Are you saved? It’s the sort of question I associate with the sandwich-board men I saw walking up and down streets in the West End of London when I was a child. As I arrived outside Waterloo Station recently, I heard a man with a small PA system. I didn’t hear enough to know whether he was asking the ‘Are you saved?’ question but he was certainly suggesting that any passers-by who could hear him above the ceaseless traffic noise should think about their destiny. I just knew from the sound of his voice! And I knew because I grew up among people who talked about a Saviour and about salvation and about who had salvation and who didn’t and who should be telling whom about it all. When I was at university, the Christians in the Christian Union were not unlikely to ask each other and unsuspecting friends the question, ‘Are you saved?’ About the whole concept there was a binary sense of insiders and outsiders, of ‘the elite and the rest’.
This week, we had a visit from a friend who had also been brought up in a community where asking the question was commonplace. She was particularly concerned for the salvation of a member of her family whom she recently lost in tragic circumstances. And...was he saved? And was she saved? Do we know we’re saved? And what did we think about it all these days?
They were serious questions. She caused me to pause and reflect on the journey I have taken with this question and the language involved. Not easy to sum up but...here’s as far as I’ve got!
I’m not sure quite where I first heard the words because I was brought up in a family where I almost took in the idea of ‘salvation’ with my mother’s milk! My father and my grandfather were both Christian ‘evangelists’. They spent their working lives encouraging people to invite Jesus of Nazareth into their lives to use the jargon, as Lord and Saviour – to accept the salvation Jesus offers and be ‘saved’. It was a serious matter in my family.
As I look back now, there sometimes seemed to be quite a lot of emphasis on the future – if you are saved and still alive, we were promised, we would go to heaven at the time of Jesus’ second advent. If we died before the second advent we would be resurrected and end up in heaven with Jesus. Ultimately being ‘with’ Jesus in this life and the next was the hope of those who were ‘saved’.
As I reflected on the questions of our friend, I was reminded that alongside the evangelistic preaching in my family, I learned a more practical emphasis on the present alongside the sometimes anxious focus on the future. I remember my paternal grandmother talking to me, not about being ‘saved’ but about a different sort of change, about being ‘converted’. About learning to see the world, other people and myself all in the light of the life of Jesus. In my autograph book, she wrote the mnemonic JOY! ‘Jesus first, Others next, Yourself last’.
Now a grandmother myself, I have some questions about the JOY mnemonic. I’ve seen too many burnouts in people who don’t believe, experience and internalise the love of God for themselves at a visceral level while they try to ‘save’ the world. For me these days, knowing myself, my flawed self to be loved by God now, today, seems to be at the heart of this matter of ‘salvation’. I’m focused on believing that, despite appearances to the contrary, the Love of God is the supreme life-giving and life-renewing power in the world. If I learn what it means to open my life to that inclusive Love with it forgiveness and acceptance wherever I find it (and I don’t pretend that is easy) if I learn to share it wherever I can(which isn’t easy either!) I can afford to trust that Love with my ultimate destiny. If that belief is what it means to be saved, I am! Otherwise, I’m a lost heretic!
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