homily recap 1.25.09

We are presently using the theological themes that weave through the Nicene Creed as a guide to our homily series. This week we continued our homily series on redemption.

David Kelsey, a theologian on faculty at Yale Divinity School, has written a tremendous little book entitled, Imagining Redemption. He does not use the word imagine in the sense that many think of it as it relates to the ability to create fiction. What he means by imagining is to be able to see the world and our lives through the lens of God's redemptive promise. He wrote the book because he wanted to bring powerful theological ideas to bear on the messy and ugly situations that we find ourselves in. He urges that each of us needs to learn to recognize what we need redeeming from and then begin to imagine what God's redemptive promise can mean for us in the midst of the mess. More specifically, he exhorts us to to imagine what difference Jesus can make to us in this world in the midst of our messy lives while pointing out that far too often we think of redemption as mainly what awaits us in the world to come.

One important point that Kelsey brings out in his discussion is that part of growing in the knowledge and grace of Jesus Christ entails growing in our ability to imagine the world and our lives as the landscape of God's redemptive actions. He suggests that we need an interpretive guide, a kind of heuristic, in order to be able to see the world in this way. For instance, when we look at the evil that is still loose in the world - that we are sometimes profoundly impacted by and sometimes participate in - it can be hard to see the world or our lives as pregnant with God's redemptive promise. All we can see is hopelessness: a hopelessness that can come to distort our identities. Kelsey makes the helpful point that the resurrected Jesus Christ is present in our lives at all times and that he is the embodiment of God's redemptive promise; hence, God's redemptive promise is present to us, lovingly, as we go through the dark storms that otherwise look hopeless. Here is my silly illustration of what it is like to imagine Jesus' presence with us as God's redemptive promise. More than once or twice I have been in a coffee shop that is new to me and noticed something going on behind the scenes with the baristas at the espresso machine. From a distance, in line, it looks as if they are confused, don't know what they are doing, bickering even, as they pack the espresso, pull shot after shot, and then pour each one down the drain. Meanwhile the line lengthens and customers become impatient wondering when these incompetents will actually make someone a drink. However, as an espresso nut I can see from the back of the line that what they are doing is adjusting the grind, through a certain degree of trial and error, in order for the shots to come out the way they should. What looks like chaos to some looks like hope to me because I know that they know the difference between a shot well pulled and the alternative. I see something some others do not.

When we experience the horrors of evil and observe horrific events we can either see all of it as irredeemable or we can learn, through the lens of the gospel, to see these events in the context of what God has done, is doing, and will do through the person of Jesus; for, Jesus was a human being who experienced chaotic, horrendous evil but received God's redemptive promise of resurrection. To put it in the words of the creed:

"For us and for our salvation he came down from heaven: by the power of the Holy Spirit he became incarnate from the Virgin Mary, and was made man.
For our sake he was crucified under Pontius Pilate; he suffered death and was buried.
On the third day he rose again in accordance with the Scriptures"

So, Jesus comes to us in the midst of what needs to be redeemed as God's promise of redemption, bridging this world with the fully redeemed world to come and setting our lives in a new context. Because he knows these truths often remain too abstract for us to think about them in mundane categories Kelsey teaches this in his book in the context of the life of a family who underwent horrendous suffering. Here is a bit of their story as told by Kelsey:

"Just as he turned eight, a boy I will call Sam became totally paralyzed and spent three months on a respirator in a coma. The rest of the year he spent in a children’s rehabilitation hospital. He emerged with minor brain damage, learning disabilities, complex emotional problems and severe behavioral problems.

Under the strain of trying to cope with Sam, the family began to disintegrate. His mother suffered a psychotic break and was briefly hospitalized. At first when she returned home she was very depressed. Because neither the public school system nor his family could manage him, when he was 12 Sam was placed in the first of a series of residential schools that combined academics with programs of behavior modification. Several weeks after Sam’s mother returned home from the hospital her depression lifted enough that she felt she could take a part-time secretarial job. She continued in the care of a very able psychiatrist and seemed to be managing increasingly well. Then she killed herself.

Twelve-year-old Sam was certain that his mother had committed suicide because she was upset by his bad behavior that, he believed, had caused him to be sent away to school. He began acting out in dangerous ways, was deemed suicidal himself and was placed in a children’s psychiatric hospital. He lived there, attending the hospital school and fortunately being helped by a skillful therapist, until he was 15. The mother’s suicide, of course, was also deeply traumatic, if in less dramatic ways, for Sam’s two sisters and his father."

Over the years the family became to see their lives as defined by these horrible tragedies. Their identities became one with what had happened to them. Something that each of us would probably do if in their shoes. Kelsey goes on with the story and gently teaches us that seeing one's life in this way is a distortion and puts us in a situation where we do not acknowledge properly the redemptive presence of Jesus. Again, Kelsey:

"A problem with defining personal identity in the way Sam and his father do is that it distorts one’s identity by binding it to horrible situations in the past. The problem lies not so much with the horror as with the pastness. If what justifies one’s life and shows that it is indeed worth living is surviving a set of horrendous events, then everything that happens later and everything one does later must be interpreted and shaped by reference to those past events. One’s future is defined by, and so is in bondage to, an event in the past.

So, for example: As Sam slowly becomes more capable of managing his owi~ affairs, he still cannot allow himself to live more autonomously because of who he is. He has defined his identity as that of one made dependent on others by his disabilities. When possibilities arise that could expand the range of his life, he leaves them unexplored because they don’t fit his definition of who he is. When he gets part-time jobs for which he longs, he sooner or later sabotages himself by faking seizures. Although he wants to work the way everybody else does, and looks forward to the little bit of extra income it brings in, working does not fit his definition of himself as a person disabled by horrendous events. After a certain number of seizure episodes, his employers always let him go.

Sam shows some artistic talent. But when he is admitted to the school system’s adult education art class, he fakes seizures and is asked not to enroll again. He lives as though he must keep his self-definition as a survivor of horrendous events continually in the public eye. His old identity must not be eclipsed by the appearance of a new identity as "ordinary worker" or "talented young adult." As he matures in his ability to make and keep friends Sam does not form a social network for himself, for it is essential to his identity that he is one who has lost family. "Lacking a support system" is part of his identity.

So too with Sam’s father. Even when in young adulthood Sam’s life is supported and structured by a network of social agencies, his father continues to organize his own life in such a way that everything else is arranged around the edges of his perceived responsibility for Sam. Being endlessly responsible for Sam defines who he is.

Neither Sam nor his father could imagine or allow any new joyful event, any new creative accomplishment, any new friendship to be more definitive of who he is than the terrible events to which his identity has been bound by definition. Theirs are distorted identities, frozen in time and closed to growth."

For me, the most helpful point that Kelsey makes in his book is that we often lack the sanctified imagination to be able to focus our hopes on "the difference that Jesus makes" in our lives here and now - in the midst of the messiness of working out our salvation in a fallen world. Here is Kelsey again:

"The difference that Jesus in his passion can make to Sam’s and his father’s distorted personal identities can.... be imagined in terms of "the fellow sufferer" if we follow the Evangelists’ description of Jesus’ personal identity. It is important to stress that God’s fellow suffering in, through and under Jesus’ passion is not just God’s way of understanding what we go through. It is God’s own odd way of going about loving us, God’s concrete act of loving us in the midst of the most terrible circumstances we can go through. It is just that love that can redeem personal identities like Sam’s and his father’s from their distorting bondage to past events, for it is God’s love for them that grounds the worth of their lives. Neither the excellence of what they do as measured by some set of rules nor their awesome survival of horrifying events can do that. It is only God’s concrete act of loving them in the midst of the most appalling situations that makes their lives worth living. That alone can justify the time, space and resources they take up in living."

Questions for discussion:

1. Can you think of ways in which your identity has been distorted by events of the past in subtle or profound ways?
2. Can you imagine how God's redemptive presence to you in the person of Jesus can help you be open to the future in a redemptive way?
3. Does this discussion help you think about you relate to other people who also need to experience God's redemptive presence? How does it help you sympathize with them?