Redemption

Jeremiah 18

Redemption. It’s a big word. It’s a word that I think still has some secular currency…probably most people outside the church would have a vague idea if you said to them ‘how can this mess be redeemed?’ that you’d be referring to restoring, fixing, healing or making right. In the church we have unfortunately narrowed the concept of redemption by fixing it exclusively to a one off act of Christ on the cross, rescuing sinners. But in this season of Creationtide, I’d like to dwell with the image of God as the one whose every action in relation to the world is a creative act. And in particular, to think about what the word ‘redemption’ might mean, when seen as a creative process that underpins every moment of human history, rather than a one-off event.

‘The word that came to Jeremiah from the Lord: “Come, go down to the potter’s house, and there I will let you hear my words.” So I went down to the potter’s house, and there he was working at his wheel. The vessel he was making of clay was spoiled in the potter’s hand, and he reworked it into another vessel, as seemed good to him.’

These verses flow into a discourse on God’s sovereignty…the principle that God can raise up and cast down nations based on their response to God. But just in this little image, there is a seed of an idea that I think begins with God’s creative acts in Genesis, and finds its fullness in Christ. And that is, that God is an artist, a creator, who ‘re-works’ things until they give expression to the original vision, or even something better than the original vision. God…fully present at each moment, to each moment, did not create the world and step back, but has her hands on the potter’s wheel at all times, moulding new things, but also re-moulding, fixing, restoring…even making whole new creations where the previous ones get damaged.

Understood in this context, “redemption” is, in essence, God bringing good out of all things, renewing those things that are marred, and re-creating those things that are broken. I am reminded of something Derek said as he reflected on his Lord’s Prayer artwork…that the idea of God’s will being done on earth as in heaven has something to do with the incredible perseverance of good, and of the weaving of things into good, throughout the whole of human history. The unflagging presence of God influencing even horror and evil to yield, in time…maybe even thousands of years later…something good and whole. This redemption process is ongoing and vast, it includes all things. And it’s beyond the smallness of a human life – most of us probably will never see or comprehend just how our lives participate in the process by which the Creative Creator God is breathing wholeness into creation through the flow of human history.

I have a saying that I’m fond of…that nothing is wasted. People often feel that when they’ve made great mistakes, or where they’ve been incapacitated in some way through a chunk of their lives, that the time has been ‘lost’ and ‘wasted.’ And, if we have only a sense of our life measured in human terms and human success, maybe it can be seen like that. But if we believe that God has ‘creative hands’, and that the will of God is to redeem – to make good and whole – then we can trust that everything that happens to us, even our suffering, is being renewed. And, this renewal is taking place on a far bigger canvas than we are used to contemplating. Because when we consider our lives we tend to consider them in isolation. When God creatively redeems, our influence on others and what they become by means of us is included in the mix.

I’ve been reading a novel recently, the last in a series by Susan Howatch on the Church of England from the 30s to the 60s in Britain. In it there’s a scene where a Bishop, whose life is reeling out of control, visits an artist in her studio. Here is an excerpt from their conversation:

Bishop: ‘Theologians don’t believe God withdrew from the world after the first creative blast and forgot about it.’

Artist: ‘Of course he couldn’t forget! No creator can forget! If the blast-off’s successful you’re hooked, and once you’re hooked you’re inside the work as well as outside it, it’s part of you, you’re welded to it, you’re enslaved, and that’s why it’s such bloody hell when things go adrift. But no matter how much the mess and distortion make you want to despair, you can’t abandon the work because you’re chained to the bloody thing, it’s absolutely woven into your soul and you know you can never rest until you’ve brought truth out of all the distortion and beauty out of all the mess – but it’s agony, agony, agony – while simultaneously being the most wonderful and rewarding experience in the world – and that’s the creative process which so few people understand. It involves an indestructible sort of fidelity, an insane sort of hope, an indescribable sort of …well, it’s love, isn’t it? There’s no other word for it. You love the work and you suffer with it and always – always – you’re slaving away against all the odds to make everything come right.’

Bishop ‘And when the work’s finally finished…does every step of the creation make sense? All the pain and slog and waste and mess – how do you reconcile yourself to that?

Artist ‘ Every step I take – every bit of clay I ever touch – they’re all there in the final work. If they hadn’t happened, then this - ‘ She gestured to the sculpture ‘ - wouldn’t exist…So in the end every major disaster, every tiny error, every wrong turning, every fragment of discarded clay – everything has meaning. I give it meaning. I reuse, reshape, recast all that goes wrong so that in the end nothing is wasted and nothing is without significance and nothing ceases to be precious to me.’

If this vision of God as an artist continually in process to bring beauty out of difficulty is true, then what might it mean for us? I’ve been trying to apply it to our recent struggles here at Cityside, knowing how to respond to the challenges PJ has brought to us. What is redemption for PJ, what does hope look like in his life?

In reflecting on the situation in the past few days, I have come to realise that my involvement with PJ over the past many years has been skewed toward the ‘problems’ rather than the ‘person’. That is, I’ve tried to be more of a social worker than a pastor. I have erred toward the practical, because that is where I thought I could ‘do something’ and so resolve my own need to feel like I was acting with Christian responsibility. I have thought that ‘helping’ PJ has been about working with him on the level of his addictions, and his homelessness, and his inability to fit in our social structures. But there are other agencies out there that specialise in those things, and PJ has exhausted most of them. The options for him in terms of helping him into a ‘normal life’ are few, possibly none. I have to face the reality that he may die on the street. And that I will be one of hundreds who were unable to prevent that reality. That is, in human terms, I have lost hope for PJ.

But as a pastor, my questions should be different. They include the social and physical, yes. The basics of food and drink and shelter are part of spiritual reality. But maybe as a church, it’s not our job to fulfil social agency roles, but to be the church – that is to be alongside, to listen, and to speak the light of God and the hope of God into the darkness and the hopelessness PJ carries within him.

Redemption for PJ may never involve social restoration, overcoming addiction or getting off the street. Possibly it may one day include coming to some self-awareness, or of realising his value as God’s child. Maybe it will come with a softening of his need to solve problems with violence…Possibly, redemption for him also includes his role as a teacher for us…if we have learned about ourselves as individuals and as a community through knowing him. Possibly, redemption for PJ will not come to him in his lifetime, but through God weaving his story into someone else’s story, with eternal consequences. We will probably never see it. But we can pray for it. I wonder what may have happened if for every hour I spent trying to address the problems, I had spent an hour in prayer for PJ? Possibly not much difference in terms of outcomes – but certainly no worse! In all of this I can see that my own needs and compulsions have been at play in relating to PJ, possibly limiting the extent to which God’s redemption could flow to him by way of me.

So let’s turn from thinking of PJ, to thinking of ourselves, our own lives. A human artist works with materials that have no will, no ability to either join in with or thwart the process that the artist is engaged in. But with God and humanity, it’s different.

Here the analogy of the artist gives way a little, because redemption has to take into account our freedom, and our choices.

For us, as people who seek to know God and be involved in God’s purposes for this earth, we can either choose to participate in God’s creative redeeming, or we can choose to limit God’s influence on us to bring meaning and goodness out of our struggles.

Can the leopard change its spots? The familiar saying tells us ‘no, it can’t’. We use that phrase to express our sense of realism, our discovery as we get older that there are limits on the possibility of transformation. And it’s true, I think that a lot of how we live and behave is to do with hard-wiring that we have no power to change, and that can limit the scope of genuine change. But I don’t think that’s the last word on how God interacts with our world.

It is tempting to be cynical and lose hope even for ourselves, especially when we make the same messes repeatedly, express the same flaws repeatedly, when we feel so mired in ‘the way we’ve turned out’ that we can’t imagine being able to live in an alternative. But if God is creatively moving in the midst of everything, even horrible and sad things, willing and influencing and shaping for the good not only of us but of others…surely we have to allow for the possibility that the great Creator, who formed us from the earth’s clay, can re-shape us on the potter’s wheel, or re-paint a portion of the canvas, in ways we can’t imagine?

Isn’t this the big story of Christianity – that there is redemption and renewal for those that seek it? This is the faith that is required of us, to believe that we, even we, are a part of God’s ongoing creative task.

It is important to get clear that redemption has little to do with perfection. The quest for perfection is often a quest that takes us away from the reality of who God is making us to be, and also does more harm than good, because it can make us rigidly fixate on things that have nothing to do with what God is actually about. If I try to guess at what God wants to make of me, and then set about achieving it, then I haven’t really grasped that maybe all God really wants is for me to be pliable…flexible, responsive, able to move with God’s flow, and so participate in the divine dance. If I try by myself to paint the picture of the perfect Brenda, I am simply chasing an ideal formed by my upbringing, and my illusions. I will become more controlling, not less, more rigid, not less, as I try under my own steam and by my own agency to fulfil something that wasn’t God’s vision in the first place. If I seek my own perfection, that will also make me more judgemental of others, more intolerant of the failings of others, less able to forgive myself and others.

God’s goal for us is not for us to be perfect, or maybe even in this life for us to be completely whole. Perfection is a legacy we Christians bear from our Greek heritage, and it’s not a very biblical idea. As Murray shared with us – the gospel saying ‘you are to be perfect as your Father in Heaven is perfect’ is better translated from the Aramaic, as you are to be ‘all embracing.’ Which is to say, open hearted…soft rather than rigid, merciful rather than judging, peaceful rather than ‘up against.’ The opposite is to reject out of hand, to be prejudiced, to judge, to fear or try to control, or to hide ourselves away – to protect ourselves by being closed rather than open.

In practice, what this all means is that for me to join in with God’s redeeming creativity, I need to become aware of the things I do, or the conditions around me, that make me more open and receptive…to God and others, and also aware of the things I do, or the conditions around me, that make me more likely to be closed or defensive. If I take as a given that God is moving in everything, all the time, to bring redemption, then my job is simply to learn to see it, and to hold open the spaces where it can come to greatest fullness within myself or the places where I have influence. Rather than, as is more likely, to block God by forcing my agenda for myself or a situation.

On a daily basis, it’s about noticing, awareness, and honesty. I’ve been pondering on the parable of the Pharisee and the tax collecto—both praying in the temple – the Pharisee blindly thanking God that he is righteous, the tax collector beating his breast and saying ‘God, have mercy on me a sinner.’ Often, this parable is understood as about pride and humility, leading to the idea that to be acceptable to God we have to be self-abasing, to talk long and often about how useless we are. But in the light of this creative redemption idea, this parable can be seen as about either getting in the way, or getting out of the way, of God’s desire to bring redemption. If we are willing to be honest about how things really are with us, then we are able to tap into God’s mercy for us. If we are living a delusion by looking everywhere and at everyone but ourselves and the truth of our inner lives, then we hold God’s mercy at arm’s length, or cannot see it at all. There are truths locked in places within ourselves we don’t even know exist, truths that if uncovered would yield a great flow of redemption for us and others.

No wonder then, that the Orthodox church seized on this phrase ‘Lord have mercy on me a sinner’ as the key phrase for meditation…the ‘prayer of the heart’. Again, it’s not about flagellation, but about opening our minds and hearts to reality, to the light of God shining into our inner world in order to redeem.

Other practices, such as the Examen, such as meditation, or even simply learning to pause briefly a few times a day to breathe and re-connect with our hearts, are treasures of the Christian tradition that can help us cultivate the kind of awareness that creates space for God.

Jesus comforted his followers with these words: ‘do not worry about tomorrow.’ Things are unfolding in ways that are a mixture of good and bad, constructive and destructive. It can sometimes feel that this world is on a downward spiral into destruction, especially when we ponder issues of climate change, pollution and resource over-consumption. But fear has no real place in participating with God in the redemption process. By all means we are active, and we work for change. But we do not need to be driven by fear or doom, or a compulsive need to fix things. We are learning to be loving agents of God’s change, remembering that God’s solutions are infinitely more creative than ours, and that God desires to bring redemption even more than we do.

In everything, God the artist is willing and working and shaping, so that we can say with Julian of Norwich – All will be well, and all will be well, and all manner of thing shall be well. Maybe not tomorrow, and, concerning some issues, maybe not in our lifetime, but the present will be redeemed. God wills it.