• "Never too Late to be Saved... or Lost"
• Sermon for Septuagesima
• January 23, 2005
• The Reverend Stephen C. Scarlett

One commentator observed that Septuagesima has a gospel (Matthew 20:1f, BCP 119) that says it is never too late to be saved and an epistle (1 Corinthians 9:24, BCP 119) that says it is never too late to be lost.

The laborers hired at the eleventh hour receive the full wage, which represents salvation. This illustrates that salvation is a gift from God. It is not a wage that we earn. But, in the epistle, St. Paul counsels us to practice discipline. He says that he disciplined his body lest he should be disqualified from the race. This implies that there is work to be done and some danger of not being saved.

We reconcile the two ideas by putting them in their proper sequence. There is nothing we can do to be saved-except repent and believe and receive the free gift. Should we do good works all of our lives, their merits would not earn us heaven. And should the non-believer who sins all of his life experience genuine repentance at the end, he will be saved.

We need discipline, we need to labor, not to earn something we do not have, but to hold on to what we received. The Bible teaches us that the experience of salvation is followed by a wilderness of testing. Israel was saved from slavery in Egypt by God's grace. The people did not do a thing to work their way out of Pharaoh's grasp. The blood of the Lamb kept the angel of death at bay and the power of God parted the Red Sea waters. The wilderness challenge for Israel after the Exodus was to hold on to what they received by grace, to stay connected to the God who saved them.

We did not do anything to save ourselves. God saved us by the death of his Son and the washing of regeneration through the Holy Spirit (Titus 3:5). The challenge of the Christian life is to hold on to the gift, to remain faithful to our calling. For we have enemies-the world, the flesh and the devil-who want us to surrender the gift. This is why we pray in baptism that we "may have power and strength to have victory, and to triumph, against the devil, the world, and the flesh" (BCP 278).

We are saved by grace through faith. This is the ongoing pattern of the Christian life. We are saved not only by a one time past experience of grace. We are continually saved from temptation and unfaithfulness by God's grace, which we experience through the disciplines of the Christian life. Thus, the disciplines of the Christian life are not our labor added to God's grace; the disciplines of the Christian life are the way we continue to receive the grace we need to be faithful.

What are the disciplines of the Christian life? Being present each Sunday to worship God and receive the grace of the sacrament. Having daily habits of Scripture reading and prayer. Practicing good works. Being accountable to other members of the church so that we are not deceived by our personal feelings and opinions. Practicing stewardship and generosity to avoid covetousness. Fasting, abstaining at times from lawful things to exercise our spiritual muscles and develop self-control.

To practice discipline is to order our life in the light of the spiritual battle just as an athlete orders his life in the light of the contest; to practice discipline is to avail ourselves of all the available means of grace so that we might hold fast to the gift of life, persevere to the end and be saved.

The Christian who does not practice spiritual disciplines, who says, "All I need to do is believe" is generally the one whose words of faith are not evidenced by his deeds. He struggles more because he does not live in the grace by which he began the Christian life. He may, indeed, be finally saved but, as St. Paul says, only "as through fire" (1 Corinthians 3:15).

There is also the opposite error. There are many religious people who believe that their religious efforts somehow make them righteous-or at least make them more righteous than others. This kind of person says, "Since we must work hard to enter the kingdom, I will, indeed, work hard and earn my way into heaven." One who falls into this error needs take a fresh look at the cross and confess, with Isaiah that "all our righteousnesses are like filthy rags" (64:6).

We need to keep the free gift and the need for discipline in the proper order. Our liturgical experience helps us to do this-if we rightly understand it. Each week we come to the altar of God as sinners to receive the free gift. We come having sinned in thought word and deed, provoking most justly God's wrath; we come unworthy even to gather up the crumbs under God's table. And, in spite of ourselves, Christ is always there, he is always Really Present, to forgive, cleanse, feed and strengthen us.

As we receive the gift anew, we renew our commitment to discipline. We see more clearly what we need to avoid and we have a renewed desire to pray, to hold on to the gift we have received. We come to see more clearly that discipline is the consequence of the gift and never the cause of it. We will also inevitably fall short of perfect adherence to our disciplines and this will remind us, in turn, that we are saved by grace and not by what we do.

As we progress in the life of faith, we come to realize that discipline is for our own benefit. We need habits of prayer, not to chalk up brownie points for heaven, but because we are in habitual need of Christ. We need to fast, not because our abstinence is meritorious, but because we need to develop the self-control that comes from the practice of fasting-or else we will not be able to enjoy things because we will be controlled by our desires. As we come to see that discipline is for our benefit and is the consequence of the gift, we come to practice the disciplines of the Christian life from the heart rather than from a sense of duty or guilt.

Today is the first of three pre-Lenten Sundays. Today we turn our eyes away from the beginning of the Gospel, Christ's birth and revelation, and begin to look towards the end of the Gospel, which is the Cross and Resurrection. Pre-Lent is two-and-a-half weeks to think about where we are in our life of faith and how we will use the coming Lenten fast to our spiritual profit.

We begin our pilgrimage to Easter by remembering that salvation is a gift freely given by God. As Revelation says, "The Spirit and the bride say, Come! ...whoever desires, let him take the water of life freely" (22:17 NKJV). And we begin our pilgrimage by remembering that we need to practice discipline; we need to run the race in such a way that the gift we have received will come to fruition in the crown of eternal life.