The eCrozier

We are about to enter the great narrative of salvation. From Palm Sunday to Easter, we have the opportunity and responsibility to tell our story and to tell it truthfully and rightly. Yes, our people have heard this story many times before, but some have not, or they have not heard it told as one meta-narrative, the one great story that renders all our smaller stories intelligible. I urge you to tell the story in such a frame for it is most compelling for people when they understand and comprehend it in its totality.

I know we preachers sometime get overly focused on one part of the narrative. While this is understandable and useful it often does not help people connect the dots and thus make the whole narrative intelligible. For example, the narrative of Holy Week and Easter is a good time to talk about Christmas in the sense that the incarnation is one part of the story that is a necessary precondition for Easter. As the Creed says: “For us and for our salvation, he came down from heaven.” Helping people comprehend the entire frame of incarnation and resurrection leads them to a deeper sense of what their salvation in Christ means to their lives and to the life of the world.

Let me explain more of what I am getting at here. Focusing only on the Good Friday to Easter part of the narrative will certainly help people understand what we are saved from. We are saved from our sins as we identify with Peter and the other disciples who betray, deny, and run from Jesus and his cross. When we all cry out “crucify him” as we read dramatically the passion story, we can place ourselves in the story and see how we, too, through our sins betray, deny, and crucify the God who created us and more wonderfully redeemed us in Jesus. That is a central part of our salvation narrative, but it is not the whole story. The narrative is incomplete.

We are also saved for something. When we speak of salvation, we often define it as only saving from and not saving for. The incarnation of Jesus tells us that, because God has graced humanity by becoming one of us, our matter matters. We are not simply created for heaven as if we were some sort of apprentice angels on earth. God in Christ has saved us for something. We are saved for the work of God on earth and in heaven. As Jesus taught us to pray: we are to pray that God’s kingdom would come on earth as it already has come to heaven. That is what we are saved for: to work for the coming of the Kingdom of God on earth.

Such framing of the narrative of salvation in its completeness will help all of us attain to a holistic discipleship, one that includes both the saving from and the saving for aspects of our story. I know we do not have long in the pulpit each time we enter it. Attention spans of our listeners seem to grow shorter each year. I do, however, hope that our preaching and teaching during this great week ahead will be holistic as we share the good news of our salvation in Christ.

+Scott