hosanna.

Salvation is a curious thing. In my recent backlash against what I would consider “American pop-Christianity” it seems that I’ve found it hard to come down hard on much of anything, theologically speaking. I want to say that I’m “working out my faith in fear and trembling,” but really I feel like I’m desperately drifting through things trying to find something that will stir up something in my soul.

Anything.

As I was sitting in church today I had a moment where I was fully aware of my depravity. Not in a way that would rend my heart and cause me to seek repentance, but in a way that made me realize how much I was completely complacent and utterly unresponsive.

Being Easter, the Sunday morning service was full of anthems of the “Hosanna” variety. (Which leads me to the subject of salvation.) Hosanna means to save, to rescue. Salvation means quite literally to heal, to intervene in order to rescue. It’s redemptive. It’s healing. It’s completing.

And I think back to every church camp and every Sunday morning altar call and I think about those televangelists who talk so much about “salvation” and imply it means simply to keep us from hell. But really, it’s so much more. To the Jews on that Passion Sunday their cry was that their king would come and rescue them, intervene and be just and make all things right.

And then I look at my life and wonder if it is I’ve been redeemed. If I’ve been restored.

I certainly don’t feel complete. I don’t feel like a person who’s been healed.

And some of this is my complacency, I’m sure. And some of it is my tendency to be guarded and to over-think and feel undeserving of any good thing. To be so humble as to deny myself a gift of mercy is not a virtue; rather it is only keeping me from experiencing what I can only think to describe as a tender heart.

And like it was with the Jews, salvation does not come to me the way I think it should. Or when. Or look like how I think it should look. And sometimes I miss it entirely. Continually.

So I’ve sat here and emphatically rejected it. All of it. And I’ve let things go so far that I don’t even feel that emptiness anymore. I don’t even feel the guilt. I don’t feel the rejection. I don’t wonder. Instead I’ve been unfaithful. I’ve tried to maintain something on the outside that looks like it’s pristine and pure, when in fact what I’ve done is allowed the garden of my inner life to become so over-run with weeds that I’ve forgotten what precious things the soil could produce.

Is there mercy for one like this?
Oh, to breathe again the freshness of peace,
to drink deeply of grace.

Is there hope for a dissonant daughter?
Lord, come quickly to save me.