On February 4, Dr. Jim Boyd's mother, LoDerah Boyd, passed away. Until three years ago, she lived all of her life in Snyder, Texas, where she was a life-long member of the First Baptist Church. Since the current staff of that church wasn't as familiar with his mom, Jim and the family decided to conduct the funeral service themselves. They provided the music and the eulogy and, I'm told, it was a beautiful remembrance of their mom, grand-mom and great-grand-mom.

Jim and Jan Boyd's daughter, Catherine, is married to Timothy Wood. They have four children, with an almost-Easter fifth on the way. The youngest of their children is two-year-old Isaiah. As the service concluded and the family prepared to leave for the cemetery, two-year-old Isaiah stopped by the open casket one more time, looked at his great-grandmother and said, "Night, night, Gran-gran."

This is the season of Lent. Lent, on the Christian calendar, is the forty weekdays between Ash Wednesday and Easter. Christians who celebrate the seasons of the church year know Lent to be a time for deep self-reflection, about sin and sorrow for sin and even sorrow for the impact of sin on our world, death itself.

It won't be difficult for the Boyds to feel a deeper connection to Lent this year. The departure of their beloved LoDerah is a reminder that we live in a broken world, where death still has a say and in which we live in great anticipation of another Day. That Day when, after she's had what will almost certainly seem like the briefest nap she's ever taken, LoDerah will hear the voice of Jesus whispering in her ear, "Wake up, Gran-gran. Wake up! It's time to rise again!"

Lent is a poignant, sometimes very poignant, reminder that we live in the meantime, between our physical birth and the death we all know is coming and the Day when we will all hear the voice of Jesus saying, "Wake up! It's time to rise again!" In the meantime, we live in a fallen, broken world, with visible, tragic, sometimes even graphic evidence all around that death still has a voice. Oddly enough, it is in the meantime, during this time of sometimes profound sadness, loneliness and grief that we discover the true meaning of our salvation.

It must have been quite a ride for Jesus. Listen to the way Luke recorded the trip in his gospel diary. "Jesus, full of the Holy Spirit, returned from the Jordan and was led by the Spirit in the wilderness, where for forty days he was tempted by the devil." In the chapter of Luke's gospel just preceding this one, the Spirit had blessed Jesus at his baptism. It wasn't just any baptism. A dove landed on Jesus" shoulder and Jesus also heard the voice of his heavenly Father tell him how pleased he was with his son. What a powerful moment! Baptized, blessed by his father, tangible evidence he's doing the right thing and them, wham! The same Spirit that blessed him in the baptismal waters took him to the wilderness. Full of the Holy Spirit, we're told, at the pinnacle of his spiritual life up until that moment, then Jesus gets the greatest test of his life up until then.

Though this isn't all the wilderness experience of Jesus teaches us, it certainly teaches this: Those who choose to follow the Lord in baptism and who await their final resurrection will discover that salvation is about so much more than just going to heaven after you die. Salvation also means experiencing the presence of God with you in moments when you may think you're about to die or you just wish you could die.

Salvation is the presence of the living God with us, wherever we are! As the Psalmist said of God's "saved" ones, "I will be with them in trouble, I will rescue them and honor them. With long life I will satisfy them, and show them my salvation." The next time you are in the middle of the biggest mess of your life, whether you caused the mess yourself or, as in Jesus" case, someone else brought it on or, most especially, when you don't know who's responsible but all you do know is that it stinks, you might want to recall these two little verses. Salvation is so much more than deliverance from an eternal hell after we die. It is also deliverance from the living hell of abject loneliness while we are living now.

One of the most difficult things about our experience of ministering to orphans the last two years in Latvia was in having to leave them after loving them. As I shared in my Pastor's column this past week ("Orphan Shadows," February 22, 2007), these children who had so little and asked for not much more than to be held, climbed all over us and then into our hearts. Most of them have no human family they can call their own and sleep in borrowed beds and wear borrowed clothing. When we had to leave them at the end of the week, though we had done much good, it felt like we were abandoning them. The only way I can deal with all of that is in remembering that wherever there is an orphan or a widow God is there, too. Whatever they are, they are not alone. Indeed, I'm more convinced all the time that the poor and the lonely experience the presence of God in ways I cannot know.

Is it possible that it is our failure to appreciate this presence of God with broken humanity as an expression of his salvation that is at the root of one of the church's greatest dilemmas? Those who research such things tell us that eighty to eighty-five or even ninety percent of all churches in the United States are either plateaued or in decline. May I think out loud with you this morning, and even ask a tough Lenten question? Is it possible that local churches (and by that I mean the local, human expression of the universal body of Christ) are dying in many places not because of all the reasons we tend to associate with dying churches, like age or location or cultural shifts, that kind of thing, but because of how most Christians so narrowly define salvation?

I speak as a Baptist because that has pretty much been my exclusive local church experience. Baptists have long been able to quote from Romans 10:9-10. "If you confess with your lips that Jesus is Lord and believe in your heart that God raised him from the dead, you will be saved. For one believes with the heart and so is justified, and one confesses with the mouth and so is saved." Yet, can anyone quote from Luke 4:1? "Jesus, full of the Holy Spirit, returned from the Jordan and was led by the Spirit in the wilderness." Are not both scriptures expressions of the total experience of salvation, not just deliverance from eternal hell but also evidence of God's presence with his children in the real time moment?

If your definition of salvation is exclusively limited to Romans 10:9, "if you confess with your lips that Jesus is Lord and believe in your heart that God raised him from the dead, you will be saved," then that tends to lead to a too narrow view of salvation that is something like this: If we have our ticket punched, and, especially as Baptists, if we believe once-ticketed, always-ticketed, we tend to lose concern for those who have yet to board the train because we know that we're OK, no matter what.

How is it that fewer and fewer seem to want on this train, on which we regularly feast at the Lord's Table of grace and mercy? Is it because we're not yelling it loudly enough? Or, is it because they don't believe us when we tell them what we believe to be the best news, that after you die, you don't have to go to hell, because we seem so indifferent to the hell they live in now? What good news is it to someone about what will happen to them in eternity future if there is no good news for today?

What about them the good news for today? The answer is in the wilderness where we find Jesus, just after his baptism. It is evidence of the living presence of God with his people now, which is salvation, too. If we want the world to believe us, we're going to have to get off of the train, and like the Spirit did with Jesus, go be with people in the darkest moments of their lives.

The day before she died, Isaiah climbed into the hospital bed with his great-grandmother and just laid there. Can we do that? Can we climb into the bed of suffering in which most of the world languishes and just be present with them in it?

Erwin McManus is a Los Angeles pastor, kind of. His church moves around, mostly to meet in nightclubs, that kind of thing. He said some words that have troubled my tendency to think of salvation as just having my ticket punched. "My job isn't to feed the Christians, so they can feed the sheep. My job is to make them hungry so they can feed themselves. The church isn't here for us. We are the church and we're here for the world" (Norman Jameson, "California pastor challenges colleagues to move beyond "church" to unbelievers," Associated Baptist Press, February 19, 2007).

The reason most churches are dying, in my opinion, is because they don't believe that. Do we? Do you? If so, what is your personal wilderness, the place where you go to befriend the lonely?

Why did the Spirit lead Jesus into the wilderness? Did Jesus, still on a baptismal high, still wet behind the ears, if you will, have something yet to learn? Something about how he would live the next three years showing people, by lying down with them in their suffering even at the expense of utter humiliation, that salvation was the presence of God in the world, not just our deliverance from it?

I am far more comfortable with people who can have this earthly conversation than I am with those whose only concern is heaven after we die. I've also just said more than I have time or nerve to explain.

"Night, night, Gran-gran," Isaiah said. "Wake up, Gran-gran," Jesus will someday say. The Boyds are now experiencing the salvation of God that only comes in the wilderness, in the meantime of life right now. In light of all that, may I ask you a very personal question?

Are you saved?