This is a word I'm not often allowed to use when I write stuff because no one understand what it means. I love the word. It'a a big word that has more subtle meanings than I am ever able to grasp and I love having a special word like that. Another word like that is Incarnation but that's for another time, yet the two are partners.
I like the word redemption because its a word that breaks through stuff. It's normally used of Jesus and carols, of a God who is doing stuff to me and it's all very nice, thank you very much. Quite a selfish word indeed, like most right wing theology. But it isn't a right-wing word. It's very left wing. It's about recreation, about regeneration, about renewal. It is a word that convicts me. It's the way the word is used. It is a word to be spoken into things, spoken into the church, into injustice, into poverty, into trade. It's a word that calls for rebalance, and when you hear its echo, it sounds something like: 'let the walls come crashing down', or 'God has had enough of your power houses'. No wonder people don't like it being used very often.
It also is a word that calls me away from the past and into the present. How often I find myself lingering over someone's past, what they were like when they did this or that. But it isn't about then. It is about now. What is this person's present like? Redemption comes when I see the person for who they are now, rather than who I remember them to be.
Redemption is a fabulously edgy word that is not about some squidgy God doing something about my eternal salvation but about me being called by this God to do something with how I engage with that person whose past I can't let go. It's a word that stands in front of me, calling me to bring redemption, bring life again to people, by recreating their worth in my mind, that I may see them for who they are now. It's not them who are redeemed by redemption. It's me.
It's a huge word. And the church has hijacked it and formed it into it's own personal salvation. The word redemption needs to be redeemed and set free. And when it is free from all that selfish theology, it can change the world, because it's me and my relationship with others it changes.
But don't listen to me, listen to him.
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