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| The "down staircase" at Bellevue West High School |
Up The Down Staircase
August 4-5, 2012
I went to high school in Bellevue
at Bellevue West (Go Thunderbirds!). While I was there, all of the lockers were on one level in
the same commons area, and most of the classrooms were on the level directly above
that commons area. There were two huge, wide staircases connecting the two
levels. Students would hang out in the commons area until it was almost time
for class, then head up the staircases for class to start. When the bell rang
as each class period ended and especially at the end of the day, a giant mass
of humanity would descend the stairs all at once. We were packed together going
down those stairs—it was a sight to behold. Someone could have jumped on top
and body-surfed all the way down without ever having their feet touch the
floor, had they wanted. If, for some reason, you were at the bottom of the
stairs and tried to go up at the same time as class was getting out and 1,200
or so of your closest friends were heading down…well, it just couldn’t be done. It wasn’t possible to go up the down
staircase.
Today, in our sermon series on
faith questions that you were afraid to ask but your kids weren’t, we come to
the question of salvation. What is salvation? What does it mean? What do you have to do
to go to heaven?
Just like it was at my high school,
it’s not possible to go up the down staircase.
We have this tendency to think of
salvation as this staircase we need to climb, with the top of the staircase
eventually bringing us to God, to heaven. Maybe we think of baptism as the
first step, or for some folks, maybe it’s when they realized that they trusted
God, that faith meant something to them. A lot of times, we look at how we live
our lives—the good that we do, or the prayers that we say, or the lives that we
touch in a positive way—as steps up that staircase. And then we consider our
individual sins—what we have done and what we have left undone, not loving God
with our whole heart, not loving our neighbors as ourselves—and we see them as
steps down that staircase. And so we live our lives, taking a few steps
forward, taking a few steps back, working hard and hopefully progressing so
that one day at the last we can reach where God wants us to be.
In this model, Scripture becomes a
rulebook, a guide to climbing the stairs…and our lives, at least if we’re
really serious about it, if we’re really serious about our faith and about God,
they become consumed by this quest.
But the thing is, for God, this staircase
is a down staircase. We don’t go up, God comes down. It’s not possible to go up
the down staircase. The gospel, the good news of God in Christ Jesus, isn’t
that Jesus finally gives us a way to get up that staircase, it’s that God in
Jesus came down. Immanuel. God with us.
And even for Christians, this is
hard to understand. We are people who claim grace through faith as our life and
our heritage, but our minds still tend to operate as though law, and not grace,
has the final say.
When I speak of “law” here, I’m
talking about much more than the rules that we find in the Bible. Those are
certainly laws, but I’m speaking in broader categories, speaking of law in the
way Martin Luther thought of it. In his eyes, the law is what kills the old
Adam in us. The law is whatever word convicts us of our complete inability to
get it right. The law tells me, “Matt, you are a sinner. You have sinned and
have fallen short of the glory of God.”
The law operates on an if/then
basis. If you do this, then you will get that. That’s language we understand.
If I’m good, then God will bless me, if I’m bad, God won’t. If I’m good, I’m
climbing the staircase, I’m getting closer to God. If I sin, I’m going down the
staircase.
But because God came down the
staircase to us, because in the cross God has met us where we are, our
relationship with God is no longer based on an if/then. It’s not a matter of if
I do this, then God will do that.
Our relationship with God isn’t an
if/then. Our relationship with God is a because/therefore.
Because God came down the staircase
in Jesus, because Jesus died on the cross, because Jesus defeated the power of
sin and death once and for all, therefore you have been saved from your sin,
you have been saved from needing life and faith and salvation to be about you.
You have been freed from yourself.
You no longer have to worry about
the staircase, about trying to scratch and claw your way up. You no longer have
to worry about whether you’ve done enough, about the number of good God points
or bad sin points you’ve accumulated. In Christ, YOU ARE a new creation! And this new creation isn’t caught in the
game of point-keeping or stair-stepping.
In our reading, Paul describes what
Luther called the “happy exchange.” Happy exchange is an actual, technical,
theological term, even if it doesn’t sound too technical. The term makes me
think of the painter who used to be on PBS, Bob Ross, if he was standing in the
returns line at Kohls the day after Christmas—“I’m here to make a happy little
exchange.” But the meaning of the term is incredibly profound. This is
earthshattering stuff. In 2 Cor. 5:21, Paul writes, “For our sake he made him
to be sin who knew no sin, so that in him we might become the righteousness of
God.” God took all of our junk, all of
our evil, all of our sin, and gave it all to Jesus. And at the same time, God
took all of Jesus’ righteousness and gave it to us.
That’s the exchange—God
takes on our sin, we take on God’s righteousness, and so we end up seeing those
things together at the same time in ourselves. We are, Luther tells us, at the
very same time, both sinner and saint. We are at the same time Old Adam and New
Creation. The law of sin and the gospel of righteousness are both at work
within us all at the same time, and so salvation is not a process, it’s not a
staircase to climb. It is what lets Paul write, “See, now is the acceptable
time. NOW is the day of salvation!”
Most importantly, salvation is not
up to us. Ephesians 2 tells us that we are saved by grace through faith, and it’s
not of our own doing—it is a gift from God. Not by our own works, so that no
one may boast. If it WERE up to us, we would be right back to trying to go up
the down staircase. If it were up to us, the cross wouldn’t be something new
and transformational. Instead, it would be a method of self-help for us. If it
were up to us, we would be right back to living under the if/then of the law.
Instead, we are assured of this: because Jesus died, because Jesus now lives,
because God came to us, because of the cross and the resurrection and the
promises of God, therefore we have been made right with God. We have been
reconciled with God. God has done it, completely on God’s initiative, because
of God’s infinite love for humankind.
Our law-driven, if/then minds have
such a hard time grasping this truth. Surely, we think, there must be something we have to
do to make it happen. Just say a prayer, or just repent, or just…something. But
we cannot add anything to the grace already shown us in Christ and still call
it grace. A gift with conditions is no longer a gift. And so anytime we hear
someone begin a statement about salvation with the words, “All you have to do
is…” let those hairs stand up on the back of your neck because you’re about to
hear an if/then law statement, and while the law is what drives us to the foot
of the cross, while the law is what grabs us by the collar and confronts us
with our deep sinfulness, the law is not what has the final say in our lives. We
do not climb up the down staircase. Christ comes to us. All you have to do is…absolutely
nothing. Jesus has already done it all and therefore you are forgiven even
before you realized you needed forgiveness, you are loved through no doing of
your own, you are redeemed and restored and made new through Christ who came
down the staircase and met you in your sin.
We are saved by grace through
faith, but when we understand faith as trust as we talked about last week, then
faith is simply our response to what God has already done. It is our trust in
God’s promises, it is our trust in the cross, it is our trust that it’s not up
to us. Faith is not simply yet another work, it’s not simply some other hoop to
jump through to make us acceptable to God. Faith is our response to the God who
has come down to us.
Nowhere do we see this more clearly
than in baptism. It is not baptism that saves us. Baptism is not fire
insurance. It is a means of grace, a drowning of the old Adam in the waters and
the raising of a new creation. When E. is baptized this morning, we will
see the happy exchange right there in action in her life. But although we’re
only baptized once, at the same time in a very real way it’s also something
that’s continuous, ongoing. Daily we sin, daily the law convicts us of our sin,
daily we drown the old and are brought to life in the new, daily we are
simultaneously sinner and saint.
Our trust in the promises God makes
to us in baptism, the promises of forgiveness and new life, call us into lives
of reconciliation as God’s ambassadors. We are bearers of God’s promises, we carry
in us and with us and through us the promises of new life for the world. And so
together we can proclaim with the apostle Paul, “Now! Now is the acceptable
time! Now is the day of salvation!”
Matt Schur
Our Saviour’s Lutheran Church
Lincoln, NE
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