September 15, 2024 – Seventeenth Sunday after Pentecost
Isaiah 43.1-11
Luke 23.32-43
Jesus Saves
Second Sunday after Pentecost
Every now and then Debbie and I will wistfully recall the days of driving our daughters to college. It gave us some wonderful opportunities to spend time in locales we might otherwise not have visited. Bringing Blythe to Syracuse gave us the chance to visit places like the Baseball Hall of Fame in Cooperstown, and wineries in the Finger Lakes. Taking Clare to Dickinson College in Carlisle, Pennsylvania brought us to the doorstep of Pennsylvania Dutch Country, from where much of Debbie’s family hails.
But one of my favorite parts of the ride to Carlisle was driving west along Route 84 through New York across the Hudson, and catching Route 384 just east of Scranton. While it was not the wonders of Scranton that called out to me, there was, and probably still is, something that brought a smile to my face on that trip. About ten miles before you get to the city, there is a large outcropping of rock facing the westbound lane, festooned with graffiti. I have no way of knowing who the various authors are, but it is one of my favorite places to drive by, because there in three foot letters for everyone to see is a red lovers’ heart with the names “Debbie & Alan” written inside, surprisingly, correctly spelled. It’s not every day you see yourself and your spouse immortalized like that. Of course, there are lots of other things written on the rock as well. In fact, it seems like everywhere you go, there is some kind of self-expressive graffiti scribbled in the least likely, and least accessible of places. And even more than considering the message itself, you find yourself wondering how in the world the writer got up there. Whether the message is “Kush,” “Kamala,” “MAGA 2024” or “Mix Rules,” (which I still wish somebody would explain to me), the expressions written in the unlikeliest of places tend to grab our attention in what are otherwise the drabbest of settings.
Of course, the message you see written most often on those rocks and overpasses and exit signs and practically anything else that doesn’t move, is the title of this morning’s sermon, “Jesus Saves.” Usually written in white paint that has trickled down from the bottoms of the letters, there among the lovers’ declarations and local school boosterism and juvenile obscenities and one-shot political commentary, it just goes right on declaring its gospel message to anyone who happens to drive by, who takes the time to look at what is written at the side of the road, who even cares about what somebody obviously thinks is important enough to risk bodily injury in making the effort to inscribe.
It makes you wonder what motivates a person to shimmy up the exit sign or scale the face of the cliff, most likely under cover of darkness, to paint those ten simple letters which are so common as to be ignored by most readers immediately following recognition. Let’s be honest now: what reaction do most people have, reading the words, “Jesus Saves,” if they take any note of them at all? I’ll be the first to admit, such a relatively lame sermon title hasn’t generated any chat around my Friday breakfast this week, unless you count the comment, “Jesus saves? Yes, but Moses invests.”
My guess though, is that most people, if they think the message is serious, wherever they may encounter it, tend to wince, because the phrase “Jesus Saves” evokes mental images of Bible-thumpers and revival meetings and unrelenting evangelists and a kind of religionism that does not sit well with proper New England Yankee sensibility. It’s like the New Yorker cartoon that showed a frenzied puppy in a fenced-in front yard waving a placard that reads, “Jesus Loves You,” and on the fence a sign reads, “Beware of Dog.”
“Jesus Saves.” It wouldn’t pinch us quite the same if it the words were “Christ Saves,” because these have a certain objectivity to them; they sound semi-theological enough to allow us a certain detached distance. But “Jesus Saves” refuses us that detachment; Jesus is a personal name, and it means that there is person, a real person named Jesus, who is busy saving somebody or something, and the reality of it all is painted up there on that rock or that overpass for everyone to see. And so people wince because it is mildly embarrassing to think that there is a somebody out there doing the saving for those who know about it and for those who don’t; and it is mildly embarrassing to realize there is somebody who climbed that rock with a bucket of paint or a spray can, and moved the wearing of their religion from their shirt sleeve to the great outdoors; and it is mildly embarrassing because “Jesus Saves” is such a simple, almost simplistic phrase that it doesn’t really mean that much to us at all; and it is mildly embarrassing because in reality it means everything, and when we read it we are forced to confront that reality, and we are not certain we want to.
“Jesus Saves.” Jesus saves… who? Me? Do I really need saving? Can’t I just keep traveling the road I’m on, going to church when it fits my schedule, with the Lord’s Prayer and the 23d Psalm tucked comfortingly in the recesses of my memory? Do I have to be reminded that there is something deeply personal about this whole faith business? Do I want to be? Even as we go through our lives in the same kind of world as that seventy-five mile an hour, neon-lit, cluttered and clamoring world which roars beneath the sign itself, we can still hear the implications of the words through all our wincing embarrassment, which is that everybody who passes by or underneath that jolting two word phrase, needs to be saved, ourselves most of all. Rich and poor, young and old, religious and irreligious, the words apply universally: Jesus Saves.
“Jesus Saves.” Not just an idea, or a theory about what humanity needs most, neither a concept nor a plan, certainly not a philosophy, but a person, a person named Jesus. Three men are hanging on a hill, a few hours away from death, indeed, death already has them within its grasp. One of them yells at another, with a mixture of anger and terror, “You’re the Christ! Save yourself!” And then, in a burst of frightened candor, “Jesus, remember me!” It is the same whitened prayer of the writer with the paint can. It is the same hope, recognized or not, of the driver speeding past the message. It is the same unspoken, perhaps unrealized desire of the man and the woman in the pew. As disconcerting as it is to find it written on our souls for everyone to see, we nonetheless whisper: there is something that we would like to be better about our lives: Jesus, remember us!
And the answer from the cross is as embarrassing as the question: “Today you will be with me in paradise.” What does this mean? We know that Jesus did not go to heaven on that Good Friday when the bodies were finally removed, and regardless of what the creed says, it is unlikely he descended into hell. How could anybody be with him in paradise if he wasn’t there yet himself? This is the beauty in the simplicity of these two words: “Jesus Saves” is not about theological correctness, nor techniques for winning souls to Christ, nor is it about definitions of salvation. It is a proclamation, pure and simple: Jesus Saves. That’s it – don’t try to read anything into it, just take the words at face value, and value them, because in them is the meaning of the world. Jesus saves… who? Jesus saves the criminal on the cross, Jesus saves the sin-sick soul, Jesus saves everyone who believes in him.
But this is the easy answer, isn’t it? Easy because it leaves the message up there on the rock where it can be passed by and forgotten in a flash. Is there anybody who wants to know the more difficult answer? Jesus saves… who? Jesus saves [names – Alan]. This is not quite so easy to hear. But God’s salvation is not a personal salvation just because it originates with a specific person named Jesus. It is also a personal salvation because it is directed towards an individual person: toward you, and toward me, and toward every person who is able to say “I,” and “me.” Jesus saves who? Jesus saves me. And equally, Jesus saves us, all of us, together.
“Fear not, for I have redeemed you. I have called you by name, [and] you are mine. When you pass through the waters, I will be with you, and through the rivers, they shall not overwhelm you; when you walk through fire you shall not be burned and the flame shall not consume you… You are my witnesses, and my servants whom I have chosen, that you may know and believe and understand that I am [the Lord]… I am the Lord, and besides me there is no Savior.”
What are those flames which we can walk through without being burned? What are the floods which cannot overwhelm us? If Jesus really saves us, what does he save us from? I don’t know – what is it that jeopardizes our equilibrium? Does work threaten to consume us, are there those who despair of ever finding a job? Is there a relationship that is not quite right, because we aren’t ready to admit our own responsibilities? Does our outgo consistently exceed our income, or are we so comfortable that we’re tyrannized by the search for the latest status symbol, trinket or bauble? Are we teetering on the edge of health and unhealth, are we consumed by the fear of our own mortality? Or do we need to be saved from that from which I’d wager most people need deliverance – do we need to be saved from ourselves? As much as we could go through the sanctuary and name each individual whom Jesus saves, we could also name as many needs, as many predicaments from which we would dearly love to be delivered, as many wishes as we would like granted. And again, the easy answer, and the one we’ll usually receive if we would bother to ask the painter of those words, is that Jesus saves us from sin and perdition. And this is true, I suppose, but until we recognize the ways we are distanced from one another, the ways we are distanced from God and yes, the ways we are distanced from our best and truest selves, then Jesus’ salvation means as much to me as those other words painted on the rock: those names I don’t know, those words I would not speak, those politicians I would never countenance.
“Jesus Saves.” The words are not the property of shallow religionists, who can’t seem to get beyond the words themselves. They are not a catch-phrase that sums up the view of the Bible thumpers and revivalists. In fact I think this is another of those ideas we need to reclaim from the evangelicals, like the word evangelical itself, because they are, in fact, the fundament of our faith. Not only did the earliest Christians, with their Jewish roots, insist this above all things for Jesus; his very name itself is from the Hebrew word “Yeshua,” which means “Savior.” By definition, by proclamation, by appellation, however you want to cut it, Jesus saves. Perhaps the embarrassed wincing comes from the fact that it is such a simple idea, that Jesus saves. We probably would not be justified in suggesting that twenty centuries of theological thought can be boiled down to that simple formulation, but then again, we would not be all that far off if we did. Jesus saves. This is who he is, this is what he does. The child who was born in a barn with its noises and smells and gross inconvenience, the man who hung there between two other criminals dying a slow, gruesome, obscene death, body twisted, having to listen to the insults of the one to his left and the pitiful desperation of the one to his right, without even the decency to be allowed to die alone, he is Jesus. He is the one who saves. And when you consider his birth and his death and everything that happened in between, and all that has happened since, then to reduce it all to a simple two-word phrase, seems almost obscenely simplistic in itself. But there you have it. Jesus Saves. I doubt any of us could go that one better.
And so the sign by the road speaks the truth after all, more penetratingly than its writer ever dared to imagine. And the world whizzes by, on its way to someplace it imagines is important, and if the sign is noticed at all, it is as if in a flash. Yet on down the road, past the billboards and the exit signs and who knows what other graffiti splashed along the highway, it still nibbles insistently around the edges of our consciousness, and will not let us forget it entirely. And this is a good thing, because Jesus Saves.