Redemption is a work in progress

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Link to video of gospel and sermon: https://youtu.be/CKP8I626CMY

Clare L. Hickman

St. Luke’s Episcopal Church, Ferndale

July 4, 2021—Proper 9B

Ezekiel 2:1-5; 2 Corinthians 12:2-10; Mark 6:1-13

          “Who the heck does he think he is?” That’s basically what they said, right? Those people in his hometown, faced with what they’ve heard that Jesus has been doing: healing the sick and casting out demons and interpreting the scriptures? They see him in their midst and some of them just cannot resist cutting him back down to size. “He’s just the son of a carpenter” (Mk 6:3): He is just ordinary like us, and how dare he try to be something else!

They can’t see past what they know and think of him. He couldn’t possibly be extraordinary, because they have seen his extreme ordinariness. [i] They’ve seen his humble origins, perhaps even his youthful indiscretions. So he is not at all the person they would choose for a hero. Way too regular; too much, frankly, like the rest of us.

So they reject him. Which seems awful and obviously absurd when applied to Jesus. But still, I have to admit, I recognize the impulse.

These past couple weeks, for example, the news cycle has been filled with stories of Olympic hopefuls, as the various trials that determine our country’s team take place. And as anyone who watches the Olympics knows, part of the fun comes from those Olympic stories. Our hearts swell and tears might just fall, hearing about an athlete who came through trials and tribulations to finally get to the Games!

But there are rules for these stories. They generally present a very clean redemption narrative, one in which a person came out of great poverty or came through tremendous loss, but was able to overcome that and is now the perfect champion.

Which doesn’t really prepare us to understand someone like Sha’Carri Richardson, one of America’s champion sprinters. Even before her possible disqualification because of marijuana use (which is a whole other issue that I’m not going to engage now), there was a chorus of folks objecting to her self-presentation: the way she spoke; her wild orange locs, her long false eyelashes, her even longer acrylic nails. She was too trashy, too low class, too … “ghetto”!

Make no mistake: her talent and hard work are un-de-ni-able. She’s breaking records, for heaven’s sake. But apparently a bunch of folks would really like it if her success could make her behavior and appearance more acceptable to the mainstream. Surely, once you’ve worked hard enough to escape a background like that, you could leave all THAT behind, right?

Because we like a nice, clean redemption narrative. And we don’t always examine our assumptions about what that should look like.

But we should. Because our assumptions often aren’t very biblical. Even without the classism and racism that infect the Sha’Carri Richardson story, the desire to erase a person’s “problematic” past to highlight their new self is just not what we see in scripture. Scripture tells a long, and always complicated story about people who try and fail and return. and fail and try and return, over and over. It’s ALL there, and it’s simply NOT a story in which someone starts bad, then overcomes that to become good and shiny and lovely. It’s not.

The story of the people of God is one in which every last one of us carries a whole life of success and failure and repentance and starting over. We bring it all: all of our history, all of the things that make it harder for us, the things that make it easier, the things that make us “us”! And being conscious of all of it, frankly, is what makes an actual arc of redemption possible.

Because we lose something, when we cannot see the whole person, or when we are afraid to let our whole selves be visible. The people in Jesus’ hometown weren’t able to receive the gifts he brought because they were unwilling to allow his ordinary childhood to contain any new extraordinariness. So, too, other people will not be able to receive our gifts if they can’t accept our whole person. And we won’t be able to receive the gifts that they have to bring, if we are unable or unwilling to hear their whole story; if we try to fit them into a box that is only one thing: trash or treasure, redeemed or unredeemed, sick or healed.

Because reality is almost always a bit of both.

Sometimes we fight against this fact. And so we attempt a different path: insisting that strength comes from only acknowledging the healed part, the redeemed part, the extraordinary part. Thinking that doing so will strengthen those positives, make them truer. But in reality, the impulse to hide or deny or repress your difficulties actually makes you sicker. Makes you weaker.

Admitting the fullness of your experience is more honest, more true, and it actually leads to greater healing. It makes MORE room for the extraordinary, not less. It also broadens our picture of what extraordinary is supposed to look like. In a case like Sha’Carri’s, it interrogates our assumptions about what “trashy” means, and what kind of classist and racist ideas those might be perpetuating. In everyday life, it allows us to admit our continued struggles, and the broadness of experience that characterizes all our stories. Our redemption is rarely clean, and even the stories that seem to be a clear “he came from this, but with God’s grace and a good mentor he became THIS” often miss the complexity of the difficult places that form us. An addict who survives will always be an addict, whose success is a continued struggle of will and temptation. And someone like me, who has lost a great love, will always be someone who has lost a great love. Even if I someday remarry, that will not be a nice neat redemption story. I will simply be a person with a broken heart who continues to be able to love.

Humanity is astonishing that way. And we are stronger when we can acknowledge it, rather than trying to brush the painful past aside. On July 4th, we might recognize that our nation, too, is strongest when we can allow a full portrait of our successes and our failures, of the  inspirational values on which we are founded, and also the ways in which we have not yet lived fully into those values.

The people in Jesus’ hometown did not receive his healing, because they could not allow themselves a full view of who he was. We Americans cannot receive the full blessing of this land, if we do not allow ourselves a full view of both our failings and our incredible promise. And all of us, as individuals, limit ourselves and others when we force ourselves into boxes that label us ordinary or extraordinary, successes or failures, redeemed or unredeemed. The picture is always far more complex than that, and it is only when we acknowledge that, that we can accept the fullness of life that God offers us in Jesus. May it be so. Amen.

[i] Debie Thomas, https://www.journeywithjesus.net/essays/3058-hometown-prophets