereotypes, and literalism that stifle and stymie growth and maturity in us. Think of the difference between a hot-house tomato forced into its rigid ripeness and one that has the spaciousness of summer’s rhythm and dance to develop its juicy sweetness.

It is never too early because why would you want to miss out on it one moment more than you had to, but it also is never too late, to be persuaded by the largeness of God’s heart and mind and soul and Spirit as we see it embodied in Jesus the Christ to live and believe similarly. There is nothing in your past to disqualify you. In our scripture today it was said of Paul that he was the foremost of sinners – a blasphemer, a persecutor, a man of violence, a man of little redeeming imagination and even less to recommend him – but then he gave himself to the largeness of God as he saw it in Christ and thereby was saved from his little life. Yes, the saying is sure and worthy of full acceptance, that Christ Jesus came into the world to save sinners.

The vastness of the whole realm of nature with its great beauty and openness, its variety and mystery, betokens the spaciousness of God in whom there is room for me – and for each and all of us who desire it – to grow into all our glorious fullness. Therein is found our salvation.

Amen .

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