Trinity Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.)

Sermons 

The common theme, of course,

that runs through both our Old Testament and our gospel passages,

is the power of God to bring life out of death.

To restore hope when hope is lost.

To redeem a human life or lives

even when they seem beyond redemption.

And while both of the stories are a little bit spooky,

what with bones rattling in a valley

and a wrapped-up mummy coming out of a tomb,

nevertheless, they both testify.

To God’s power, absolutely,

but also to God’s love.

God’s desire to lift us out of death and decay

into light and life.

Now I’m quite sure that at some time or another,

most of us here have wished for the literal return to life

of someone we know has died.

Any of us who have lived long enough

know what it is like to lose someone we love

and to wish with all our heart that God would give them back.

But it isn’t what I want us

to talk about this morning.

Because while I firmly believe

that God can raise the dead if God wants to …

I also believe that most of the time

God chooses not to intervene in the natural order in that way.

Where God is forever involved, messing around,

is in the spiritual order of things.

God does not ever want to leave us alone!

And I don’t mean that in a pesky sense,

like the way sometimes small children won’t leave you alone,

and keep tugging at your clothes to get your attention …

I mean that God is like

someone who is in love with us.

Who because of that love

wants to do things for us,

wants to draw us always into

a closer and more intimate relationship.

I’m getting a little ahead of myself here,

so let me back up for just a moment.

What I want to look at

in the light of those two lessons,

is God’s intervention into the dead and destroyed places of our lives.

You’ve already seen the sermon title,

and the question that it asks us:

"Who redeems your life?"

To a certain extent, the answer may be obvious …

here we are in church;

the answer must be God or Jesus or something like that.

We kind of need to start behind the question.

Because for most of us,

even raising the question of redemption in and for our life

makes us feel kind of squirrelly.

And there are two possible reasons for that.

The first of the reasons connects with

our traditional doctrine of sin as being pride.

That the things we do wrong happen

because we have put ourselves in place of God,

and we’ve come to think somehow

that we are at the center of things

and we know what’s right for ourselves

and everyone else.

It’s hard for us to perceive ourselves

as being in need of redemption

if we understand ourselves basically to be good, decent people

who believe and do the right things most of the time,

and only stray occasionally.

Surely Christ didn’t need to die for us.

We’re not that bad!

Of course we make mistakes now and then,

but that’s a problem on a human level;

we don’t need to drag God into it, do we?

So it’s hard to answer honestly the question,

"who redeems your life?"

when we can’t quite see ourselves

as being in need of redemption.

We know that the "correct" answer is that God redeems our life,

or Christ is the one who saves us …

and yet, the way we live makes it pretty clear

that deep down, we believe

it’s our responsibility to save ourselves.

And that was the Pharisees’ main problem.

They get a lot of bad press

in the New Testament and over the centuries,

but they weren’t really bad people.

It’s just that they believed

their own obedience and their own good works

would alone redeem them.

That’s a trap we also have to watch out for.

Most of us are good people;

I wouldn’t argue with that for a second!

Nevertheless, we are still in need of redemption,

and we can’t do it ourselves.

Now there’s also a completely different reason

that some of us have trouble with the question

"who redeems your life?"

And it’s quite the opposite of

what we just talked about,

the problem we have with pride.

Some folks have difficulty imagining being redeemed

because at some time in their life,

they got the message that they were so bad

as to be entirely unredeemable.

We can often find that

in people who were abused as children, just for example.

There are other possible causes too, of course.

But some of us are so weighed down

by a burden of guilt, or shame,

that we come to believe that even God

can’t fix whatever is wrong with us.

Oh, Christ can redeem normal people,

that’s no problem.

But we are so much worse than normal,

that for us there is no hope.

God could not possibly love us.

We don’t deserve it; we’re not good enough,

and we never will be.

Who redeems our life?

Nobody, because as far as we’re concerned,

it can’t be done.

Like the folks in the other group,

we know what the "right" answer is:

We say that Christ saves us.

God redeems us.

But deep inside,

we don’t really believe it.

The good news is simply too good to be true,

at least for us.

What’s interesting, and more than a little ironic,

is that many of us waffle between those two extremes.

Some days, and in comparison to some people,

we feel ourselves to be quite good enough,

in no need of redemption.

And then other days, maybe the very next day,

something happens that makes us feel awful about ourselves,

and we know we need to be redeemed,

but we’re very afraid that we’re beyond God’s help.

So it’s not as easy as we might have thought

to answer the question,

"who redeems your life?"

What we know in our head to be the right answer,

isn’t necessarily matched by what we feel

in our heart, in our gut,

or wherever we do our feeling.

But this season of Lent is a good time to ask the question,

and to examine our answer to it.

Good Friday will be here in less than two weeks,

and there’s no more natural time

to think about our redemption

and its connection with Christ’s death.

For some of us, the emphasis is that

we are saved from our sins …

yes, our sins,

even though it’s impossibly hard to admit them.

For others, the emphasis is,

we are saved from our sins …

yes, even we can be saved,

no matter what those sins are.

Who redeems your life?

Who restores you out of death?

Who gives you hope?

God does, through Jesus Christ.

And no matter who we are,

or how we feel about it,

this is the best of all news.

God has redeemed, and will redeem, our life.

This is sure.

Thanks be to God!

Amen.

© 2008 Julie Adkins (e-mail: DrJAdkins@trinitypresdallas.org)