Have you been saved? Perhaps you have been asked this question. For some of you, it may cause you to break out into hives! We can attempt to answer the question, though it may not be the answer expected by someone who would boldly pose such a question. Have you been saved? Well, we are always in the process of being saved. Salvation is a process, not a moment in time.
The original Greek of the word “to save” has valences of being made whole, even of being healed. Rather than a simple rescue from something that is bad, salvation can be likened to something that restores goodness, or at the least, unites and repairs what is fractured. Maybe even more surprising to the fervid evangelical posing the question, “have you been saved?” is the rather more catholic claim that God saves us in the liturgy itself. The Western—especially protestant mindset—might be inclined to think of the Church’s liturgy as either a reenactment of past events or, alternatively, as a word-heavy intellectual exercise. The Church’s liturgy is neither. Indeed, the Church doesn’t really have a liturgy. The liturgy is Jesus Christ himself, God’s own act of beneficence, God’s work for us, God’s gesture of love toward the world God created. In the Church’s liturgies, we participate in the saving events of Christ’s life himself—his life, death, and resurrection—and so we assume a Christlike identity.
Considering the liturgy in this way gives an entirely new response to the age-old question, “why should I go to church if I don’t get anything out of it?” One response is that we don’t go to church to get anything out of it. We go because it is our only proper response to what God has done in love for us. In the liturgy, we meet Christ himself in a particular way that is bound up with our salvation, our being made whole and one with God and each other. The late Roman Catholic liturgist Robert Taft put it this way: “liturgy is not just ritual, not just a cult, not just the worship we offer God. It is first of all God’s coming to us in Christ. Nor is it individual, or narcissistic, for it is also a ministry of each one of us to one another. It is only through our faith that Christ can be visibly present to others in the present dispensation. The commonly heard contemporary complaint, ‘I don’t go to church because I don’t get anything out of it,’ the summit of a selfish narcissism suitably expressive of our age, shows how little this is understood, this gift of Christ only we can bring to one another by the shining forth of the intensity of our faith in the life of the assembly!” [“What Does Liturgy Do? Toward a Soteriology of Liturgical Celebration: Some Theses” in Primary Sources of Liturgical Theology: A Reader, Collegeville, MN: Liturgical Press, 2000, p. 146]. Striking is Taft’s emphasis on the corporate dimension of worship, of our presence to one another, of our ministering to one another in the liturgy. Salvation is a corporate affair, not a solo one.
To that end, as we embark on this Lenten journey, we may wish to reconsider our participation in the liturgy in relation to being made whole—indeed, healed—by God and with an eye toward how the saving event of liturgical participation is essential to the world’s healing. If we are troubled by our age— of heinous government-sanctioned cruelty, of fearful rhetoric, of senseless violence, of immigrants being treated as refuse, of the meek being denied a voice, and so much more—then the liturgy is the place where the Church strives to be herself most fully, where the light of the Gospel shines as a counter to the world’s darkness. The liturgy’s purpose is never educative, but it does have ethical ramifications. In the liturgy, we rehearse what it is like to be a people of peace, of reconciliation, of selflessness, of service, of holiness, even as we struggle to be so outside of the Church. Even when we don’t feel any of those things, our encounter with Christ in the liturgy can’t help but affect us for the salvation of the world, so that the world can become so much better than it currently is.
And this raises a final chilling question: how do some people go to church so much and yet live as if their encounter with Christ in the liturgy has had no impact on their lives? This is where faith comes into the picture. If our eyes are opened by faith, if the liturgy is not a self-serving human creation or a mindless individual affair but, instead, a historically-rooted ordo that shapes us rather than our shaping it, then something about us must surely change over time. That is the hope. That is the prayer.
If you are interested in the connection between our salvation and the liturgy, I encourage you to attend our next online adult formation presentation/discussion on Thursday, March 5, at 7 p.m., which I will be leading. We will talk about the liturgies of Holy Week and how in those very liturgies, through our encounter with Christ crucified and risen, we, with God’s grace, work out our salvation with fear and trembling. Look for the Zoom link in the weekly email.
As we go deeper into the forty days of this Lenten season, I invite you not to underestimate our corporate encounter with God in Christ in the liturgy or its saving effect on the world. If our previous understandings of salvation have traumatized us, then the answer is not to reject any talk of salvation but rather to reframe it. The Church, as Christ’s very body to the world, is essential for the world’s wholeness and healing. I close with more words from Robert Taft: “since we are that Church in whom Christ lives, the liturgy, as the common celebration of our salvation in him, is the most perfect expression and realization of the spirituality of the Church” [“What Does Liturgy Do? Toward a Soteriology of Liturgical Celebration: Some Theses,” p. 147]. May it be so.
Yours in Christ,
Father Kyle