Scripture: Psalm 71:1-4; 1 Corinthians 13:12 Series: 2022
The final sermon in a ‘Survival’ series argues that the whole point of survival is rescue: just as wilderness survival skills (Parris Island training, an Alaska crash, the rule of threes, heading downhill, signaling) are temporary means toward being rescued, the life of faith aims at being rescued by God. Using Psalm 71’s plea for refuge, Pruitt insists we cannot rescue ourselves; God in Christ has already sought, found, loved, and saved us through the cross. The Christian life is lived in the gap between the already and the not-yet, which is precisely the purpose of the church (there is no church, Eucharist, or preaching in heaven). Taking refuge in God rather than our own power, and confessing Jesus as Lord (so Caesar and self are not), the body of Christ is called to announce and embody rescue, freedom, and belovedness in a broken world.
Illustrations: parris-island-survival-training, alaska-plane-crash-rescue, rule-of-threes-survival-adage, no-three-room-cabin-shelter, go-downhill-to-be-rescued, island-signaling-for-rescue, helicopter-boat-rescue, no-church-meetings-in-heaven
July 17
Rescue
I’ve taken refuge in you, Lord. Don’t let me ever be put to shame! Deliver me and rescue me by your righteousness! Bend your ear toward me and save me! Be my rock of refuge where I can always escape. You commanded that my life be saved because you are my rock and my fortress. My God, rescue me from the power of the wicked; rescue me from the grip of the wrongdoer and the oppressor. Psalm 71:1-4
There’s always a reason why someone needs to survive in the wilderness. These reasons can be different, but there always has to be a point. There’s no survival as such. If you are training to be a Marine and they send you to Parris island to survive for a week, that is the point you’re trying to accomplish. If you are flying over Alaska and the plane crashes, you are trying to survive long enough to be rescued. The skills of survival fall into either one of these two camps: either there’s an intentional attempt to practice skills under a timeframe, or there is an emergency situation. You get lost, something dramatic happens. With the emergency situation, usually there has to be some sort of trauma to instigate the need for survival, some kind of accident, some kind of injury. You’re not in the exact right frame of mind. That’s normal life. This is why, when I began this series, I started with the lesson. Don’t panic. The hardest time not to panic is the time when you have every reason and right to panic. If you’re stuck in the wild because of a plane crash, it seems like that’s a much more reasonable time to panic then if you are late to the airport or late to school or another reason. And yet it is in those moments that the skills of survival are best used. This is why we start with don’t panic. And then you move on to the adage. You can live three hours without shelter, three days without water, three weeks without food. But all of that has to do with a goal of being rescued. Survival skills aren’t the same skills you would have if you wanted to be a hermit and go live in the woods. It’s a different set of skills, you need a different level of bushcraft. Survival skills are for a limited timeframe with a goal of being rescued. That’s why you don’t want to build a three room cabin if you are making a shelter. If you’re trying to survive, you’re seeking shelter, seeking safety, seeking water, seeking food for a limited amount of time. You are ultimately trying to be rescued. Friends, we’re finishing our series on survival. We have been looking at how to survive in the wild as well as how to survive in the wild and brokenness of this world. It began by talking about not panicking. Next about the need for shelter, how God calls us to offer shelter in this world as we seek shelter in survival. Then we spoke of the need to find water to live, and how there are good water sources and bad water sources, but that we are called as a church to offer living water and God in Jesus Christ offers us a spring of living water within us, but we have to go to that source again and again. We then spoke of food and the need to find food in the wild, but also how Jesus is the bread of life, the food from which we never hunger, finally rescue where we are today. Because the point of surviving is to be rescued. Survival is not about the journey. It is about the destination. It is about getting there. A lot of journeys matter. Most of our day is spent in journeys of one kind or another. Journeys of shorter or longer lengths. School is a journey. Our jobs are journeys. Our marriages are journeys. Our vacations, our journeys are journeys. Our ultimate destination is to be with our God and our creator who loves us and offers himself for us. For that to happen, we need to be rescued.
The Psalms are full of calls for rescue and Thanksgiving for rescue. Psalm 71 is a great example.
I’ve taken refuge in you, Lord. Don’t let me ever be put to shame! Deliver me and rescue me by your righteousness! Bend your ear toward me and save me! Be my rock of refuge where I can always escape.
The Bible as a whole is full of calls for rescue and Thanksgiving for rescue. all of salvation, all of Christianity, all the faith comes down to this. God created everything and saw that it was good. God created humans in the image of God, but humans turned away. Our love failed. Yet, God’s love remained steadfast. In the fullness of time, God sent his son Jesus Christ to be with us, to be born as a child, as a king, to live with us, to befriend us, to heal and teach us, but then, ultimately, to be willing to love us all the way to the cross and death on the cross, and in so doing defeating death and opening up the doors of life eternal for us. In the wild, the way you look for rescue depends on where you are. If you’re in a mountain or a desert or a field or a place where there may be other humans, even if they are miles away, but they are there. If you are in such a location, there are some things you should do. If you’re on an island, there are other things you should do. For instance, if you are in a mountainous or hilly terrain, one of the practices, you could do is to just start going down hill, find a way to get down hill. There are two reasons for this. One is to find people, because there are more people who live down hills than up them. The second is less obvious until you think about. You want to go to downhill because it takes less energy. If you’re on an island, you want to figure some way of signaling or transportation. In either situation, the goal is not to spend all your energy on being rescue, but work in a specific way. Survival is often about conserving your energy. You don’t have an unlimited source of energy wherever you are in life, but especially when you are in a survival situation. The life of faith, the things God shares with us to do, prayer, worship, service, these are not ways of being rescued. It can be easy to confuse them. We don’t love our neighbor to earn something from God or to get God to notice us. God has already sought us and found us right now. We are already loved and saved before we do anything. We cannot, in fact, do anything to rescue ourselves. There are no secret tricks. There isn’t a secret. The amazing reality is that God has already rescued us. The question for us today is how to live in the gap between the already and the not yet. How do we live in this space where we are already forgiven, where we are already loved and yet where there is still this brokenness around us, where there are still people who don’t know God, where there are still these temptations and deceptions which pull us away. This distance between the already and the not yet is the whole point of the church. If God called us into a new life that was fully apparent now, we would not need the church. That is, if all the questions had been answered, all the current concerns met, if we were no longer looking through a glass darkly, as Paul says, in 1 Corinthians 13, we would not need the church. There is no church in heaven. There are no preachers. There is no Eucharist. There is no baptism. We are all revealed in Jesus Christ. In this way, the point of a preacher is to work myself out of a job. There are no preachers in heaven. There are no sermons. Life with God is not just this endless potluck or like church planning meeting. There are no church leadership meetings in heaven. The work of the body of Christ in the here and now is for the work of rescue in the here and now. And for the work of noticing the rescue that has already taken place. The work of survival in the here and now is not the desperation of the wild, but for the illumination of those who are deceived about the realities of this world. And for those moments, when we ourselves are deceived about who is the Lord of all creation, if Jesus is Lord, that means Caesar is not. If Jesus is Lord, that means I am not. My heart and my desires are not Lord overall. And there are things that I do and goods that I have that do not serve my Lord, but serve myself and that they are self-destructive, they are wrong. They lead away from God’s rescue, but we are called together for the purpose of announcing this good news. We are called to take refuge in God, as the Psalmist says, not in our power and skill. And we are called to live out our faith, to live it out in continuous conversion towards Jesus Christ. Doing the things of God, seeking the love of our neighbor, finding our greatest good, then our neighbor and not in ourselves of living, not for ourselves, but for others. We’re called to this continually because rescue has already come, the healer has come. The advocate has come. The rescue of God does not look like the rescue of the world. The rescue of God does not always look like a helicopter rescue, like a boat rescue. Sometimes we see God’s love and understand it. And then the hardest challenge that we ever face comes into our life. Having challenges in life does not point to an inadequacy of God. Faith is not about making our lives easier, but being true and honest and fulfilled look out is called us to, and that would be fine. Our truth, our mission, our call and the call of Jesus Christ. When we are aligned as individuals, when we are aligned as a body of Christ, when we find a community that can hold us up when we are down, that can remind us of rescue when we feel lost, that can show us shelter from the storm, that can offer us living water. That can feed us the bread of life. Our journey is not over, but God sends us out to share that rescue, to share the scars of survival and to announce that God is here. Love is here. My brothers and sisters, may you be free this day. May you be encouraged this day that you are already loved. God has rescued you and forgiven you to the deepest, darkest recesses of your soul. You have been seen all the way down. And God likes your soul. God likes you and who you are. You don’t have to go through the motions anymore. You don’t have to live the ways of destruction anymore. You are free and called to be a part of the body of Christ we call the church. Let us be a location of freedom, of rescue, of survival in this world, where God’s name is proclaimed, god’s truth is honored, god’s glory is revealed.
Let us pray. Heavenly father, thank you for rescuing us in the midst of despair and anguish. Thank you for rescuing us in the midst of joy. Thank you for showing us the truer joy, the truer happiness and blessedness that is found in following and serving you. Thank you for reminding us that nothing can separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus, our Lord. In the name of the Father and the Song and the Holy Spirit. Amen.