Today is the Day of Salvation

 

Sermon preached on Sunday, Sept 28, 2025 by Dn. James Wilcox

Luke 5:1-11; 2 Cor. 6:1-10 Sept. 28, 2025

The core message given to us from today’s Gospel and Epistle lessons is one that is rather straightforward. In simple terms, both readings are about salvation—a salvation that can only be accomplished through the saving work of Jesus Christ and brought to life through our personal cooperation with the love of the Father. In the Gospel text the Apostle Peter demonstrates what it means to surrender everything unequivocally for the sake of salvation, and today’s Epistle highlights the consequences AND the cost of choosing to do so. These two readings, then, offer us a picture of the Orthodox understanding of salvation from start to finish. We lay down our lives entirely before Christ, and then we prepare to endure hardship because the love of Christ for whom we bear witness will often invite persecution and ridicule. The challenge for us in this present moment are the slight and subtle variations on this understanding of salvation that are common among us in the western world. And some of these variations are repeated often enough that we simply to assume it is standard Orthodox teaching.

And when i think on the subtle character of these variations that exist today, it brings to mind a modern parable that helps illustrate what I mean. It goes like this:

“The devil and a friend of his were walking down the street one day, when they saw ahead of them a man stoop down and pick something up from the ground. The man looked at it, smiled, and tucked it into his pocket. The friend said to the devil, ‘What did that man pick up?’ ‘He picked up a piece of the truth,’ said the devil. ‘That is a very bad business for you, then,’ said his friend. ‘Oh, not at all,’ the devil replied, ‘For I am going to help him organize it.’

Now to describe the Orthodox definition of salvation in very plain terms, in so far as that is possible, I will simply repeat the words of St Gregory the Theologian: “In being saved we must have both the action of God and the will of man.” Now this is a very short statement that points to a larger process. To be saved, in other words, is not a one-time transactional event as some popular understandings purport. We don’t “accept” Jesus and get “saved,” per se, but we do lay down everything that we are to begin a process that requires our willful cooperation with God over time. And this is a process that asks us to let go of our selfish instincts, and to allow God to transform us gradually, over time into His likeness. It is a cooperative and synergistic practice. But it cannot get underway until we first make the choice to repent.

St Peter encountered the Lord in today’s Gospel reading, and did what many do when they sense the genuine nature of holiness enveloping around them. “Depart from me,” Peter says, “for I am a sinful man…”  Peter couldn’t bear to stay in the Lord’s presence because he knew his own sins very well, and standing next to this figure of holiness unsettled him greatly. But this very feeling is part of the process of our salvation. It is something we must go through, and not around. We do not get to dictate the terms by which the Lord comes and goes, asking God to step away from us like Peter does, to assuage our comfort. For all of us must understand our own unworthiness, and we must learn to find our repentance in the presence of the Lord, however uncomfortable that may be. This is where our transformation into Christlikeness begins!

Now, when we speak of salvation as a process — a saving process — there is a larger picture that is important to understand. The Apostle Paul describes it in the following way: “… For you know the Grace of our Lord Jesus Christ, that because of us he became poor although he was rich, so that you might be rich through his poverty.” [1] This is a description of the manner by which redemption has come to us. It’s not a simple agreement to “accept Jesus into your heart,” as some teach us today. Christ who is both fully God and fully human, emptied himself of his divinity to fill up on our humanity, that we might learn to let go of our humanity in order to fill up on divinity. I hope you can see that this process is an inside job. The Scriptures and the Church teach us that we were made in God’s image for this express purpose. God, who is pure love, created us in an act of divine love for the purpose of sharing in that love that is God’s divinity. It is not that God takes us and “transfer[s us] into the divine essence,” as John of Damascus puts it,. We are “defied by participation in the divine radiance.” [2] We must choose and willfully act upon this through our own free will. God will not force us to do so.

But some might say, “I’m already Orthodox, and I’ve already repented and been baptized. Where does my salvation go from here?” And to this I would say, that because God is divine love, and because this is a process in which we are moving toward God over the course of our Orthodox lives, unless you have learned to love ALL people — and I DO mean ALL — we haven’t even begun to scratch the surface of our repentance. St Maria of Paris writes that “The way to God lies through love of people.” St Silouan of Athos takes this a step further writing that the love of our enemies “… is the fundamental criterion for the Christian way of life. This IS Salvation,” he writes.

Now this should seem obvious. But again there are some alternate takes on this idea of being saved that exist among us. Because our culture is so polarized, and because social media is so prolific, images are shown by those zealous for the Christian faith, which circulate, disparage and insult others in the name of “truth.” These run rampant across the internet today. I saw a particularly disturbing video of a world leader praying the Lord’s Prayer, while images of rockets were fired from tanks, with bombs dropping on foreign lands. And again this should be obvious, but this is NOT the way of salvation. A video like that mocks the salvific work of Christ, and is utter blasphemy. The Kingdom of God is not brought to fruition through an alignment with the political powers of our day. The Kingdom of God, and our Salvation, are alive and being made alive within you! If we wish t make steps toward God as part of our becoming more Christline, we need to let go of the need to be right, and simply allow God to be. Allow God work within you to bring the light of Christ to fulness around you.

“Now is the day of salvation,” writes Paul in today’s Epistle.

“For our sake, he made the one who knew no sin into sin so that in him we might become God’s justice. And cooperating with him we implore you not to receive God’s grace in vain. Provid[e] no stumbling block in any matter, so that the ministry should receive no censure, but instead commending ourselves in everything as God’s ministers.”

 

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1) 2 Corinthians. 8:9, Nicholas King Translation of the New Testament, pg 400.

2) St John of Damascus, On the Orthodox Faith: A New Translation of An Exact Exposition of the Orthodox Faith. (Yonkers, New York: St Vladimir’s Seminary Press,2022), 130.