August 17, 2008 | 9:30 and 11:00 a.m.

The Trajectory of Salvation

Calum I. MacLeod
Associate Pastor, Fourth Presbyterian Church

Psalm 133
Isaiah 5:5–9
Matthew 15:21–28

Even the dogs eat the crumbs
that fall from their masters’ table.”

Matthew 15:27 (NRSV)

How God must despise the sounds of those who pray this day, “Thy kingdom come,” and tomorrow bar its way. How God must despise the spectacle of Christians who climb upon the cross to be seen from afar, thereby trampling on the one who has hung there so long.

William Sloane Coffin

I arrived back in the office on Friday, having spent some time in Europe—a couple weeks at home in Scotland and a couple of days on the Continent towards the end of our holiday. I got in on Friday, and it didn’t take long for the email jokesters in the office to begin firing off messages to “All Staff” about how MacLeod’s back and no one will understand him because he’s had a stint at home and his accent will be so thick. One wag suggested that we use a crude form of sign language and that might help. All very witty and humorous, I thought.

And then to my surprise yesterday morning, when I was listening to Weekend Edition on NPR, I heard Scott Simon interview a young singer/songwriter, an extraordinary young woman called Amy MacDonald. Amy is a self-taught guitarist and singer/songwriter. She is something of a phenomenon in Europe and is seeking to take the United States by storm. So Scott had her on the program.

She’s from Scotland and very proud of her Scottish heritage. The first question that was asked in the interview was about her influences in being a singer/songwriter. She replied with what I thought was a very clear and erudite use of English. Scott Simon said to her, “Your accent is lovely, but I could only get every third word.” I wasn’t sure whether to be mad at Scott Simon or sorry for all of you today as you sit here, but we’ll try our best. I’ll try and keep slow as we go.

It was a joy being at home in Scotland, and it was lovely being back on the Isle of Lewis in the Outer Hebrides, the island that my forebears are from. My father was born there, and we now have the family house. My father was up there in the house with other members of the family. It was lovely time enjoying all the good things that the Hebrides bring, which mainly involve lots of wind. Someone was joking that there are no trees on the Isle of Lewis because they’ve all been blown away, it gets so windy.

Being there over a Sunday, there was the interesting experience of being on a Scottish Outer Hebridean island on a Sunday, because on that part of the world there is still in existence a kind of Calvinist Presbyterianism in which the sabbath day is kept as a day only for worship. The children are not really allowed to play on Sunday, due to the strict Sabbatarianism. There is a very odd thing that happens on Sunday morning on the Isle of Lewis. You see, people who live beside each other, work with each other—neighbors, friends, work colleagues—on Sunday morning at 10:00 all get into their own cars and go to different churches.

Now they are all Presbyterian, just so that we’re clear about this, but some people go to the Church of Scotland, to the national church, and they worship at the Church of Scotland. Some people go to the same place, but there is a building beside it, and it is the Free Church of Scotland. It grew out of a schism in the Church of Scotland: the Presbyterians had a fight in 1929, and the Free Church stayed separate. Some people go to the Free Presbyterian Church, which is a schism from the Free Church of Scotland. But then some people who used to go to the Free Presbyterian Church now go to the Associated Presbyterian Church of the Free Presbyterian Church because they had an argument over one of their leading figures: a Law Lord attended a Catholic funeral mass for a colleague, and so there was a major schism in the Free Presbyterian Church. So now some people who used to go to the Free Church now go to the Free Church Continuing, which is a schism of the Free Church, which was a schism from the Church of Scotland. They are all Presbyterian. Everyone goes to their different churches. Disagreements over doctrine, over leadership, over money, over personalities all caused these various schisms over time.

Who’s in, who’s out when it comes to God—that’s often a question that’s at the heart of these schisms and new churches being formed. Sometime it seems almost like a joke, and other times it seems almost scandalous that Christians would be so divisive and use resources to build new churches for their new schismatic congregations when there are already too many churches on the Isle of Lewis. (Now that’s going to get me in trouble if someone hears that on the Internet.)

It is extraordinary because all these people are neighbors and know each other. Many of them are related, but they separate on Sunday morning. There’s an old joke about that, about a Scotsman who was shipwrecked and landed on a desert island, and after ten or twelve years he was rediscovered and the people who rescued him went onto the island. There on the desert island there was a home with a lovely garden in the middle and on either end of the island was a church. And so they asked the Scotsman, “Why are there two churches on your desert island?” He said, “Well, that one there is the one I don’t go to”

You always have to have one you don’t go to.

It’s not just on the Isle of Lewis; it’s not just Presbyterians, we know from our history. In the Christian church, schism and division is a reality for us—and a scandal. There are many who continue this day to pray in the words of Jesus that “all may be one.” One of the great movements of the last sixty or seventy years has been the ecumenical movement, such that we are able to recognize and celebrate diversity within the church. But I think in this question in the world today it is not just about the Christian church or the denominations within the Christian church; it has become something of a cliché to talk about the global village and about how distance has been reduced by communication and ease of travel. As we are all glued to the box watching the Olympics over these days, we are reminded of our common humanity, of how close we are, of how we live in a pluralist culture and not just plural in the sense of different Christian denominations, but that we live with and work beside and share space with people who are of other faiths—Hindus and Jews and Muslims. This experience of the “other” is no longer something that is distant or only for the few. It is something that we all experience in our life.

It is very common in our Inquirers’ Class for a question to be raised on this issue. Someone will ask, “Who is saved, who is salvation for, who is within the boundaries of God’s love, how wide is God’s grace and mercy? Do Hindus get in, or Muslims, or Jews?” It’s not really a concern about other Christians now but rather thinking on the relationship that people of other faiths have with God.

There is something of the same question that arises in our Bible reading today, because this story of the encounter between Jesus and the disciples and the Canaanite woman is a story about an encounter with the “other.” We are told by the historians that the Canaanite woman is doubly an outsider from the society in which Jesus and the disciples lived. She’s a Canaanite, which means that she is not Jewish, so she’s a pagan. And she’s a woman, and women at that time in that culture were outsiders, second-class citizens. So here’s an extraordinary exchange between Jesus and this woman who is outside. It’s complex. It sometimes seems harsh when we read the story.

Jesus blithely ignores the woman at first, and then the disciples are just getting tired of her; they want her to be sent away. Jesus seems to confirm that to the disciples in that he says his call, his ministry, is only to the house of Israel. And then to the woman, Jesus has harsh words about the children’s food not being given to the dogs. And then this extraordinary thing happens: the woman won’t let go.

She persists. “Even dogs eat the crumbs,” she says. There’s something almost pathetic, yet also sarcastic, perhaps even humorous in this response. Jesus says to the woman, “Great is your faith,” and her daughter is healed. This is a story of healing, of wholeness, of salvation that comes to one who is outwith that which we would expect.

There are two ways to read this story. Some people think that Jesus in this story is testing the disciples, that Jesus holds back and tests the disciples to see if they will get to a place where they are able to welcome the woman, and then Jesus does it. But other people think that Jesus himself is changed in this encounter, that this experience of the “other,” of the outsider, opens up to Jesus this movement of God’s love and God’s grace to those who are marginalized.

Let’s see if we can get some help in understanding something of this from a very fine reflection on scripture by the Scottish hymn writer and preacher, John Bell. John’s just an extraordinarily creative man, and he was reflecting here mainly on the Old Testament and on the movement of salvation in the scriptures. This what he writes: “I don’t doubt that God’s love and mercy are unchanging in their intention and intensity, but I don’t believe that this precludes God’s mind from changing. Indeed, I believe that the Bible is the record of God’s mind changing with regard to human beings. It is the record of how God’s mind changes as to who will be the beneficiaries of God’s love, thereby gradually widening the circle of God’s friends.” Isn’t that a lovely concept: widening the circle of God’s friends? Bell talks about how God begins by loving Abraham and then it is widened and it continues to be widened; how the prophets, particularly Jonah, is a great story of God relenting, God changing God’s mind and Jonah getting mad. And what John Bell is talking about here is a trajectory of salvation, an ever-widening trajectory of salvation in scripture.

I think that that is what we see in our text today in the New Testament. The circle is widened: one who is outside has now been welcomed into God’s love and God’s grace.

When we read the Isaiah text, we find in the God speaking through the prophet and even this far back in our scriptures that there is a theme coming up about not being isolated, about not being exclusive. It is a withering prophecy of Isaiah. My colleague who proofreads actually called me in Europe to see if I had the right text, because it is so miserable. God is so angry at the children of Israel and speaks through the prophet and condemns them because they live without justice and without righteousness. And one of the ways that that is expressed is through exclusion: “There is room for no one but you.” That is the charge that God lays against the children: there is room for no one but you, that is how you live and for that you are judged. You are judged because the trajectory of God’s love is inclusion, not random exclusion.

I had a very fine professor of Old Testament theology at Glasgow University, Robert Davidson. He was just a great churchman of his time, served as moderator of the General Assembly of the Church of Scotland and was a professor at Glasgow for many years. I was in a class once where he was reflecting on this question of the movement of salvation in the Old Testament, and someone in the class asked him, “Do you think it’s possible for someone who is not Christian to be loved by God, to be saved, to know salvation?” and this is how he answered and I’ll never forget it. He said, “I was born on the banks of the River Clyde in Glasgow, the son of faithful Presbyterian Christian people, and as I grew and developed, my spirituality developed, my faith in God developed, and it did so within the context of the Reformed Presbyterian tradition that I knew and that was part of my culture. If I had been a child born by chance on the banks of the Ganges to Hindu parents and I continued in the same way to grow in my faith and to develop my spirituality and my relationship with God, I would have done so within the context of Hinduism. I don’t believe that God writes us out of the book of life by dint of accident of birth.”

What Robert Davidson did in saying that was he opened up the mystery that is salvation and offered a warning to us, to the church that is God’s work and not our work. And that the church is always in danger of cornering off and excluding people.

One of my heroes of the saints is George MacLeod, who founded the Iona community. His prayers are beautiful and spiritual and lovely. He had a warning for the church in one of his prayers:

We are so warm in our own self-esteem that we freeze the folk around us. We get so high in our own estimation that we stand isolated on a mountaintop of self-righteousness. That is why you came, Lord Jesus: not to save the lecherous, but to turn the righteous to repentance, and that is me, O Lord. Amen.

Sermon © Fourth Presbyterian Church