October 31, 2010 | 8:00 a.m. | Reformation Sunday

Made Well By Someone Else’s Salvation

Joyce Shin
Associate Pastor, Fourth Presbyterian Church

Psalm 16
Luke 19:1–10

What we need to do, then, is to recognize, accept, and even celebrate the full extent of our interdependence. . . . To understand what it means to be human, it is not sufficient to dissect a human specimen. It is necessary to see a human being in action. To do that, we must see human beings interacting with other people . . . in a variety of contexts. To see what any one of us is, we need to see who and what we are connected to.

Richard B. Gunderman
We Make a Life by What We Give

The Gospel of Luke and the Acts of the Apostles were written by the same author. Although these two books combined are longer than the Gospels written by Matthew, Mark, or John, some scholars refer to the combined work of Luke as the “unfinished Gospel.” We find that the story, beginning with Jesus and ending with the early church, does in fact end with a cliffhanger. In contrast with Matthew, Mark, and John, the story told by Luke is open-ended. The Acts of the Apostles ends, for example, with the Apostle Paul under house arrest in Rome, and we are told nothing about the final outcome of his appeal to Caesar. Furthermore, although at the start of Acts the disciples are promised by Jesus that they will be his witnesses “to the ends of the earth” (Acts 1:8), the book ends with no hint as to where on earth the disciples will end up.

Given the care with which Luke crafted these two works, it would be a mistake to imagine that Luke had intended any other kind of ending. Luke was a master writer. The history that he wrote was open-ended, it seems to me, because the church about which he wrote had not yet come to completion.

The church is, of course, still unfinished. Christians of every time and place have hoped for the reign of God’s kingdom to come, while admitting that they are unprepared for it. As Protestants we mark our deep recognition of the church’s incompletion when each year we celebrate Reformation Sunday. The particular slogans of sixteenth-century Reformers reverberate today with the enduring truth that the church is “reformed and always reforming.”

Given that the church’s work in the world is incomplete, what work is left to do? Where should we put our energies? Where can we make a difference? These are the questions that drive us. We want to know what we should do to alleviate hunger, to make schools safe, to eradicate poverty. The “we-can” attitude and “we-should” ethic runs deep in our veins and pumps us up for action. Over time, the spirit of the Reformation of the sixteenth century seems to have gotten translated into a call for social action or activism.

One thing about Fourth Church that never ceases to amaze me is the spirit of its members to move and shake. Our congregation is full of movers and shakers. Though you do not speak in tongues and though you sit very still in worship, there is no doubt in my mind that you are as possessed by the Spirit as any charismatic Christian. You would not otherwise support a ministry that prepares and serves dinner for hungry people on Sunday, Monday, and Friday evenings and hands out sack lunches every Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday. Four hundred members and friends of Fourth Church would not come here every week to tutor children after school, and this congregation would not have voted to approve a capital campaign for an ambitious building project if you were lacking in spirit.

More than the other Gospel writers, Luke emphasizes the role of the Spirit that I have observed at work among you. While the Spirit is mentioned six times in Mark and twelve times in Matthew, in the Gospel of Luke there are seventeen references to the Spirit and in Acts of the Apostles there are more than fifty-seven references to the Spirit. In the beginning of Acts, Jesus promises the disciples that they will receive the power of the Spirit, and from that point on, the Spirit, not the apostles, is the main protagonist.

Given Luke’s emphasis upon the role of the Spirit, theologian Justo González anticipates that Luke’s Gospel and the book of Actswill have greater significance for the worldwide church in the twenty-first century than ever in its history. “There can be little doubt,” he writes, “that the doctrine of the Holy Spirit will be a central issue in our century as it has never been before. While many of the more traditional churches are losing membership, and some even seem to have lost hope, vibrant and growing churches throughout the world stress the work of the Spirit in their midst. . . . Christians throughout the world need to rediscover what Scripture says about the Spirit” (Luke, Justo L. González, p. 10).

González has been observing the rapid growth all over the world of churches that emphasize the activity of the Spirit. Protestant Pentecostalism and charismatic Catholicism are not only growing movements in African and Latin American countries, but they are also spreading from other continents back to the United States. The USA is seen as a fertile mission field.

It isn’t the first time that the United States has experienced such waves or movements of the Spirit. Though some American historians identify three or even four waves of religious revivalism in American history, the period of revivalism perhaps best known to us is the First Great Awakening. Writing and preaching in the eighteenth century, at that time when revivalism first became a significant phenomenon, was the great theologian Jonathan Edwards. Edwards firmly believed that those who opposed the revivals because of their affective excesses were misguided. While he could understand the opposition, he nevertheless argued against it, for he saw in the religious revivals the potential for the Holy Spirit to be at work. So rather than disparage the revivals indiscriminately, as some of his opponents did, in his optimism, Edwards compared the revivals to past periods of great religious reformation.

In every age of great religious reformation, Edwards argued, the Holy Spirit stirred people up emotionally, wholeheartedly, to the point that they were moved to action. Without being fired up, people would fail to act. And yet, having a mountaintop experience, as passionate as it might feel, would alone be insufficient evidence of truly being saved by the Spirit. For Edwards, actions were the most reliable sign of the Spirit at work. In an effort to be even more exacting, Edwards added the nuance that only a person’s actions over time could reveal whether or not that person had been saved by the Spirit.

There is a long tradition in Christianity of looking for proof, or signs—signs that the Spirit is at work; signs that one’s salvation is genuine and lasting, not false or fleeting; and signs that God’s kingdom is at hand. In his Gospel and the Acts of the Apostles, Luke presents his theory on signs: the signs by which the church can trust the Spirit to be at work, according to Luke, always involves a reversal of some sort. At the start of Luke’s Gospel, Mary announces reversals that astound all who hear: “He has scattered the proud in the thoughts of their hearts. He has brought down the powerful from their thrones, and lifted up the lowly; he has filled the hungry with good things, and sent the rich away empty” (Luke 1:51b–53). Through his parables, Luke teaches us that those who now laugh will weep; that the first shall be last, and the last, first; that the greatest is the one who serves; and that things hidden to the wise have been revealed to babes. Each of these is a reversal of the social order of Luke’s day.

The story we heard this morning, from Luke 19, tells of yet another reversal. In the story, Jesus invites himself over to the home of the chief tax collector Zacchaeus. Not only does Jesus want to have a meal with Zacchaeus, but he also announces Zacchaeus’s salvation. It is clear from the story that all who watched Jesus choose to have dinner with Zacchaeus are appalled. Zacchaeus is, after all, the chief tax collector, guilty of injustice toward the poor for making the poor even poorer. This isn’t the first time, however, that Jesus is criticized for eating with people whom society has deemed the worst of sinners. Luke often portrays Jesus at the table with sinners, for what could be more opportune for demonstrating Jesus’ crossing of group boundaries and reversal of social and religious orders? In the story about Jesus and Zacchaeus, Jesus reverses the social and religious expectations of both the crowd and Zacchaeus. That, however, is not the only astonishing thing to happen. So moved by this reversal, Zacchaeus decides to give half of his wealth to the poor and to pay anyone from whom he has unjustly collected money four times the amount he collected, thereby going even beyond what Jewish law commanded. Upon hearing Zacchaeus’s decision, Jesus takes note that salvation has come to Zacchaeus’s household.

Salvation in this story, as is the case throughout the Bible, has less to do with personal salvation and more to do with the reign of God. Salvation has less to do with avoiding eternal damnation and more to do with liberating people from persecution, oppression, injustice, poverty, and disease. The salvation of Zacchaeus affects not only him personally. It affects his whole household. It even affects the poor and all the people he oppressed in the past. Zacchaeus is not the only one made well, or saved, by Jesus’s reversal of the social and religious order; by Zacchaeus’s salvation, many others too are made well.

That we might be made well by someone else’s salvation, I think, is hard to grasp. At least for me it is. I suspect it is hard to grasp because I have been brought up in a country, culture, and church that have promoted not only the value of doing good in the world, but also the value of being the one to do the good. As a result, it is easy for me, and perhaps for you too, in the midst of doing good things to become a do-gooder.

In his book Fire in the Heart: How White Activists Embrace Racial Justice, social scientist Mark Warren draws a distinction, and shows the slippery slope, between the activity of doing good, which is the aim of the activists he writes about, and being a do-gooder. A do-gooder, he explains, is someone who does good for others, for the sake of others. Interviewing fifty white activists for racial justice, Dr. Warren investigates the conditions necessary for people who used to be do-gooders to become motivated in a new way—in a way by which they see the good for which they strive as being good not only for others, but also for themselves and for everyone.

Dr. Warren concludes that in order for people to see the good for others as also good for themselves and everyone else, people have to develop personal relationships with others who are outside their current social circles. Out of these personal relationships emerge a new sense of identity—one that holds what is good for you to be good for me.

In the story of Jesus and Zacchaeus, Jesus stepped out of the social circle that religion and social convention proscribed. Inviting himself to Zacchaeus’ home for dinner, Jesus initiated a friendship with a tax collector. And in doing so, he saved Zacchaeus. What Jesus hoped the crowd would learn was that in Zacchaeus being saved, they too could be made well.

We don’t often think that we can be made well by someone else’s salvation. Luke’s Gospel challenges us to appreciate the work of the Spirit, no matter where it takes place and no matter whom it involves. At a time when the Spirit is moving among peoples on continents far away as at home, like Edwards, I am hopeful at the potential for ongoing reformation in the church. When the Spirit is at work in the lives of others, we too can be made well.