“And if some of the branches be broken off, and thou, being a wild olive tree, wert grafted in among them, and with them partakes of the root and fatness of the olive tree; Boast not against the branches. But if thou boast, thou bearest not the root, but the root thee.”
God’s will, God’s finality for human beings – what we usually call salvation or being saved – is a whole composed of many parts and one must be careful not to isolate the parts from one another and one must also avoid taking one part for the whole. For example whether we say it or not we tend to think in terms of “me and my salvation;” whether we like it or not the message is that salvation is all about me. Another example of taking the part for the whole is the popular, evangelical/Protestant point-of-view of justification by faith that makes it the beginning, middle, and the end of salvation. That perspective has impaired Protestantism’s understanding both God and man. St. Paul warns Gentiles Christians, who are branches grafted into Israel, that they do not bear the root. It is fair to wonder today whether or not Protestant/evangelicalism or for that matter whether Roman Catholicism grasp the difference between root and branch. This state springs from a misjudgment of salvation that takes a part for the whole.
Allow me to illustrate this ubiquitous fallacy with two more examples: When I was young and the usual suspects that I hung out with heard that Otis Redding was going to be close to home the operative question was “Who has wheels?” and that meant, just in case you do not know, “Who has a car?” Everyone came up with gas money and on the evening of the concert we were off to see the mighty Otis. Now lets say that someone from another country, a place utterly isolated with no TV, no radio, no newspapers just happened to be an exchange student fresh off the boat and lets say she overheard our conversation. Furthermore lets say she had never heard of Otis Redding nor the term “wheels” as we were using it and lets say everyone from her lonely country were all dyed-in-the-wool empiricists and literalists. She would take the word “wheels” to be the very essence of an object needed to view Otis Redding. She might have thought: “What sort of wheel does one need to see an ‘Otis?’” But being a bright kid, once she saw the automobile, she soon figured out that the word “wheels” is slang for this amazing object which in fact has six wheels, if you count the steering wheel and the fly-wheel, as well as an internal combustion engine, seats, lights, bumpers, windows, and a chaise. The automobile is made up of many parts that are related to one another and that is what makes the automobile a whole – the relation of its parts to one another. A wheel, a tire that is pulled from the whole becomes what you can make of it – tie a rope around it and you have a swing, for example – but that tire has nothing to do with the object known as “wheels,” unless you reattach it then the wheel becomes part of the integrated whole. If you want to experience wheels you may do so only by experiencing the whole and the way to do that is to get into the automobile and drive away. One part or even many parts do not equal the whole; it is the internal relations of the parts to one another that equal the whole thing. One part is not more essential than the other parts: take away one little part, say the flywheel, and you have destroyed the whole. This reminds me of what St. Paul says about the Body of Christ.
Now the same thing is true of a narrative. A narrative is a whole composed of many parts and it is the internal relations of the parts that make the whole of what we call a narrative. Someone may say to me, “You are making this way more complicated than is necessary; a narrative is a story and that’s all there is to it.” But I say to you, that is a bit like the little girl who told her father that she knew water bends wood because she saw it with her own eyes. A narrative is a story and a story is a whole made up of parts: words and paragraphs, characters, a place, a period, dialogue, movement, maybe a plot of sorts, conflict, and resolution. A narrative in some manner has a beginning, middle, and an end, even if a clever storyteller like Quentin Tarantino plays tricks with time. A narrative may be an account of someone’s historic experience; it may be a poem or a Psalm that has an implied or assumed narrative. Within the time it takes you to read the Book of Genesis you will have read through a library of narratives that is the bone, the marrow and the flesh of every single story you have ever heard in your life or ever will hear. That is remarkable in itself, but if you wish to understand a narrative you have to do your very best to understand it from within as a whole, to understand the relations of its parts to one another. The plot, if there is one, is not the narrative. Characters isolated from place, isolated from time or isolated from the other characters are reduced to cartoon figures no matter how well drawn. A talking snake in a garden is not very interesting unless there is someone for him to talk to. An abstract deity laying down the law is comical unless he is laying it down to a people he has chosen for some purpose, but then he is no longer abstract. An old man who pulls up stakes and leaves his home just when he ought to be enjoying his golden years is laughable or to be pitied unless God told him to leave and take his family with him. One part or even several parts do not make the narrative, do not equal the whole; it is the internal relations of the parts to one another that embody the whole thing. One part is not the most essential of all: take away one little part, say the flywheel, a talking snake, a Promise from an invisible God, and you have destroyed the whole. This is one of the big differences between the Eastern and Western Church and I first understood that back at Duke Divinity. I had a friend who was a Greek Orthodox priest and one day when we were having coffee I asked him what were the essentials of Orthodoxy. The look on his face told me that he had no idea what I was talking about. I said, “You know, like the fundamentals of the faith. What are the central beliefs of Orthodoxy?” “Oh, I see,” he said with a bit of an accent, “There is no such thing as fundamentals in Orthodoxy because that would imply that there are non-essentials which is untrue. What you’re asking is very much a Western thing.”
I have made two points for us to keep in mind: The first point I made two weeks ago with the story of the little girl who thought water bent wood and the point of that story is that everything, all of experience, has to be interpreted which is to say that experience has to be understood. The child was enamored with the empirical, bewitched by experience, and it was only with her father’s help (we always need someone to lead us) that she later broke the empirical spell and achieved understanding. The second point is that a whole cannot be reduced to one of its parts. To understand a thing is to understand how its parts relate to one another. My Greek Orthodox friend stated an important truth when he said nothing is a throw-away, there are no non-essentials and that is especially so if one takes a part to be equivalent to the whole. When that happens things get turned upside down just as Paul said to the Romans:
“But if thou boast, thou bearest not the root, but the root thee.”
What we call salvation, being saved, is a dynamic structure of many parts that organizes the life of the individual Christian as well as the Christian community in which he dwells. The dynamic structure is a living structure and it is God’s work and our work as well. It involves repentance from sin, trust, faith, beliefs, and wholesome activities such as liturgical (which means “the work of the people.”) worship with other Christians, attentiveness to instruction, private prayer, as well as corporal and spiritual works of mercy. And it involves avoiding activities that are unwholesome and destructive to one’s self as well as the Christian community. Such activities according to the epistle from last Sunday brought the wrath of God upon many of the Jews who followed Moses out of Egypt and they were sons and daughters of the covenant. But we have a big problem today because few if any Christians actually believe that God would really and truly reject them regardless of their behavior. The big problem which has grown and continues to grow bigger and bigger is that for several hundred years we in the Western Church have gradually come to believe that salvation is individualistic, pragmatic, and instrumental – just a means to an end. That is a substantial mistake. Salvation, God’s finality for humanity is a state-of-being-for-God-and-for-all-creation but it has been reduced to what people call a “personal relationship,” which when one actually examines what that means it turns out to be a shallow relationship that established God as our service provider, an intangible insurance policy that one acquires for one’s self by simply believing a set of propositions, ideas, or narratives and once one believes them the deal is struck and one is saved and you are God’s fair-haired child forever and ever and ever no matter what. That narrative is utterly foreign to the New Testament, nowhere to be found and yet it is the guiding narrative of American evangelicalism. The way this has occurred is that parts have been taken for the whole and to really clinch the deal, some of these parts are not real but are mistakes, illusions, sticks in water.
The word that we have translated as salvation in the New Testament is a Greek word that means to heal, to rescue, to be made well, and to be made whole and it is used in the New Testament to describe God’s finality for humanity as a state of wholeness, a state of completeness – a state-of-being-for-God-and-for-all-creation. The very important point I want you to see is that we are not the center of the universe. God is not in the business of providing services to human beings. It may appear that salvation is all about me; it may appear that the Church is a service industry set up by Jesus to satisfy my felt needs, but that is an illusion. God created human beings for a purpose, a high and holy purpose, not merely to become enamored with the empirical, not merely to experience creation, but to delight in the beauty of creation, to be attentive to the creature, to understand her and to love her, and to rightly judge the great value of creation to God himself; to give the creature what only we human beings can give; to give to the creature what by nature she does not have – to be her voice, to be her poet, to declare her beauty, her glory, and her worth before the Lord with the voice of joy, the voice of gladness, the voice of the Bridegroom:
“Behold the fowls of the air: for they sow not, neither do they reap, nor gather into barns; yet your heavenly Father feedeth them…”
That is only part of what it means to be saved and as you can see it is a far cry from being the center of the universe. But what has happened is that some words that St. Paul uses, especially in Romans and Galatians, words that describe parts of the whole, parts of being saved – these words have been taken as the whole of salvation and to make matter worse the words have been misunderstood. Three of these words are especially important and over the next couple of weeks we will take a look at them and how they relate to one another from within the whole of salvation. These words are justice/justification, righteous/righteousness, and faith/faithfulness.
“And if some of the branches be broken off, and thou, being a wild olive tree, wert grafted in among them, and with them partakes of the root and fatness of the olive tree; Boast not against the branches. But if thou boast, thou bearest not the root, but the root thee.”