Everyone

Text: Romans 10:8-13

Focus: Sodzo

Function: to help people see that salvation is holistic

⁸But what does it say?

“The word is near you,

    in your mouth and in your heart”

(that is, the word of faith that we proclaim), ⁹because if you confess with your mouth that Jesus is Lord and believe in your heart that God raised him from the dead, you will be saved. ¹⁰For one believes with the heart, leading to righteousness, and one confesses with the mouth, leading to salvation. ¹¹The scripture says, “No one who believes in him will be put to shame.” ¹²For there is no distinction between Jew and Greek; the same Lord is Lord of all and is generous to all who call on him. ¹³For “everyone who calls on the name of the Lord shall be saved.”

Good morning beloved of God!

Oftentimes, when I am choosing my text for a sermon , like we saw last week with Lectio Davina, I look for a word or a phrase that sticks out to me and focus on that. Hence , the word I chose to focus on is “Everyone” from the phrase “everyone who calls upon the name of the Lord will be saved.” When Paul writes those words he is quoting the Old Testament, The same quote that Peter used when the Holy Spirit fell in the book of Acts, it's from Joel 2:32.

I find it an interesting turn of phrase. Let me break it down to simple terms. Everyone who prays to God will be saved.

I think in order for us to understand this, we need to go back to our understanding of what it means for us to be saved.

There is what I call a salvation formula in this passage that speaks to the condition of the heart of a person and they way they respond with from their heart with an outward sign of their commitment to Christ Jesus.

I’m not into formulas as if they were magic enchantments that will automatically secure a persons salvation.

Throughout the scriptures, God looks at the heart and looks for a heart that responds willingly to the leading of the Holy Spirit to thrive in their love for God by loving others.

But the formula that is written here is believe and confess. Specifically, it is believe with the heart -resulting in Right living, and confess with the mouth -resulting in restoration..

It is one of the main reasons why we do baptism here. Baptism is our confession of our trust in Christ.

To me, salvation comes from resting in Christ and letting the Spirit of God lead me in my life. It touches every aspect of our lives.

That, I believe is why he says we believe resulting in righteousness. The phrase means the result is right living, by applying the standard to love others as much as ourselves,

And prayer leads us to God and to listen to the Holy Spirit. That is why I did the Lectio Divina exercise last week, to help us get in touch with the Holy Spirit.

So, theologically, we need to get past the concept of salvation where we simply make it to heaven when we die.

That is not at all what Jesus talked about when Jesus talked of salvation. You know, because I have taught you that eternal life literally means a life without boundaries, unlimited by the possibilities of the Spirit’s power inside of us.

Salvation -being saved- is restoration, or being restored by God.

Praying people get restored to God.

Everyone who prays to God gets help from God. And he means everyone because he mentions that there is no distinction between races.

And that help is transformational as the Spirit of Christ dwells in us in a more and more intimate and personal way.

That is why in the passage containing John 3:16, he introduces it with the mystical concept of being born from above.

We may have heard it as born again.

And baptism symbolizes it as we are put under the water, we symbolize a death to the old way of being selfish and as the water washes that life away we become alive to the new way of letting the Spirit lead us more and more to love one another as we prosper in God’s grace. It symbolizes a form of death to selfishness and becoming alive to this new way of living. We are alive to loving others like Christ did.

God dwells inside of us and restores us to the place of oneness with God and others. And the goal goes beyond personal transformation into a society that truly cares for the least of these.

Christ prayed “Our Father,” not “My Father,” signifying that his redemption was inclusive of everyone.

People say that Jesus wasn’t political since he said that his kingdom is not of this earth.

But he came to establish the Kingdom of God here on earth instead of just in heaven.

Salvation is restoration to God and to others and it is our mission according to 2 Corinthians 5:17-20, Listen:

^17-20...Now we look inside, and what we see is that anyone united with the Messiah gets a fresh start, is created new. The old life is gone; a new life emerges! Look at it! All this comes from the God who settled the relationship between us and him, and then called us to settle our relationships with each other. God put the world square with himself through the Messiah, giving the world a fresh start by offering forgiveness of sins. God has given us the task of telling everyone what he is doing. We’re Christ’s representatives. God uses us to persuade men and women to drop their differences and enter into God’s work of making things right between them. We’re speaking for Christ himself now: Become friends with God; he’s already a friend with you.

I can’t emphasize it enough, this is the work of the Holy Spirit inside of us as she is striving to reconcile the whole world to God.

Let me speak a minute, then, about Christian Nationalism, well, I can’t call it Christian anymore, so I call it Nationalism. It is bound up in White Supremacy. I is afraid that white people are being replaced by brown people. It is powered by racism which is a sin.

Jesus in his teachings, and then Paul as he gives his version of them both agree that the transformation God desires is not by coercion, but by the power of Love softening and changing the hearts of hard hearted individuals. Nationalism wants to use laws to get people to conform to what they believe to be Christ’s teachings instead of the power of the Spirit.

My prayer for the Politicians in power who are placing some sort if misplaced patriotic fervor over compassion for immigrants who will most likely suffer death or slavery to gangs or political persecution is the same as Bishop Budde who called on those in power to have compassion and mercy instead of maligning refugees. She lovingly fulfilled the mandate given to her as a shepherd of to the whole flock of America that we see in the 2 Corinthians passage. And I love the way she did it. It was gentle and loving. I might have thrown in the rest of Matthew 25:41-46 where Jesus sends those who refuse to care for strangers to judgment. But intead, she focused on the reality that the Spirit of God could touch them and make them merciful as well.

Sadly, the response to her was not loving. And she didn’t change or get bitter as she was pressed about it in further engagements. It was obvious that she was working in the love of the Spirit.

The power of change inside of us and the culture is Love fueled by faith. Remember, faith, or belief changes us to follow the new commandment: Love everyone.

Sadly again, another Nationalist politician responded to Bishop Budde by trying to claim that it is a Christian virtue to care for our own to the exclusion of others. That, beloved, is a direct contradiction to the teachings of Jesus. Love everyone because everyone who prays to God belongs to God. That is a lot of people!

This insurgence of Nationalism that calls itself Christian is spiritual warfare for between the historic teachings of love and mercy that Jesus taught and the domination of the empire version of Christianity that started in the 3^rd century.

Here is how we tell the difference: Nationalism is coercive, the Spirit is a gentle shepherd inside of us leading us to have mercy, love and compassion. That is the new way of living, the restoration, the salvation that Jesus brings to us and us to Jesus.

Let us live in the power of the Spirit. Amen.