"Redemption" by Marie Alford-Harkey, M.Div.

Sermon for Proper 5C
1 Kings 17:17-24; Galatians 1:11-24; Luke 7:11-17
Trinity Episcopal Church, Hartford, CT
June 9, 2013
Marie Alford-Harkey

On the Wednesday after the Boston Marathon bombings, I was scheduled to preach at Boston University. I was actually scheduled to lead a series of event over two days, Tuesday and Wednesday.

My contact at BU called me on Monday, the day of the bombings, to say she didn’t know if the school would be open on Tuesday. I said no problem. Just let me know. She called me later on Monday to tell me that the school would be open and that they were making some changes to Wednesday’s worship. “Thank God,” I thought. Thank God that I won’t be responsible for finding a word to preach into this horror.

I bet you know what’s coming. She called me late Monday night to tell me that the organizers still wanted me to preach and to go ahead and address the topic I had come to speak about.

Right.

I arrived on Tuesday and delivered my guest lecture in a theology class, and it went very well. Then I had some free time to wander the city and the campus of BU. And the more I walked, the more I was certain that I couldn’t deliver the sermon I had prepared for the next day.

But what was there to say? What was there to say in the midst of death and blood, and bodies broken? In the face of such an evil act, what on earth was there to say to a community right there in the heart of it.

I prayed. And what came to me seems so simple. It is the bedrock of our Christian faith: Our God can redeem anything.

It sounds like a platitude, doesn’t it? And it brushes right up against the kind of theology that claims that God wills for bad things to happen to show us God’s power to make it better or to test us, or to show God’s displeasure.

But that is not what it means to say that our God can redeem anything. Quite the contrary. What it means to say that God can redeem anything is that God comes right down into the muck and mire and mess that we humans create – to change it.

That is what these resurrection stories represent: a divine intervention in the midst of oppression, scarcity, and fear. They represent the hand of God, coming in to meet us where we are.

You see, widows, whether in Jesus’ day or in Elijah’s day generally had no means of support. In those patriarchal systems, women were property. Without a husband, they relied on their sons and without a son or a protector, they were reduced to abject poverty and generally sustained themselves by begging.

But for these two widows, in Zarepheth and in Nain, God entered into the injustice of this system with hope and life. Through Elijah and through Jesus, these women were given the gift of the resurrection of their sons. And the system that would have reduced them to beggars was subverted.

What it means to say that our God can redeem anything is to say that resurrections and opportunities for new life are always present, because our God is always present.

Even in the lives of people who seem to be beyond redemption, we learn that God can redeem anything.  

The apostle Paul, who is almost single-handedly responsible for the spread of Christianity spent his early years “violently persecuting the church of God and trying to destroy it.” Saul (as he was known in those days) was present at the stoning of Stephen and then, we are told in the Acts of the Apostles, “was ravaging the church by entering house after house and dragging people off to prison.”

And then God confronts Saul on the road to Damascus, and changes his very name. And the new Paul becomes the apostle who spreads the faith to the gentiles, “proclaiming the faith that he once tried to destroy, causing believers to glorify God.”

God’s redemption always makes itself known through love. I know about that, firsthand. I’ll bet most of us do.

One of the ways to learn about God’s love and redemption is to be brought low by one’s own pride. I used to think that the “dark night of the soul” that John of the Cross speaks of is the suffering we endure at the hands of others. And then I had a very big, very public failing in the close-knit community of my seminary. And I realized that I was experiencing the darkest night of my own soul because I had caused my own downfall. And in the midst of that very public failing, I learned the most important lesson of my life

I learned that people loved me. With my failings and shortcomings staring them in the face, people loved me. And if people loved me, I reasoned, then surely God must love me. I didn’t have to be perfect. God just loved me.

It’s my own personal resurrection story. God came and met me in the pit of my own pride and despair – through the people around me – and I was resurrected. Because God can redeem anything and anyone. Even me – full of pride and brought shatteringly low in front of those I cared about most. God proved to me through the love of other people that joy really does come in the morning.  

Sometimes we ourselves are responsible for pain and suffering. Sin and brokenness separate us from God and from each other. We are arrogant, prideful, sarcastic, petty, stingy. We make idols of accomplishment, perfection, status. We are by turns competitive and fearful and we live out of a place of scarcity. We are so very, very human and broken. And whether we mean to or not, we participate in human, broken systems of oppression that cause death around the world – we are human and our failings are too numerous to count.

And yet we humans are also capable of bringing about redemption in the midst of our own pain.

Stories of redemption have been in the news lately. I heard about the young woman who lost both her legs in the Boston Marathon bombings. She was the last one to get out of the hospital. She said she couldn’t wait to get back to the elementary school where she taught to see her kids graduate. She said she sent them a video so they could get used to her new body. She said she can’t wait to get back to teaching next year.

Redemption is the families of the children who died in Newtown who are now advocating in Hartford and Washington for sensible gun control. They are reaching beyond their own pain to try to make the world better for other children.

And God’s redemption is this. I just learned about the Sandy Ground Project on the news. Have you heard about this? The New Jersey State Firefighter Mutual Benevolent Association went to Mississippi 7 years ago, after Katrina, and built playgrounds for children.

And so, After Newtown, these firefighters decided that a fitting way to help rebuild coastal communities that had been ravaged by Sandy would be to build 26 playgrounds in honor and celebration of the lives of the victims of the Sandy Hook shootings. They call it the Sandy Ground Project: Where Angels Play.

They contacted the families of each of the Newtown victims and asked if they could build a playground celebrating the life of their child.

I heard about it because the groundbreaking for the fourth playground, celebrating the life of Dylan Hockley, was on Friday, in Westport where I work. Dylan’s playground will feature the color purple, and butterflies – two things his Mom says Dylan loved. She thinks it’s a wonderful memorial to her son – a place where children and families can come and be happy.

Our God can redeem anything – and our God uses us – people who have experienced both loss and redemption, to redeem others.

I want end by sharing with you a poem by Jan Richardson that speaks to the pain of death, and the awesome responsibility of participating in redemption.

Blessing for the Raising of the Dead