Unitarian Universalist Church of Palo Alto

How the Game Was Saved

Meditation – Adapted from the words of the Rev. Chris Buice

Occasionally, I am stopped on the street and asked the question, “Are you Saved?” Even though I am a minister, I am often unsure how to reply. Then I remember a story from my own childhood. When I was four or five years old I took my brother’s pocket knife and carved words into the headboard of my bed. When my mother discovered my handiwork, she was justifiably angry. Normally vandalism of furniture would have gotten me into deep trouble. But my mother was a minister’s wife, and the words I had carved into the bed were “Jesus Loves Me.” In this kind of situation it is true that “Jesus saves.”

Of course I was saved not by Jesus. I was saved by a mother who knew how to balance accountability with forgiveness. It is difficult to know how to discipline your children when their religious expression does damage to the furniture. In my case, a gentle talk with my mother helped me see the error of my ways and how I could change behavior for the better.

When I hear the word, saved, I think of being rescued from danger, delivered from evil, protected from harm. And in many ways I have been saved. Sometimes this experience of salvation has a human hand and a person’s face. At other times I find it when I’m all alone in the woods. But the seeds that were sown in me at an early age have grown; so that now when I am asked the question, “are you saved?” I am much quicker to respond, “Yes, I am definitely saved.”

 

Sermon

It’s the Super Bowl today and I have two predictions. First, all over this country, millions of kids who have made it a point to watch Sunday after Sunday, will pay attention. They will watch closely, their favorite players take their places. They will depend upon their heroes to do great things. To save the game. And they will dream of, someday, being such a player. Who others look up to. Who becomes a hero. Who saves the game.

At least that’s what I remember wanting.

Second, I predict a crucial moment will come when the camera is pointed downfield, through the uprights following the ball on the game saving field goal. And millions in America will be able to see, a few rows up in the stands, a man, with a purple and green wig, frantically waving a sign that says JOHN 3:16. Many will not realize that John 3:16 is not, in fact, a linebacker. But instead a rather famous biblical passage referring to, God, so loving the world so as to give his son that those who believe shall not perish…. And not only will millions not know the reference, they will not know the real question behind it. Which is:

Are you saved?

Show of hands: How many people here have ever been asked that question? How many have been asked that question in the last week? Thank you. I just wanted to make sure I wasn’t still in Georgia.

Are you saved?

It’s not unusual to be asked that question, in Georgia, where I live. Shortly after moving there I stopped being surprised when I saw men in purple wigs waving a signs. I stopped being surprised being asked, “Are you saved?” And I stopped being surprised at the intensity and enthusiasm that is usually behind the question.

Are you saved?

It’s hard to explain to people who aren’t from the south what this means. They don’t get it. The same way people from California don’t understand that football and religion are often interchangeable in the south. But I saw a piece on Bill Cower the other day that helped me understand how this question is often used and what some people really mean.

Bill Cower is the coach of the Pittsburgh Steelers — one of the teams playing in today’s Super Bowl. His players were talking about how intense he gets — especially when he thinks the game is on the line. How he gets in their face, and sticks his chin out, and scowls. And when he yells, spit flies everywhere like a soapbox preacher. And they showed one scene where Cower was chewing out one of his players, yelling, “Are you even playing in the same game as the rest of us?”

It dawned on me when I saw that, what most people are really saying when they are waving the sign JOHN 3:16. What they mean when they are asking, ‘are you saved?’ They want to know, “Are you even playing in the same game as the rest of us?”

The first time, in the south, I was asked if I was saved, it came with all the enthusiasm you’d expect from Bill Cower. But it came from a petite southern grandmother… At a wedding… I had just officiated. Her eyes were cast down when she said my service was, ‘interesting.’ But I knew what she really wanted to know was “Are you even playing in the same game as the rest of us?” Then she smiled, demurely, and said, “Bless your heart!”

I replied, much like our colleague, Chris Buice, saying, “Yes, I am definitely saved.” But I could tell she didn’t understand. How could she? My answer was so much more personal then a piece of scripture could convey. It was not Jesus who saved me. My salvation was too often fashioned from a human hand or a person’s face. She didn’t recognize the kind of salvation that I had found. Or the kind I had to offer. I could see the doubt on her face. I had seen it before.

Only a year before I worked as a chaplain at Toronto General Hospital. While on call, I was summoned to the maternity ward. A baby born a few days earlier would not eat and was not gaining weight. A very anxious grandmother was asking me to come as quickly, hoping to baptize her baby and to ‘save’ her. “Oh, by the way, what religion are you,” she asked frantically. “Unitarian Universalist” I replied. And there was a long silence on the other end of the phone. “Oh,” she said. “Well… come anyway.”

I got there twenty minutes later to find the baby’s mother and the nurses in hysterics. The grandmother had taken the child out of the hospital. She took her down to the nearest church. The church where she was raised. The church she believed saved lives. She knew her granddaughter was struggling. And needed help. The grandmother believed that a confession of faith and a short ritual would help save her. I remember, when I heard, not being so sure. I was thankful when the baby was returned in good health. And the question of whether she was ever actually saved stayed with me.

We called it by different names. We felt it came about by different means. But I understood what she just wanted to give her granddaughter was the same thing wanted as a child — and millions of other children still want. A chance to be saved. The chance to play in the same game as everyone else.

Were you saved? In the earliest moments of your life, did someone come in the dead of night to make sure that you had what you needed most? Made sure you were held? That you were loved? That you were blessed? Were you surrounded by people who noticed? And cared? Were you saved?

Because a lot of children aren’t.

The next time I remember being asked that question, it came from founder and President of the Children’s Defense Fund, Marion Wright Edelman at the Atlanta Interfaith Children’s Prayer Breakfast. She asked a room full of religious and social leaders: “are you saved?” They all nodded as you’d expect. But the question was not designed to summon self-congratulations. It was really designed to lead into her next question which asked whether that meant we were then part of a communities that saved lives? Because, as she proceeded to point out, there were lives that needed saving all around us. And then she told us exactly what she meant.

“Did you know,” she asked, “that everyday in America….

• 5 children or youth commit suicide.
• 9 children or youth are homicide victims.
• 180 are arrested for violent crimes.
• 367 are arrested for drug abuse.
• 1310 are born without health insurance.
• 2016 are born into homes where they face malnourishment and poverty.
• 2543 public school students are corporally punished.
• 7883 children are reported abused or neglected.

Every day! Being saved in today’s world, she explained, wasn’t so much a matter of having faith and conducting ritual as it was a matter of sweat and muscle. It was not so much a matter of learning how to believe in salvation, as a way of making salvation believable.

I thought about the children she cited in her statistics. And I realized that most of those children probably had had parents and friends - even grandmothers - with a strong sense of faith and ritual. Many went to church. Many were sprinkled with water and raised in the sacraments. And I’m sure many prayed. But I don’t think anyone could say that even one child within those statistics was saved.

Were you saved? Did somebody, at some point, foresee some of the choices being made in your life - or ones you were making - and stop what they were doing to step into your life and hold up a better way? Were you part of a community that took the time to mentor, or advise you through disappointments? To pick you up when you had fallen? To make sure you got to play in the same game as everyone else? Were you saved?

I know the struggle many of us have with salvation. Struggling to believe in it. Salvation is not easy. Partly, because we are taught to think of it as something way up here (point up) in the clouds. When all the people who need it most live way down here (point down) at our feet and are going unnoticed.

It is not often that you will meet a child who is seeking salvation fashioned from faith and ritual. Children have plenty of faith of their own and an inner light brighter than almost adults. It is sweat and muscle they need. And a chance to be noticed. Included. A chance to play in the same game as everyone else. And ironically that’s exactly the kind of salvation Unitarian Universalists have to offer.

Minister and director of our Social Witness Office in Washington DC, Meg Riley believes in our call to offer this kind of salvation. She talks of how it became clear to her — while working in a shelter for abused and abandoned children under the age of 5.

“Watching these children,” she says, “who were learning what it means to be alive in some of the worst circumstances imaginable, I became deeply awed by the resilience and wisdom of the human spirit. These children had already suffered more than anyone should have to in a lifetime. They never had the chance to know love that was not simultaneously interwoven with abuse or neglect. And yet, I observed that within a week of good care, consistent expectations, and kind attention, almost all of them began to manifest vitality and curiosity and creativity. That is not to say that they were healed, but that they visibly and quickly grew towards any light that was offered to them.”

It was Meg’s story that came to my mind while sitting at the interfaith prayer breakfast that early September morning — while I listened to Marion Wright Edelman point out, over and over, how our children — not just children in our poorer areas — but children everywhere — are craving for opportunities to have real heroes. To be part of real dreams. To play in the same game as everyone else. To believe in what it really means to be saved — and to believe such a thing is possible for them.

Children will always choose to grow toward any light that is offered them. But it must be offered. Meg continues:

“Working at the shelter also helped me see that there are limits to [a child’s] resilience. One child in particular broke my heart. Joey was two and a half years old when I met him. Outrageously defiant and perpetually acting out, he delighted me even when he exasperated the entire staff. He came to the shelter after his 15-year-old mother abandoned him in downtown Minneapolis because he was getting on her nerves. Within days of his arrival, the shelter began to works its magic, and his defiance was softened into energetic curiosity and limit-testing. His mother, coming to visit, was delighted with the change in him and wanted to take him back home. This was a common phenomenon at the shelter, and she did take him home. Within 48 hours she had once more abandoned him, leaving him alone at a mall to be picked up by the police. We took him back to the shelter. His lights came on, but this time they were a little bit dimmer. After this horrific cycle had been repeated three more times, there was no more creativity or curiosity or acting out. He was listless, depressed, and uninterested in coming back to life again.”

A child will grow towards any light that is offered them. But if it is not offered, or too easily snuffed out, they eventually stop looking. A child will look up to — look out for — heroes in only so many places, be turned away or turned down only so many times before they become unable to recognize salvation in terms of human hands or a person’s face. There is a line in everyone’s life beyond which a child finds it hard to say, “Yes, I am definitely saved.” A line beyond which they start believing in themselves as a statistic — because they have become too accustomed to being treated like one.

So I ask you again: Were you saved? Were you rescued from danger? Delivered from evil? Protected from harm? Were you shown any concrete ways to believe in salvation.

The word for ‘believe’ in Greek — as it is used in the new testament - simply means ‘to give one’s heart to.’ The word ‘salvation,’ in Hebrew from the Old Testament means, ‘to make wide, or make sufficient, the road ahead. At its core, believing in salvation is not about having head-in-the-clouds faith. And it’s not just about muscle, either. Real salvation is about what happens when we learn how to put faith and muscle together. It is what happens when remember our children and we give our hearts to making wide the road that opens before them.

Children will learn to follow that road, to grow toward the light to escape the abyss of becoming a statistic — only when we learn how to be the real heroes they can look up to. When we do that for enough children, for enough generations, we might just begin to know a world that is not perpetually defiant and acting out, or is so often listless, depressed and unable to come to life. Then we’ll know what it means to be saved.

That was the message we all took away from that prayer breakfast. As we got up, we felt a clear vision and charge. I later wondered how much of that charge got to take root. And how much of that charge was lost in the turmoil that followed. It was almost exactly nine o’clock when the prayer breakfast ended. September 11th, 2001.

Most of us never even made it to the entrance of the hotel when we heard the news. In a flash, I realized that the salvation I felt so clearly a moment before — the salvation I believed I was called to offer — was something I needed to be reminded of. So, instinctively, I turned around and went back into that room. I wasn’t surprised that everyone else was also returning. That everyone else also had a faith like mine that required real faces to look into, real hands to hold on to and realized that salvation came from within a real community promised — and re-promised — itself to the work of love and justice.

When I heard that the people who flew those planes into the towers did so in part because they believed they were saved, I wondered if their defiance and desperation would have been lessened if they had been given, while they were still young, the flesh and blood salvation that comes from human commitment and human community and human love.

There is a poem by Mary Oliver where she describes a dream. In it she sees her father, long deceased, who she had always wanted to love — and forgive — but couldn’t because he was so often defiant and angry and unavailable. Listen to this paraphrasing of her words:

The door fell open
And I knew his face
Pathetic and hollow,
With even the least of his dreams
Frozen inside him,
Now looking
Like a little boy
the meanness gone,
I greeted him and asked him
Into the house,
And lit the lamp
And looked into his blank eyes
In which at last I saw
What I had never been able to see
I saw what love might have done
Had we dared to love in time.

Were you saved? Did someone who you admired, who you looked up to, dare to love you in time? Did someone you knew give their heart over to the task of making your road sufficiently wide? Were you saved?

Today, children all over will look for heroes, just like they have done Sunday after Sunday. They will dream of one day being a hero themselves. Of doing what they can to save the game. Just like I did years ago.

The heroes that were real to me, came not from the TV, but from my community. They were the ones that gave me a human hand and a person’s face. Who believed in me. Who dared to love me in time. And helped me understand, “I am definitely saved.”

But more than that, they helped me to become the kind of hero I had once looked up to. Not by completing the pass to save the game. But simply by completing my commitment to those who come after me. To help them play in the same game as everyone else. And make their road sufficiently wide.

To the Glory of Life.