My young adult children have figured out a way to get my undivided attention at the dinner table, while at the same time avoiding all of my motherly probing into their private affairs: they ask impossible theological questions! Unfortunately, I fall for the bait every time and usually end up tripping over my attempts at smooth apologetics. This Thanksgiving, as I tried to win an argument by appealing to the promise of salvation, my son asked, “What exactly is salvation? What does it look like? Isn’t it that stuff about going to heaven while everyone else is going to hell?”
“No, of course not,” my yoga-practicing daughter piped up. “Salvation is just inner peace. God saves us by giving us inner peace.”
While I muttered that salvation is best seen neither as merely a reprieve from eternal hellfire nor simply as inner peace, I quietly began to wonder, “What exactly does salvation look like?” At Easter, we can play around in the realm of theological abstraction, as we try to explain the cosmic, saving death of Jesus on the Cross. But the incarnational nature of Christmas forces us back down to earth. During Advent, we wait for salvation, for deliverance, in the form of the baby in the manger—the baby whose name, Jesus, actually comes from the Hebrew word for “salvation.”
How do we explain the kind of salvation that the baby Jesus brings into the world? If I had to paint a picture of salvation, what would I paint?
Imagine my delight to find that our psalm for today paints a beautiful picture for me. In Psalm 85, salvation resembles a joyful meeting, a divine dance, if you will, between God’s steadfast love and faithfulness and between God’s righteousness and peace: “Steadfast love and faithfulness have met together; righteousness and peace have embraced,” sings our psalmist. “Faithfulness will spring up from the earth, and righteousness will go before [God] and make a pathway for his steps.”
Four divine characteristics meet on earth, become part of our world, and recognize and embrace each other as they begin to mold and transform creation from the inside out. I imagine flowing forms when I read these words—graceful, holy forms that pour into each other and into us and mix to create a smooth, wavy landscape, filled with the divine.
First, God’s steadfast love steps out of the shadows. Grace and loving-kindness, the love that forgives again and again, the desire for covenant-building relationship, God’s love opens wide its arms here on earth. This love is our salvation.
And then into God’s loving arms comes truth, or faithfulness. This is not a cold, abstract philosophical truth, but an active, all-encompassing faithfulness, full of good deeds and right response. It is the faithfulness that insists on feeding the hungry stranger and sheltering the pregnant, wayfaring mother when there is no room at the Inn . This response of faithfulness is our salvation.
Then, as God’s love and God’s all-encompassing goodness come together in the dance, God’s righteousness rises up to join them. God’s righteousness isn’t some prissy obedience to a list of rules, but it is the eternal correctness that orders all of creation. It is what gives life stability, what keeps relationships in good balance. This right relationship is our salvation.
Finally, last but not least, shalom—peace, well-being, happiness—springs up from the earth and greets righteousness with a kiss, joining right relationship to life-giving blessing. This shalom is our salvation.
In all of this swirling, dancing divine outreach, it becomes clear that the salvation described here is a dynamic process, initiated by God. God pours out God’s love and right order upon us, to draw us into loving, right relationships ourselves. Salvation doesn’t happen up in heaven somewhere, though, independent of our actions on earth. Indeed, in our psalm, salvation doesn’t just involve humankind but includes all of creation, as the land flourishes and the earth itself yields faithfulness. Salvation is not our individual, once-for-all prize for believing the right set of words. Instead, it comes into our community, ordering and reordering, loving and shaping and transforming. It comes from the blessing of God’s presence, not merely as an absence of God’s judgment.
The Psalm paints a beautiful picture of salvation, doesn’t it? It is indeed more than an “I’m going to heaven and you’re not” attitude, and it is more than an individual’s of inner peace. But what happens to this gift of salvation when God calls us to dance, and we turn away our faces? The dance of salvation cannot be done without lots of turning, says our psalm. God approaches, and we turn away; God turns away and we turn back; God turns again, and we turn to meet God in an embrace. The verb “to turn” in Hebrew is the same as the verb, “to repent.” Salvation is a dance of constant repentance and change. One of my favorite nativity scenes, from a medieval fresco in the crypt of a cathedral in Switzerland St. Joseph
In our psalm, the people of Israel have returned home to Jerusalem Babylon Jerusalem
For us, too, our relationship with God, played out in the dance of salvation, is kind of like coming home for the holidays. You know, when you return to your family childhood home, finding it filled with both sad and tender memories. You can sense the promise of well-being and right relationship just oozing from every familiar corner. The love is there, palpable, but then not there at the same time. Siblings and parents can be annoying; old hurts and unhealthy patterns are never far beneath the surface. Sometimes, though, grace can fill the room like children’s laughter, as you gather together with family under the twinkling lights of the Christmas tree. Righteousness and peace embrace in the candlelight, and truth springs up from the crèche. But then someone slips up and feelings get hurt, or memories of an absent loved-one slice right through your heart. Home carries both so much promise and so much room for error.
Marilynne Robinson, in her novel Home, subtly plays on the relationship between salvation and home-coming. A father, full of forgiveness and mercy for his wayward son, throws open his home and his heart as the son, long-absent like the Prodigal in Jesus’ parable, returns home after twenty years of disgrace. The elderly father, a Presbyterian minister, practices goodness and forgiveness and gratitude for God’s blessings in a pure, humble way that truly seems to mirror the attitudes of our heavenly Father. Yet the two adult children, who have been forced to come home by difficult life circumstances, struggle daily with all of their relationships: to the past, to their father, to each other, and to their home town, in all of the little ups and downs with which we are all familiar. Like ours, this family’s ordinary, daily life is filled with constant turning, constant repentance, yet it is also filled with a constant sense of peace, love, righteousness, and faithfulness. “Weary or bitter or bewildered as we may be,” writes Robinson, “God is faithful. He lets us wander so we will know what it means to come home.”[1] The dance of salvation is like coming home, in all of its beauty and in all of its twisting, turning ambiguity.
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