Christmas 2B
Jeremiah 31:7-14
Ephesians 1:3-6,15-19a
Luke 2:41-52
Psalm 84
O God, who wonderfully created, and yet more wonderfully restored, the dignity of human nature: Grant that we may share the divine life of him who humbled himself to share our humanity, your Son Jesus Christ; who lives and reigns with you, in the unity of the Holy Spirit, one God, for ever and ever. Amen.
“Tell me what to preach about this weekend!” I called out
with a smile, as a small group of parishioners began their weekly lay-led Bible
Study on Tuesday. It wasn’t long before
Lanier poked her head in my office.
“Redemption!” she cried out
emphatically. “It’s all over the readings for this week, and none of us has a clue
what it means. The only time that I have ever used that word involved Green
Stamps.”
Many of us are indeed old enough to
remember those S & H Green Stamps. As a child, I was in charge of
collecting them for the family. After every trip to the grocery store or the
gas station, I would carefully lick the small pale green rectangles that we
received with our receipt and paste them into our “redemption book” with great
satisfaction. When the pages were full enough, I would start nagging my mother
to take the booklet to the “redemption center” to trade them in for treasures
like a new blender or a radio. For those
of you who are too young to remember Green Stamps, you probably know about
redemption from your Sky Miles account. You are saving up the number of miles
that you earn with your travel and your credit card purchases and then
redeeming them, or trading them in for a free flight or for a seat upgrade.
When we talk about redemption in
religious terms, then, what on earth are we really saying? We use this
redemption language all the time in church.
Right before I began my sermon, I
prayed to God, as “our strength and our redeemer.”
“I know that my redeemer liveth!” we profess, with Job, in our funeral liturgies.
“The Lord has ransomed Jacob, and has
redeemed him from hands too strong
for him,” proclaims the prophet Jeremiah in our first reading.
“In Jesus Christ, we have redemption through his blood,” writes
the author of our second reading to the Christians in Ephesus.
Jesus has come to earth to redeem all of Creation,” we rejoice over
and over again at Christmastime.
But what does it mean? Is Jesus trading
us in for a new blender, or even for an upgraded human status? If so, where is
the redemption center located? Is Jesus turning in his collection of “salvation
miles” to God? Why would a Son have to pay his Father? Or is it the Devil who runs
the redemption center!? I sure hope not! Is it really blood that we are
collecting for redemption? That’s a gory thought. And how much blood do we need
to collect before the trade? Believe me, theologians have talked themselves
into corners trying to explain how this redemption metaphor works. I think that
it is good language, but we need to relax a little bit first before we can hear
the good news of it.
Take a deep breath. The language of
redemption comes from the Hebrew Scriptures. In the ancient world, you could
redeem a prisoner by paying a ransom to his captors. You could also legally
redeem a piece of land by paying the debt on it. You could even redeem a woman!
This is what happens in the biblical story of Ruth: her husband dies, and she
finds Boaz, one of her husband’s next-of-kin. According to the law at the time,
she convinces him to redeem her, taking her from the life of poverty and
rejection that is the lot of the widow by making her his wife.
When the Hebrew Scriptures talk about
God as redeemer, however, the metaphor moves away from the idea of involving a literal
payment. Without any money exchanging hands, without any legal contracts being
drawn up, God promises over and over to redeem the people of Israel. Take a
look at our lesson from Jeremiah. Redemption here is described as a kind of
liberation for the whole community: the blind, the lame, those who are normally
excluded from the group, pregnant women, children, the weak, people from every
corner of the land, all together. Together they will be lifted from the
suffering that has oppressed them as an exiled and defeated people. God will
release them from “hands too strong” for them to lift from their own hunched
shoulders. And God will set them down to walk on smooth paths along brooks of
water. The redeemed people will dance and sing together. Redemption in Jeremiah
reminds me of singer Bob Marley’s “Songs of freedom, redemption songs.” It has
the impassioned joy of a reggae beat.
I especially like Jeremiah’s image of
the watered garden. “Their life shall be like a watered garden,” the prophet
says of the redeemed community. I can see God bending over our tender shoots with
a watering can in the early morning light. I can imagine God pouring the
life-giving water of love and forgiveness deep into the tangled roots of our
common humanity day after day. I can imagine us growing imperceptibly taller,
faces turned toward the sun, branches intertwined and tendrils touching, more
and more ready to bear fruit. In this image, God is redeeming us not by paying
a lump sum of cash for us, but by tending us, by giving us what we need to grow
together into what we are called to be, day after day.
I can also imagine Jesus as the
bearer of this kind of divine redemption. We human beings are fragile plants,
born today and gone tomorrow, tossed about and ripped by powerful winds too
strong for us to bear. We react to our finitude by fearful attempts at
self-preservation, building glass domes around our flowering beauty like the ones
that St. Exupery’s Little Prince put over his beloved rose. We react to the
powerful winds of our own coercion by taking power over others and sucking away
the lives of the most vulnerable. Living lives of illusion and fear, we cut ourselves
off from the living water of relationship with our Creator.[1] God,
however, comes down into the garden with us in the face of Jesus. Jesus puts
his whole trust in his Father’s love, even in the frightening presence of death.
Jesus loves us more than he loves his own life. With Jesus, there is no protective
glass dome. With Jesus, the life-sapping powers of this world hold no sway. He lives
and dies as a part of the world, submitting to death at the hands of powerful oppressors.
And yet he lives; he rises in glory. In his living, dying, and rising, Jesus rescues
us from the mortally destructive illusions and fears that dominate and oppress
us.[2] Jesus
redeems us from the lie that we live alone in the desert. Jesus waters us with the
life-giving truth of our unbreakable relationship with God. Christian
redemption puts humankind back in right relationship with God. It trades in fear
for love; it trades in coercion for love. It happens not in some river of blood
but in the life-giving garden of the Christian community, all-inclusive
community gathered around their crucified and Risen Lord.
When I used to redeem those Green
Stamps as a kid, I was trading in intangible slips of paper for a tangible
prize. When you redeem your Sky Miles, you redeem invisible numbers for a real-life
vacation! When Jesus redeems us, he is trading in the slippery and intangible suffering
of the human condition for the pure joy of renewed relationship with God and
with one another. The tricky thing is that God’s freeing action involves us in the
intricate process of relationship. We are not inanimate stamps or numbers. If
we don’t come together to pray and sing praises to God—if we don’t come together
to show love to our brothers and sisters on earth—then how will anyone know
that we are redeemed? I look at our half-empty churches and wonder if the
redeeming growth in our well-watered garden is now taking place somewhere in
secret, under the soil. Between the “Nones” who reject organized religion, and
the “Dones” who are bored with it, I wonder where to find the dancing, the radiance,
the joy and merriment, the satisfaction with the bounty of the Lord that are
the signs of a redeemed people? I am haunted by a song that St. James’ Cathedral
in Chicago wrote for their stewardship campaign this fall.[3] To
the tune of “Hello” from the musical “The Book of Mormon,” this clever video
keeps repeating the phrase: “This church will change your life! This church
will change your life!” Oh, that it may be so! Here at St. Thomas, and in all
of our Christian communities. Redemption changes your life. And my life. And
all of our lives together. I can define redemption for you, but it is up to us,
as a community, to make it visible in the world.
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