On the first Sunday in Lent I spoke of Creation, the fact that God brings all things into being and into a loving relationship with God. I spoke then of the purpose which God has for Creation.
When I spoke of Sin, I referred to the wilful and disobedient breaking of the relationship with God and how we are diminished and lose something of what we are through Sin.
Judgement refers to the ultimate confrontation with God, when all come face to face with God on the Last Day. Judgement also means the times of choice and of facing the truth of our situations - judgement occurs when our life reaches a crisis. The best response to crisis, or judgement, is repentance.
Repentance is a turning away from evil and turning towards good. As Christians, that means that we turn and follow Christ as our example, our friend and as the human face of God. For Christians, to follow the way of Christ is to walk in the path of righteousness, or to walk in the way of salvation.
Today I would like to make a little exploration into the idea of salvation. Salvation is about being saved, about safety, and about a saviour, all those words. As I said a couple of weeks ago, salvation is the central theme of the Bible. The proclamation of the Bible is that God has "visited his people and set them free" - that is, salvation is a fact. Wherever you go in the Bible you will find God described as the one who saves, the one who rescues, who delivers us from our enemies.
In psalm 68 this cry of praise is found, "Blessed be the Lord, who daily bears us up; God is our salvation. Our God is a God of salvation; and to God, the Lord, belongs escape from death."
In the same way Jesus is declared to be a Saviour - hear the song of Zechariah from Luke's Gospel. "Blessed be the Lord God of Israel, for he has come to his people and set them free. He has raised up a mighty saviour for us in the house of his servant David. Through his holy prophets he promised of old that he would save us from our enemies and from the hands of all that hate us."
The basic Biblical message is that God is our salvation, and that where God is, there is our salvation also. As we read the Old testament the mighty acts of salvation which God has done are declared again and again - how God declared a covenant with Abraham, how God led the Children of Israel our of Egypt into the Promised Land, all these declare that God's salvation surrounds us from the beginning of time to its end.
This is vitally important, because God's salvation of God's people in the past is the promise of the future. In the Bible we see God's people looking forward to the salvation of God while at the same time they see it all around them. Salvation is always the far distant promise as well as the present reality. The children of Israel wandered the desert looking for the promised land, knowing that God was with them like a burning fire and a pillar of cloud.
King David and King Solomon and their successors looked for an everlasting kingdom centred on Jerusalem, while at the same time they saw God blessing their faithfulness and punishing their wickedness.
The prophets proclaimed the future coming of the Messiah and proclaimed God's present faithfulness, and Jesus himself declared that the kingdom of heaven was close at hand even when he said told his disciples that it was not for them to know the times and seasons which the Father has fixed by his own authority.
The disciples were expecting salvation to be a sudden great event, changing the world in an instant. There are some people today who look for some great apocalyptic event. But Jesus' teaching and the Biblical witness is that salvation is not something that stands still, it is movement and energy. Jesus described it as abundant life, and the children of Israel saw it as God at work in the world.
In the Bible, there are many ways in which salvation is experienced. In the Old Testament salvation is often seen as the destruction of enemies, or the ending of a plague, or the breaking of a drought. Salvation can be deliverance from death or the curing of a disease - the miracles of Jesus are miracles of salvation. Salvation can be a complete change of life - remember Zacchaeus who restored the money to the people he had cheated. Jesus said of him, "Salvation has come to this house today."
For other people salvation can be restored relationships, or a new relationship with God and with creation. It can be release from prison - either a prison of iron bars and razor wire, or a prison of attitudes and habits. Salvation can be as great as the hope of heaven or as simple the finding of a lost coin. Wherever God's action touches our lives we find salvation.
So salvation is not something to be held on to or kept, it is not a thing to be grasped. Instead, Jesus said that those who try to cling to their life will lose it. You can't work for it as if you were making it with your own hands, you can't study for it, as if it was an exam. Salvation belongs to God and God gives it to those who are faithful. And because of this, salvation often surprises us. It can scandalise us, too, when salvation comes to someone we think may not deserve it. Salvation is God's free gift, given with overwhelming generosity.
The greatest example of salvation we know is that of Christ's death on the cross - a gift beyond human understanding, a gift which still shocks and amazes humankind. Christ's death and resurrection is something the church has always seen as the ultimate act of God's salvation, and that we will explore on Palm Sunday, Holy Week and Easter.