Reaching for Redemption
Sermon by Steve Edington
March 2, 2008
In May of 2005 the Maine born and based author, Stephen King, was asked to deliver the Commencement address at the University of Maine at Orono - just a few miles up the road from his home in Bangor. This is part of what he said: "I wonder if you've considered the larger implications of this. I mean I'm honored, I'm delighted, I am flattered out of my shoes. But think of it. You have asked a man who has spent the last thirty years trying to scare the hell out of everyone in the English speaking world to send you out into 21st century America. I think I'll take that as a compliment."
When it comes to my literary tastes Stephen King holds the distinction of being a writer whom I greatly admire as a human being, but whose work I just can't get into. I've never met him but he gives every impression of being a very pleasant and charming guy, who offers a lot of encouragement to aspiring writers, who has gotten a lot of people to do some dedicated reading when they otherwise might not have, who has done some wonderfully philanthropic things for his hometown of Bangor - and who is a die hard Red Sox fan. So, what's not to like about him? For me, everything but his writing.
There are a couple of exceptions. I got a kick out of The Girl Who Loved Tom Gordon with its Red Sox angle. And his book Rita Hayworth and the Shawshank Redemption was made into what I consider to be one of the better movies to come out in the past 15-20 years. The movie was just titled The Shawshank Redemption - and I'm using it as my lead in for today's sermon. It's a very detailed and complex movie, with a lot of subtle and not-so-subtle religious overtones and undertones, to which I could probably devote a sermon series if I wanted. All I'll do with it here is give it a quick hit as a way of getting at the larger topic of redemption.
The main character, Andy Dufrense - played by Tim Robbins - is sent to the Maine State Penitentiary for murdering his wife and her lover, a crime he did not actually commit even though all the apparent evidence pointed to him. Andy, an investment and finance lawyer, blames himself in part for his wife's fate, due to the ways in which he drove her away from him, but he didn't kill her. The prison is ruled over by a very sadistic warden who uses his religion to justify his wicked ways - including some of the horrible stuff he lets his guards get away with. But, over time he comes to trust Andy enough to have him handle his finances - including a money laundering and hiding scheme wherein Andy creates a phantom identity for the Warden so he can squirrel away thousands of dollars.
The film's occasional narrator is a long-time prisoner called Red, played by Morgan Freeman, who becomes Andy's closest friend over the 20 years that Andy spends in Shawshank. Through a scheme he works on for those 20 years, and that you've got to see to believe, Andy escapes the prison one stormy night by crawling through the sewer system - and is reborn out of the, ah...muck, let's call it, as a free man. He then uses the phantom identity he'd created for the Warden to claim and create a new identity for himself, and splits for Mexico; but not before surreptitiously exposing the Warden for the corrupt SOB that he was.
Some time later Red is granted parole in his advancing age. Through a plan that he and Andy had discussed while in prison - and that seemed like an utterly hopeless pipe dream at the time - he joins Andy in Mexico. End of movie.
If you've seen this film then you know I've barely scratched the surface of it, and given away the ending to boot. [The only caution I would offer in recommending to you who haven't seen it is that it has some pretty brutal scenes in it.]
So why is the word "Redemption" used in the title of the movie as well as in the Stephen King novel it's based on? It works on several levels actually. Andy is able to redeem the time he spent behind bars by fulfilling what had seemed like a hopeless dream while on the inside. He becomes an agent of liberation, or a redeemer, for Red. Through the good deeds he does for some of the prisoners during his incarceration he redeems, in some measure anyway, the shabby way he'd treated his wife; which, it could be argued, set her up to be killed even though Andy didn't do it. And there's a decidedly redemptive note in the way the Warden, and the evil empire he'd created for himself, are finally brought down due to the imaginative ways in which Andy had bided his time for 20 years. So while the book and the movie do not go the usual horror show route you generally get from Stephen King, it's still about good overcoming evil in the end.
Outside of the Warden's perverse religiosity, there is nothing overtly religious about this movie. But it is a religious film, I would say, nonetheless. In fact, I was first introduced to it when it was used in my son's religion class back when he was going to Bishop Guertin High School. Until then I figured it was just another Stephen King horror flick.
The theme of redemption - in one sense or another - is found in practically all of the major religions of the world. And when you can find a common theme in a wide range of religious faiths, that tells me that we're also dealing with a common and deep seated human phenomenon as well. Let's consider it on that level for a few minutes.
Literally, redemption means securing freedom by paying a price. In earlier times - and tragically in some parts of the world today - is meant buying a person out of slavery. The person doing the freeing paid an agreed upon price to the owner and the slave was freed, or redeemed.
The term can also mean simply an exchange of one thing for another. I'll probably date myself on this one, but how many of you remember Green Stamps? Yes, you'd get them in grocery stores mostly - one for each ten cents worth of groceries you bought. You'd take them home and stick them in these little booklets. When you got enough of those booklets filled you could take them to a Green Stamp Store and turn them in for things like small appliances, furniture, and the like. These Green Stamp Stores were called Redemption Centers; places where you "redeemed" your Green Stamps. Or maybe it was to redeem all the money you'd spent on groceries.
The most common usage, though, treats the term "redemption" as an act taken to right a previous wrong. If a player in a baseball game makes an error that results in a couple of runs being scored, but then gets the game winning hit or home run the announcer will often say, "Well, Jones certainly redeemed himself for that error he made back in the third inning." The player is released, so to speak, from feelings of guilt or self-recrimination over costing his team a game since he took it upon himself to see that the game was eventually won. When I go to baseball games, you see, I'm really engaging in religious study. But I do not, I assure you, push that to the point of writing off my Red Sox tickets as a professional expense.
On a more serious note, there is a pronounced note of redemption in the twelve-step recovery program whose objectives are to free persons from an enslaving addiction, or from self-defeating and self-destructive behaviors and ways of living. One of the 12 steps calls for participants to make a list of persons they have wronged, or persons they've made life painful or difficult for, because of their behavior. The following step then calls for the participant to seek out - if possible and appropriate - the people they have wronged and try to find ways of making amends to them. This is basically a process of self-redemption, which also has the potential for bringing about some reconciliation with the wronged or hurt party. Of course, you don't have to be dealing with an addiction to know that you've wronged someone, and find yourself looking for ways to redeem that wrong. That's a process I daresay we've all had to engage in at various times in our lives.
For all of their variations, there's a common element found in many of these understandings of redemption, which has to do with being released from a broken or painful condition, and being delivered into a more healed or whole one. This is why, as I said earlier, it is a common theme in the legends and mythologies of most of the world's religions.
The agricultural sacrifices the Egyptians and the Roman made to their god and goddesses were for the purpose of staying their anger and assuring a plentiful harvest; a redemption, as it were from the wrath of the gods as shown in storms, floods, droughts, and the like. The central legend in Judaism is that of Yahweh redeeming his people from slavery and delivering them into a Promised Land in return for their loyalty to and worship of him. In the Zoroastrian religion, which contains elements later found in both Christianity and Judaism, the redemption of humanity happens when Ohrimazd, the God of Light, conquers Ahriman, the God of Darkness. In Buddhism, the goal is the attainment of enlightenment, which is the deliverance or redemption from the ongoing cycle of life and death. In Christianity, it is Jesus who takes upon himself the sins of humanity and redeems them by his death.
With respect to the latter - as I've said on various other occasions - the idea of Jesus' death as an act of redemption is what proved to be the major stumbling block for me in my embracing of Christianity in any orthodox way. I do believe our Unitarian and Universalist forbearers were much closer to the mark when they reinterpreted the idea of redemption, in the Christian sense, to mean that by his life and teachings Jesus demonstrated that there was a higher and more healed, and godly (if you will) self that we can aspire towards, and that can call us away from our more fallen or broken selves. This is also the point of a book by Deepak Chopra I'm reading now called The Third Jesus.
To keep it in a more humanistic vein for now, I know I have my times - as I guess we all do - when I feel cut off or separated from the life I know I could be living; and from the person I know I can be. I doubt there's a human being alive who hasn't known that state of personal alienation and frustration when we just cannot connect with our better selves. It is when we are in such a state that some of our more regretful and hurtful behavior takes place.
I'm guessing it is a universal phenomenon to feel out of sync with ourselves and our world. It is a universal human perception as well, I would say, to recognize that we live in a terribly broken world; and to look up and around us and say, "Surely we can do better than this." Perhaps this is why the themes and myths of redemption are practically universal among the religions of the world. It is because we know that we are imperfect and unfinished beings who live in an often tragically imperfect world.
Terms like Redeemer or Messiah or Christ are not ones I use all that often, except for when I get going in a sermon like this one and speak of the value of myth and metaphor in our spiritual journeys of meaning and discovery. But a Redeemer or a Messiah is not someone who, in one fell swoop, reconfigures our lives and makes everything all right. Instead it is a person - it could be any person - it could be you in relation to another person - who alters one's personal sense of reality. A redemptive moment occurs when we are made to see ourselves in a new light, or enabled to see new possibilities and new dreams for ourselves; when we are delivered from the mundane.
A redeemer is one who shows us creative possibilities and creative ways of living that have been there all along, often allowing us to see them for the first time. In the shadowy and largely hidden figure of Jesus of Nazareth I see a model for such a person; someone whose most redemptive message to those who were really listening to him and who really got it, was "The Kingdom of God is within you." Meaning, as I take it, the resources you need for meaningful living are within yourself, if you can really tap into them.
I have one more place I want to go with this theme of redemption before I close this out. This month of March, 2008 marks what I regard as a most tragic and painful anniversary; namely the fifth - the fifth, mind you - anniversary of our country's invasion of Iraq. This will just be a short take today. Whether we leave that country in the next 100 days or the next, well, 100 years (and it will be neither of those time spans, actually), one of the many questions and issues before us will be how do we redeem the lives lost, both American and Iraqi, in a war we didn't have to fight?
It's not the first time we've had to answer that question. That long, black granite wall in Washington, DC with the names of nearly 60,000 American service men and women etched into it - one of whom being a high school classmate of mine - is, among many other things, an attempt to redeem those lives that were sacrificed on the altar of our hubris. It is a way of saying, very rightly and redemptively so, that these lives mattered, they counted, they were people who were loved and cared about, and they deserve to be remembered and respected as such, however horribly misguided the policies were that cost them their lives.
For the past five years, thanks to another misguided folly, we are seeing lives lost, and on whose behalf we'll be called upon to offer, in some fashion, the same redemptive message: These are lives that mattered, that were loved and cared about, and that deserve to be respected and remembered as such, however horrible, misguided the policies were and are, taking those lives. We'll be electing a new President this fall. A lot of important issues will be at stake; issues about which persons of concern and goodwill will have differing opinions. That's what democracy is about - giving all of us a voice in our civic life. One thing I'll be bearing in mind as I cast my vote is who I feel is best equipped and situated to at least partially redeem us from this terribly folly of a war we have created for ourselves and for our standing in the world community.
To bring it back, now, to those of us who gather to worship here. Among our many callings as persons who share a liberal religious faith, is that of being a redeeming community. We are called to create a special, and sacred, place where lives are transformed, where we can move from broken-ness to wholeness, where we can both face our shortcomings and celebrate our yet-to-be realized possibilities. And where we can find ways, acting together, to be agents of redemption in a world so in need of hope and healing. Together we will continue to make it so.
Stephen Edington
March 2, 2008
