Christian thinking about salvation has divided itself into two main streams which I like to think of as: "Monkey-hold" salvation or "Cat-hold" salvation. The difference in theological viewpoint is seen in how monkeys and cats protect their young. A mother monkey will sound the alarm when danger lurks. The baby monkeys come running to her and hold tightly to her fur as she runs to safety. A mother cat, on the other hand, picks her kittens up by the nape of the neck and carries them in her mouth out of harm's way. So, which is it? Monkey-hold salvation or Cat-hold salvation? Does God sound the alarm in Jesus leaving us to come running and hold on tightly, or does Christ take us by the nape of the neck and carry us to the throne of grace?

At least in these parables it appears to be a Cat-hold salvation. Jesus pictures God as a shepherd who seeks out a lost lamb and carries it home on his shoulders. Or a homemaker who searches every corner of the house for a lost coin until she finds it and rejoices with her friends. Our salvation rests in the care and keeping of a seeking Savior. The message is simple and clear: We do not have to worry about holding on to God's coat tails for God will not let go of ours.

This is what a biblical doctrine of election is all about. Despite what you may have heard or think, the much maligned doctrine of predestination reads something like this: God is so great and good that the Almighty will not entrust something as important as our salvation to someone as unreliable as we. Rather, God entrusts it only to divine care and keeping. The focal point of the Old Testament is the Exodus in which the Hebrew slaves were rescued from their bondage in Egypt. All the credit for their deliverance is given to God who "heard their groaning, and remembered his covenant with Abraham (Exodus 2:24)." In the New Testament, deliverance from sin and death is wrought by Christ. Paul, therefore, his faith fixed firmly on Christ - can boast, "If God be for us, who is against us (Romans 8:31)?"

Predestination is credited to John Calvin, that dour reformer of Geneva. But the idea that God seeks out sinners and takes full responsibility for their salvation did not originate with him. Thomas Aquinas writes of the doctrine. Indeed, long before Calvin was a gleam in his father's eye, Augustine spoke of our election to salvation, as did also the apostle Paul. The doctrine, has of course, raised many questions for logically thinking believers. Yet to deny it, is to deny the biblical God who seeks us out and rescues us from slavery, sin and death. The Negro spiritual has it right, "He's got the whole world in his hands, he's got you and me brother, in his hands!"

To think that our eternal salvation rests with the firmness of our grip on God's coat tails can only give rise to the greatest anxiety. In our saner moments of reflection we know that our grip is weak and unpredictable. Paul speaks for all of us when he cries out in anguish, "I do not do the good I want, but the evil I do not want is what I do. Wretched man that I am! Who will deliver me from this ... death (Romans 7:19, 24)?" Like a tightrope walker balancing precariously over the abyss, we fear falling and dare not look down. We concentrate so hard on each step that we miss the scenery. There is no good news if our eternal salvation depends upon our grasp of God.

But then the punch line: "Thanks be to God who gives us the victory through our Lord Jesus Christ (1 Corinthians 15:57)." Christ is a seeking Savior! He does not wait for us to come to him!

Dietrich Bonhoeffer speaks of this Savior as God's birthday wish come true. The Holy One's most burning desire was not to remain in heaven with the adoring angels where the latest press clippings and heavenly polls all confirmed the Sovereign's popularity. No, God's birthday wish was to be in and with the world. And, it must be noted, not a world which was sanitized for the divine visitation. There were no secret service agents to "check it out" and make the visit safe. And, clearly, there was no bulletproof limousine to take the expectant couple to the barn. Not a world of antiseptic splendor offering a "red carpet" welcome for prestigious potentates. It was the world you and I see every evening on the nightly news; a world of scandal and dirt, common laborers and corrupt government officials. Yet that is the world God wanted to be with because it beat staying in heaven with all those angels. And his name will be called "Emmanuel," Matthew insists, that is, God with us.

At the root of our word "incarnation" lies the word, "carnal," which the dictionary defines: "In or of the flesh; bodily; material or worldly, not spiritual; having to do with or preoccupied with bodily or sexual pleasures; sensual or sexual." Jesus is God incarnate, that is to say, Jesus is God in carnal form. God's grace is a worldly grace. It is to be understood carnally because that is how it comes to us.

The church has always had trouble accepting that fact. In the early creeds of the church, for example, God was spoken of as having no body, parts or passions. It was offensive to think of a Supreme Being in those terms. Spiritual? Yes! And certainly, heavenly! But theologians have been embarrassed by the frank anthropomorphism of the Old Testament which speaks of God using a body to walk in the garden, smell the incense, and look at rainbows (Genesis 3:8; 8:21; 9:16).

Christian art in the Middle Ages pictured Jesus as a man with a halo adorning his head, all of which obscured the fact that he could command the allegiance of other men, and was physically attractive to women who, the record indicates, flocked around him during his ministry. The church has never had any trouble affirming Jesus as the Son of God with connections in heavenly places, but it has had great difficulty affirming him as a man of the earth, the Son of Man, a title which completely dropped out of use in the early Christian community. Church officials are usually disturbed if ministerial candidates do not confess Jesus as the Son of God, the second person of the Trinity, but seem to care less about insuring the confession that he is the Son of Man.

Historically, this desire to keep Jesus' feet from touching the earth has been labeled the "Docetic heresy." Docetism comes from the Greek word, dokeo, which means, "it seems." The heresy believed that Jesus only seemed to be human. In reality, he was eternally divine and had only temporarily assumed a human disguise in order to masquerade among us.

So prevalent was the Docetic heresy in the early church that one of the reasons for the formulation of the Apostles' Creed was to combat its influence. When the Creed affirms that Jesus was, "... born of a virgin, suffered under Pontius Pilate, was crucified, dead, and buried. He descended into hell ...;" it is attempting to underline with the boldest strokes possible his true worldly humanity: he was born, he hurt, he died, he really was one of us. No masquerade. No pretense. No ifs, ands, or buts about it! He really entered into the human condition to seek and to save the lost.

To say that "God was in Christ reconciling the world to himself (2 Corinthians 5:19)," has less to do with the forgiveness of our sins than with the fact that Jesus did not assume a superior stance with regard to a sin-filled world. Rather, he truly emptied himself and became one of us. "... though he was in the form of God, (he) did not count equality with God a thing to be grasped, but emptied himself, taking the form of a servant, being born in the likeness of men ... he humbled himself and became obedient unto death, even death on a cross (Philippians 2:6-8)."

The descending order from greatness to humility is significant in Paul's letter. Though Jesus was equal with God, he did not count that equality as something to be guarded. Instead he emptied himself, taking on human form. But not just any human form. It was the form of a servant; a servant who was willing to be obedient even unto death. And not just any death! Certainly not the peaceful death of old age after a full life surrounded by admirers. Death on a cross; the ignominious death of a common criminal, deserted and alone. Paul's conclusion is clear: Jesus had no intention of pulling rank. He took off his clerical collar and risked getting decked in the brawl. He risked taking his lumps with the rest of us and in so doing tore down the temple curtain which separated the Holy of Holies from the courts of the profane (cf. Mark 15:38).

Once when flying down to see Grandma, my little daughter asked, as the plane climbed above the cloud castles and broke into radiant sunlight, "Is God up here?" It is a child's question born of a child's understanding of God. Yet many adults never outgrow the conception of God as the Old Man in the sky. When the first Russian cosmonaut returned from his flight into space he tauntingly boasted that he found no trace of God up there. While it is true most thinking Christians would not expect to look for God up - or even out - there, the fact remains that our concept of God presupposes the Holy One is, in one way or another, removed from us and the scenes of our scandalous endeavors.

Luke's gospel offers us no illusions about the waiting world into which Jesus was thrust. Luke begins his gospel by speaking disparagingly of "those days." Those days of Roman rule and oppression, those days of high taxation and hard times, those days when government corruption and the high cost of living were on everyone's mind as they conversed in the market place. Those days when Jewish zealots (that is, terrorists) were plotting the overthrow of the government and hijacking caravans. Those days when life was cheap and public executions - crucifixion-style - were hardly noticed. In those days when the lame and the blind had resigned themselves to their careers of begging, like blind Bartimaeus sitting beside the dusty road going up from Jericho to Jerusalem; when tax collectors like Matthew and Zacchaeus had long since learned that the way to get ahead was to play the game and had willingly sold their souls to the system in order to make a living. In those days when frustrated fishermen like Simon and his brother, Andrew, had come to the bleak conclusion that the most life could offer them was another day at the nets in their father's boat. In those days, a decree went out from Caesar Augustus that all the world should be enrolled and taxed and taxed and taxed.

Now it is precisely at this point that the miracle of the gospel is seen. The claim our faith makes is that it was in a hick town, in those days, in such a place, that the Savior was born, and the new creation of God's kingdom was established. The Savior seeks us, not in the temple courts of the sacred and the sanctified, but in the scandalous world; secular and sinful. The remarkable words of the prophet come to mind, who in announcing the Messianic reign, promised, "... waters shall break forth in the wilderness, and streams in the desert (Isaiah 35:6)." The location of the springs of water and the streams of grace is unimportant. They will break forth in the most unlikely places: the desert wilderness, or in Bethlehem, in "those days."

In Arthur Miller's poignant play, Death Of A Salesman, the wife of Willie Loman talks with her son about the father with whom he has become disenchanted. She tries to explain about the man she loves.

"I don't say he's a great man. Willie Loman never made a lot of money. His name was never in the paper. He's not the finest character that ever lived. But, he's a human being, and a terrible thing is happening to him. So attention must be paid. He's not to be allowed to fall in his grave like an old dog. Attention, attention must finally be paid to such a person."8

Jesus is God's word that attention has been paid to such a person. God may have other words for other worlds, but his word for this world is "Jesus Christ." It may be true that "Nobody knows the trouble I've seen, nobody knows but Jesus." But he does know. He has been to the front and seen combat. He is Emmanuel - God with us - and Emmanuel is a God who knows what it means to be vulnerable, weak, defenseless. Emmanuel is a God who has joined the troops as a foot soldier slugging it out in the trenches; born in a barn as a helpless babe with the hint of scandal about him and died on the cross a sinner's punishment. If the God of grace be for us, who or what indeed! can be against us. We may be crushed, but we are not destroyed. We may be discouraged, but we are not left in despair. Bereaved, but not reduced to helplessness.

What does it mean to have the Savior seek us and save us? It means our eternal destiny has been decided. Our salvation rests securely in God's care and keeping. We can relax, lift our heads to laugh and sing, and enjoy the scenery.

James Stewart, professor of New Testament studies at the University of Edinburgh, was fond of saying, "Gentleman and ladies, do you realize that one day we will stand in the presence of the angels? And they will gaze in wonder at us and say, 'My, how like Jesus they are!' "

We have God's word on it and that Word has become flesh. "I will not leave you desolate;" Jesus says, "I will come to you ... because I live, you will live also. In that day you will know that I am in my Father, and you are in me, and I in you (John 14:18-20)." Christ is our guarantee.

Nevertheless, though the new being has been promised, its fulfillment only comes in the "fullness of time." None of us was born suddenly. Our parents may have paced the floor but there was no way to hurry the pregnancy along. Our birth came in God's good time. Similarly, Christ has been conceived within each of us as believers and his birth assured. Still there is no way to hurry the pregnancy along. We can only wait for the birth to come in due time when all will be able to see and admire God's handiwork. Indeed, others may see it long before we are aware of it. The advent of the new being always comes unexpectedly and usually catches us by surprise.

"Nothing is more surprising," says Paul Tillich, "than the rise of the new within ourselves. We do not foresee or observe its growth. We do not try to produce it by the strength of our will, by the power of our emotion, or by the clarity of our intellect. On the contrary, we feel that by trying to produce it we prevent its coming. By trying, we would produce the old in the power of the old, but not the new in the power of the new. The new being is being born in us, just when we least believe in it. It appears in remote corners of our souls which we have neglected for a long time. It opens up deep levels of our personality which had been shut out by old decisions and old exclusions. It shows a way where there was no way before."9

When the anguished cry, "O wretched person that I am. Who will deliver me from this bondage to death?" has been wrenched from us and we have been forced to kneel mutely before our own inadequacies, trusting the promises of the Savior becomes the only option left to us. Just at the time when it seems as though nothing is happening, when we are discouraged and impatient, just at that time we need to read again these simple stories and discipline ourselves to live as though the leaven is working in the loaf; the new life is being created. Read them again and again, and yet again, because they remind us of the central fact of our existence. We have been sought and found by our Savior!