I was about nine years old when I first went away to Alton Bay Christian Camp in New Hampshire. It was a fantastic experience, I got to swim, learn archery, and make wonderful friends. It was also the time when I made a personal commitment to Jesus Christ. I remember the night vividly. About 50 of us were gathered around a big campfire and the night sky was filled with sparkling stars. One of the staff members talked about being saved by Jesus. He talked about the feeling of relief and joy that he felt inside himself after he gave his life to Christ and described it as "feeling like you have butterflies inside you." His presentation was compelling, every word he said about Jesus and having a personal relationship with him resonated deeply within me. At the end of his talk we went back to our cabins and were invited to talk to our counselors if we wanted to accept Jesus Christ as our personal Lord and Savior. As I talked with my counselor about salvation I knew I wanted Jesus to be with me in the midst of my life. I prayed to Jesus and I told Jesus I wanted him in my life, I told Jesus I wanted to follow him, and I felt a rush of what I can only describe as the Holy Spirit, and I sensed new life welling up within me.

Salvation, "being saved", is all too often a sensitive subject. Frequently salvation is explained in negative and damaging ways. I’ve heard my fair share of sermons where salvation is basically equated with fire-insurance—a way of insuring that you wont go to Hell. Similarly, the idea of salvation can be held over peoples’ heads and used to judge and exclude them, "if you haven’t been "born again", if you haven’t "accepted" Jesus, you simply aren’t Christian and you have no place in our church". Given all of these damaging views of salvation, just what is it? Just what is it that Jesus meant when he said in the end of our Gospel, "God did not send the Son into the world to condemn the world, but in order that the world might be saved through him"?

The question of salvation has existed as long as people have met Christ. This question was the very one that the disciples were living out as they walked with Jesus throughout his life. This question is the one that stands at the foundation of much of the writings that we find in the New Testament. At the heart of the Christian story stands the question, "What does a relationship with Jesus mean for my life" What does this relationship really mean in the midst of a world of poverty, school shootings, violence, sadness and human brokenness?

In his letter to the Christians in the City of Rome Paul struggles with this question. For Paul Christian life is summed up in the idea of "being made righteous", "being justified", or what my camp counselor called "being saved". For Paul his struggle with just what salvation was brought him back to a discussion of faith, righteousness, justification and a man named Abraham—or as our first reading called him, Abram.

Paul looked at Abraham’s life and made the statement that it was through faith, through trusting in the goodness and love of God that Abraham was saved, that he was reconciled, that he was brought into a life-giving relationship with God, a relationship for which all humanity was made. Paul argues that it was not through any action of Abraham, not through any intrinsic quality that Abraham had, not through Abraham’s moral goodness or even his very belief in God that Abraham became the father of the Jewish and Christian people. Abraham found salvation, instead, through his willingness to trust God even when it didn’t make much sense to trust God.

For Paul, the story of Abraham’s deep and abiding trust is the very key for us to understand just what salvation looks like. Living a life of Salvation in Jesus Christ, is living a life of radical trust in God. Salvation in Christ is trust in the goodness and presence of God even as we are surrounded by the pain, brokenness and the irrationality of the world. For Paul, and for the early church, Christian salvation is not based on earning the love of God through what we do. Instead salvation is based on God’s grace, God’s reaching out to us, made known to us perfectly and fully in the God-made-flesh, Jesus Christ. Salvation is trusting that even as we are broken, even as we are hurt, even as we are sinful and ultimately incapable of earning the love of God our God nonetheless accepts, heals, forgives, and walks with us. Salvation is giving oneself utterly and completely to God—trusting that God will meet us, heal us, and fill us with new life no mater where we’ve been, no mater what we’ve done. Salvation is modeled through Abraham’s trusting God in the midst of a situation that seemed completely untrustworthy, and finding God to be present, finding God to be loving, finding God to be bringing new life out of situations that seem to be utterly hopeless.

What I was looking for that night was a deep and personal connection with God through Christ that would never desert me in the midst of the brokenness and pain of my life. The night that I accepted Jesus I was saved. I was saved because through a relationship with Jesus I was able to trust. Of course I couldn’t have explained that at the time, I didn’t realize that this acceptance of Jesus was part of my life-long journey of trusting Christ. It took many years of thought, study, theology, and reading for me to be able to put those theological words to my experience. But the fact was, that night, I found myself standing in the same place that the Pharisee Nicodemus had stood, coming to Christ searching for something more, searching for truth, searching for God in the midst of confusion and pain, searching for the salvation which Christ came to the world to bring.

My coming to Jesus has not given me all of the answers, it has not solved all of my problems—salvation isn’t about that, none of the Apostles, least of all Paul, ever claimed that this was the result of salvation. However, my coming to Christ, my "salvation" was, quite simply put, an act of trust. Through that trusting in Christ, I have found a relationship with God that is deep and rich. In this relationship of trust I have found guidance, joy, and a deep sense that I am loved, accepted and held in the loving hands of the God who has reconciled me and forgiven me no mater what I have done.

Many of us need think only briefly to recall situations in our lives where our ability to trust and have hope seems to be dim at best. No doubt we can think of times of pain, confusion, shame, fear, and even death which make us recoil from trusting others, let alone God. The recent shooting in DeKalb, Illinois has led to multiple conversations which claim that we can’t trust anyone anymore, not schools, not students. Simply put, for many given the dangerous realities of the world, trust is simply out of the question. Yet the hope which Paul speaks of today, the gracious gift that Christ brings to us, is that even in the midst of these situations, even in the midst of pain and doubt our God is trustworthy. And thus we can trust, we can lean on the presence of the ever trustworthy God made known to us time and again through the Eucharist, made known to us through his Body, gathered together in the wonderful mystery which is the Church.

Dear friends, as we continue to walk the road of Lent, as we continue the practice of our Lenten disciplines in the midst of a hurting and broken world I pray that we might take a moment to practice trust in God. The fact is all the Lenten disciplines in the world will not make us right with God, all the good-works that we can muster do not earn us God’s love and approval. Instead, as Paul reminds us so strongly through his reflection on Abraham, it is God who makes us right with God. It is God, reaching out to all of humanity in Jesus Christ; it is God, walking with us in the midst of the insanity of the brokenness of the world; it is God who saves us; and it is trust in that God that gives us life. Our call is to trust, to lean fully and completely on God. We are called to come to Christ, come filled with doubt, come filled with joy, come filled with hurt. But come, come as Nicodemus did, to bring our questions, our concerns and pains, to bring our broken selves to Jesus and trust that in Christ we will find acceptance. In Christ we will find salvation, an unearned gift, freely offered to all who would have the courage to trust.

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