Mary Robert and I received the J. Allen Pope Reaching Out award this past Saturday evening. The award is given by AQUA, an organization comprised of the various organizations and agencies that serve the gay, lesbian and transgendered community in Mobile. It was a bigger deal than I thought; incredible energy and enthusiasm in the room; and I realized that the award was more about All Saints than it was about Mary and me. It is the people of All Saints, who as a matter of practice, continually reach out, claim and include those who in some way or another have found themselves excluded. This reaching out here goes far beyond the LGBT community; we reach out to displaced refugees, the poor and the hungry, the battered and the disenfranchised of our world.
In accepting the award I said to the assembly gathered that we church folk have a lot of fancy words we have been using over the centuries of our several and disparate denominations, to the extent that many of our so-called church words have lost their meaning. One such word I suggested is “salvation.” What does that word mean beyond a Christian platitude? We hear it so often. I remember in high school other kids asking me if I were saved….”Jesus saves” bumper stickers…salvation in our culture a decided means of exclusion…either you’re in or your out….Augustine of Hippo thought as much…only a few denizens in the city of God…while the doomed burgeoning city of the world falls off the cosmic stage as ballast….Calvin derived most of his theology from Augustine…and alas this exclusionary predisposition of Christianity is still pervasive.
Ishmael Garcia noted theologian and ethicist argues that salvation is not some elite rank of which one is a member…a somewhat private guarantee of a blissful life after death, to the exclusion of others….He argues that salvation is a present reality that has a decided face, and that face is dignity. Wherever dignity is made present there God’s saving love is made manifest…therefore salvation is for all…everyone on this planet is intended by God to live a dignified life…Another way to say the line from our Baptismal Covenant is: “to respect the salvation of every human being…the notion of salvation then takes on a very practical reality, instead of some overused abstract platitude. Salvation then becomes a practice…a practice of making the lives of the least in our world better….the practice of salvation now the means by which all people live in the light of God’s gracious favor; in God’s abundant kingdom…..our high call is to bear God’s dignity to the world….feeding the hungry; providing clean water, medical care…through advocacy within the structures of our political and socio-economic world to enable for all people, God’s children, a better way of living…Salvation not a badge but enlightened practice….a practice with implications both material and spiritual…of the same cloth….the ancient world never separated the two.
We are learning the art of salvation here….I think and hope we are… It is why we are here in the first place, not for ourselves alone but for those who are given to us….we are being sent, as we speak, into the dark corners of the indignity in our world, we, as followers of Christ, bearing the face of salvation….inviting all to God’s table…no one left out….the city of God and the city of the world one shining city in which there is dignity enough…room at the table enough…and all will see salvation face to face, together.
