The Holy Spirit Will Come Upon You, and The Power of The Most High Will Overshadow You

In a Christian sense of the world, salvation is an unwarranted gift from God. That's a pretty standard concept to a Christian. What we say is that there is no human work that earns salvation or requires that God save us. Rather it's something in the nature of God- the good news of the Good News is that God is revealed as the kind of God that seeks to save humanity because of God's nature, not human nature.

I don't say this to try to sell it to anyone that doesn't already buy it. And of course, saved to or from what needs to be filled in. And I suppose there are other things to fill in as well, but I mention this point specifically because we who claim to know this, often act as if knowing this is the thing to do to get this salvation; we live in such a way that says "Knowing that Jesus died for your sins is that which you must do to get to get to go to heaven". I'm going to ignore for now that idea of "going" to heaven. You should too- there is something more important to address. Namely, knowing something, knowing anything, is a human work that, like any human work, is worthless insofar as "being saved" is concerned. Saying you believe "such and such" does nothing for your salvation.

You should be happy about that. It's a reminder that it's the power of God that saves, not your silly notions about this or that or what may or may not be. That's good news. And strange as it seems, it remains news to even Christians; in our lives as people who know that Jesus saves we easily get confused into thinking that knowing Jesus saves saves so the good news is often viewed as scary news.

We, evangelicals, are pretty good at saying you can never be good enough to earn salvation. You can never feed, clothe, or shelter enough people, you could never give away enough of what you own, you could never turn the cheek enough times, we could never [insert your pick here] to make God save you. Jesus saves. Sure. Often, that just makes most of us pretty good at neglecting that type of behavior. we say you can't do anything except we do have requirements for doing. We require the knowing and building and receiving a world in which we know what we know. That is something we do.

We say our beliefs are how we are saved (and as soon as we say that we're saying it's not the power of God that saves). We ignore maliciously or innocently, that we create a sense of the world in which belief in any thing and of any kind is possible. We act as if we don't craft and negotiate the sense of the world in which we know we know. We pretend that our minds are senses that simply receive what the world is. This is death Any sense of the world, even our Christian sense of the world, is a created thing, so to put our faith in that- to say belief saves- is to trust a human work for salvation. What we are doing with that is tying our salvation to a particular world. In one sense, that's only as it can be. We exist. We make choices and have commitments and loyalties in order to live. What else could we do? But to be brief, thinking that salvation lies in one particular set of commitments and arrangements is idolatrous.

What follows from that are often behaviors that pull us deeper and deeper into a particular way of doing and knowing that is more and more alien to faith. We want it because we often confuse the illusory security and certainty of a well established way of the world with the indomitability of life in Christ. We seem to know to say that Christianity is not about following a particular legal code of conduct (even if we say it with a wink), but we do say being a Christian means being and doing some type of such and such. It can be a terrible trap then to ask for more of that which we say makes one a Christian because we may only be asking for a more world-fixed expression of that which we presently call Christianity.

"Make me more of what I am," "Give me a bigger portion of what I already have," "Make me more secure and certain in the world," "Give us a deeper and stronger commitment to the way we know and do things now." "Thank you Lord that we are not like other folks... will you make us even more of that?"

We don't need more of the same, we need the courage, humility, and openness to strangeness that will lead us to walk in places we have never walked. When I hope that God would meet us, invigorate us, and give us new life, I realize I'm opening myself to a life that is foreign, alien, and scary.We don't do this ourselves. We need the spirit to confront us because the foreign, alien, and scary is generally that which we work to exclude and eliminate from our well-crafted, stable, and certain Christian existence.

It certainly doesn't seem easy, but if a young girl can say "Behold I am the handmaid of the Lord, let it be to me according to your word"* knowing only that it will turn every aspect of her world upside down, then we can do it, no? We're better than some little girl that doesn't have the sense to not get pregnant while she's engaged to some other guy aren't we?

No? Maybe?

Nah let's just stick with what we know.


* It's a bit inside but with this verse in mind I could've titled the post "We Are 1:38".