Jesus Saves‪!‬ Trinity United Sermons

Romans 5:1-11
June 21, next Sunday, is National Indigenous Peoples’ Day, and our denomination is marking this Sunday as a day of prayer for Indigenous people everywhere. We are choosing prayerfully to acknowledge our own complicity in the oppression of indigenous people and of all minorities in Canada. That’s what the Black Lives Matter movement is stirring up in us all. Our prayer is that God would use this time to sensitize us to the reality of white privilege and release the healing and hope for all those who have suffered and who still are suffering the most as a result of this insidious evil. Dear God, in your mercy, hear our prayers…
Today’s text brings together so much of what Paul understood to be the whole point of Jesus’ work! Theologians describe this as ‘Soteriology’. It’s about how Jesus SAVES us!
How are we different now as a result of our having been impacted by God in and through the person and work of Jesus Christ?
It seems that there are various understanding this. We typically assume that whatever we believe must also be true for everyone. In fact, what some may believe is good and true about Jesus and his work in us may actually seem offensive to others. I know what I believe has significantly evolved and grown over the years – and I’m deeply grateful for that because I find that I am now more certain of loving this Jesus Christ and of being loved by him, while also increasingly stretched by what he is revealing of himself, and of God, and of creation – but perhaps especially of myself.   And while we may not exactly sure about where he is leading as we grow in our faith, what we MUST know is that WHATEVER He is revealing of himself is constantly always bigger and better & deeper & more beautiful than anything we could ever have known before…
But getting back to today’s text: It seems, historically [i], that people have developed various theories – doctrines – to understand who and what Jesus is and does. Most describe Jesus as the lamb that God needed to have die in order to destroy the power of evil over us – by satisfying some great debt owed either to Satan, or to God. Jesus is understood then to be acting on our behalf in order to change God’s mind about a sinful humanity – getting between us and God’s wrath. But surely that can’t be the whole of it – as Richard Rohr so often stresses – ‘it was never God’s mind that needed changing about humanity, so much as our minds that need changing about God! God loves us, always has, always will, that doesn’t ever change!
The bottom line in understanding today’s text is that God, in Christ, is about something quite wonderful for all creation, bringing us into awareness BOTH of who and what God actually is as well as what we, and all of this is, as well – and what we have  always been intended by God to be.  Jesus demonstrates what ‘righteous’ or ‘being-made-right’ living – ‘us-aligned-with-God’ living – is actually all about. He is what makes it possible for us to know that even the very worst of ourselves is no longer ever able to dominate & define us – and certainly NEVER able to separate us from God’s love!
The truth is that most of us – no, all of us – allow the best of ourselves to become trapped in prisons of some kind: some we build for ourselves, some we allow others to build into us! I’m thinking about the crippling effects of guilt! Victimhood! Broken self-image! …all designed to be keeping us as less than ourselves…
The tragedy is that we then go on to fool ourselves enough that we think we come to feel safe within those prison walls, like ‘Red’ in the movie The Shawshank Redemption – remember his thoughtful words while gazing wistfully up at the granite from inside the prison courtyard?
“These walls are funny. First you hate ’em, then you get used to ’em. Enough time passes, you get so you depend on them. That’s institutionalized.” Or like that p