Child of Infinity

Propers: The First Sunday in Lent, AD 2025 C

Homily:

Lord, we pray for the preacher, for You know his sins are great.

Grace mercy and peace to you from God our Father and from our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ. Amen.

“Everyone who calls on the name of the Lord shall be saved.”

I feel like I should just sit down. How could any homily improve upon that verse?

“If you confess with your mouth that Jesus is Lord,” writes St Paul to the Christians at Rome, “and believe in your heart that God raised him from the dead, you will be saved!” Now that, my dear Church, is Good News. That is Gospel indeed! Why, the only way to make it any better—or more scandalous, depending on your viewpoint—is to pair this promise with another Pauline epistle, that to the Christians at Philippi, in which he pens the poem:

Therefore God has highly exalted [Jesus Christ] and bestowed on him the name which is above every name, that at the name of Jesus every knee should bow, in heaven and on earth and under the earth, and every tongue confess that Jesus Christ is Lord, to the glory of God the Father.

Put these two together and what do we get? Paul tells us, both boldly and baldly, that everyone who confesses the Name of the Lord shall be saved, and also that everyone will confess the Name of the Lord: everyone on the earth, above it, or beneath it. And when that happens, he writes to the Corinthians, “when all things are subjected to Jesus, then the Son himself will also be subjected to the one who put all things in subjection under him, so that God may be all in all.”

There is no subtlety here, no prevarication or qualification. For Paul, the conquest of Christ is absolute. Here on earth, He vanquishes sin and death. Descending into hell, He dethrones Satan and liberates the damned. Ascending into heaven, He reorders the cosmos as it always ought to have been, reclaiming all authority from usurping principalities. In His total victory, fait accompli in eternity, there is no shadow left untouched by Jesus’ Light. Death and Hades He hurls into the lake of fire, the ever-burning Spirit of the love of God in Christ. God’s love burns down hell.

This has already been accomplished. The war has already been won. Christ is Risen! He is the Resurrection! And He has gone to hell and back to bring you home in Him. God help anything that dares get in His way.

Paul writes this—some of this—from prison. He suffers in chains. He speaks of a thorn in his flesh. Everywhere he goes, he is persecuted, prosecuted, arrested, stoned, shipwrecked, bitten by vipers, lowered over city walls in a basket on a rope, and ultimately beheaded. And the whole time, he’s saying, “Christ is Lord. Christ is King. Christ is Risen. Christ has won. And Jesus Christ is all of this for you.” St Paul does not mess around.

Lent is a time of living out “already and not yet.” Christ is Lord, already and not yet. The Kingdom has come, already and not yet. We are saved, already and not yet. In one sense, our Gospel reading this morning is but the beginning of our journey. We stand at the start of the 40 days of Lent, a season set aside in part for resisting worldly temptations, resisting the siren song of Satan. “If you were the Son of God,” hisses the devil, “then surely you would do what I would do with all that power.”

“I am the Son of God,” Christ replies, “in doing My Father’s will.” What makes a man a son of God is not the use of force, but humility, selflessness, justice, and love. Only the weak succumb to brutality. One must be strong to be gentle. When people ask us what it means to be children of God—indeed, what it is to be Christian—all that we can do is to point to Jesus Christ, to show Him to the world in word and deed.

But in another sense, this isn’t a journey at all. Christ isn’t on His way to becoming the Son of God. He is God already, God incarnate, God-With-Us. And this is not a contest. Satan doesn’t have a prayer. Christ has done what we could not: He simply dismisses the devil. That ancient sinewy serpent, the spirit of our pride, who curls about our heart like a snake around an apple, he has no power here. Christ could grab him by the throat and simply squeeze. But He doesn’t even have to do that; for Satan is as impotent as a corpse.

This is Jesus’ victory. This is Jesus showing us a perfect human life. He is Lord and King of all, already and not yet. Satan is defeated and the dumb schmuck doesn’t know it. He thinks that he will get another chance. Another chance at what, at winning? Stupid serpent. You couldn’t even get past Michael; you think you have a chance against the Christ? When Jesus descends into hell, Old Scratch, you’re gonna hear a dragon scream.

Every single one of us is like St Paul in prison. We live between two worlds, straddling the threshold of eternity and time, the spiritual and material, celestial and terrestrial. We live lives of already and not yet. We suffer, we age, we doubt, we despair, we seem to be fools to the world, and so we are! Yet we are more than conquerors through Him who  loves us so. We know the end of the story. We have seen it, tasted it.

We have been reborn in Baptism, Confirmed in the Holy Spirit, made one in Jesus’ Body and His Blood. We have been forgiven infinite times and really only once. We know that Jesus conquers; we know that Jesus saves; the fire of His Spirit’s in our bones. “Everyone who calls upon the Name of the Lord shall be saved”—already and not yet.

Salvation’s not a rubber-stamp. It isn’t zeroing out an account. Salvation is a process; which isn’t to say that we earn it. Salvation is the gift of God in Jesus Christ our Lord. And Christ has come to save us from our sins—not merely from the consequence of sin. Do you see the difference? Mostly we’re concerned with the effects and not the cause. We don’t worry about sin, about our corruption, about our distance from our God. We worry about the results, the karma, the time to pay the piper.

Jesus is not so myopic. We are in dire need of an upgrade; systemic, top to bottom, 100-point restoration. That’s why He’s here. Christ has come to save us from ourselves. Or, more accurately, Christ has come to make us into ourselves for the very first time. Deep wounds need deep healing. To become one with God in Christ—to become now truly human—necessitates cycles of repentance and forgiveness, of death and resurrection, of justice and of mercy, of Law and of Gospel.

We have to die to ourselves, every day, to rise again in Christ, to rise ever higher in His truth. Lo, I tell you a mystery: mercy and justice in God are both the same. Both of them are one unflinching truth. A perfect justice culminates in mercy. And a perfect mercy offers restitution, the opportunity for us to set things right, to heal what we have harmed. What we perceive as punishment is really restoration; while mercy brings with it the weight of our becoming merciful.

All of this is grace. All of this is truth. All of this is new life in Jesus Christ our Lord.

And we might say, “Well, I wish that He would just snap His Almighty fingers and get it over with! Remake me in Your Image, Lord, and do it straight away. The short-short version!” And in a sense He has. From the perspective of eternity—to look with Heaven’s eyes—you are now and have always been saved. From outside of time, God sees you as you were always meant to be: sees you in Jesus, yes, and as a perfect individual.

God loves you from eternity; He always has and always will. It’s only here in time—or perhaps in aeviternity, the time of angels and of devils—that things seem to spool out slowly, one moment after another, stretching into days and months and years. But how could it be any other way? All creatures need a story, need a past. From the viewpoint of the heavens, all of this is but a flash, a backstory uploaded to make you who you are: a unique, beloved child of God, distinct amongst an infinity of siblings.

Only on earth does salvation seem to tarry. But I promise you this: everyone who calls on the Name of the Lord shall be saved. You already are—already and not yet.

In the Name of the Father and of the +Son and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.

Pertinent Links

RDG Stout

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St Peter’s Lutheran

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Nidaros Lutheran

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