8/19/18 “Making Room for Redemption” by Chalice Overy

Text: Psalm 130

This morning I want to talk a little bit about making room for redemption. My first introduction to team sports was when my parents signed me up for softball when I was about 6 years old. I had been practicing softball with my mom. My dad wasn’t very coordinated, and sports was never really his “thing”, so my mom made sure I could catch and throw and hit. I was really excited about my first game, and getting to wear my little uniform and everything.

But even with all that excitement surrounding my first game, I don’t remember anything about it. I don’t know if I hit a ball or got on base or caught a ball – I don’t know. Here’s what I know: at the end of the game, I was very patiently waiting for somebody to announce the winner. I waited…and I waited… until finally I went over to my parents and said: “Who won?” “We don’t know”, they replied. And they directed me to go talk to one of the officials. I was pretty shy as a kid, but I really needed the answer to this question! So I mustered the courage, went up to this stranger and asked him the same question I had asked my parents: “Who won?”

And you know what this man said to me? He says, “We weren’t keeping score.”

I waited for a little while longer to just see if he would offer some additional explanation. And then I tried to figure out how to get back the last 60 minutes of my little 6-year old life because if we weren’t going to keep score, what were we there for in the first place?

We like to keep score. Especially when we feel like we have outplayed or outlasted our opponents. We like to keep a record of our victories: that milestone that we reached, the promotion that we earned, that project completed, or that problem solved. A friend of mine recently posted a video of her daughter to Facebook as she often does. On this occasion, her daughter was at gymnastics practice. Now her daughter hadn’t been in gymnastics for very long but it turns out she’s just really good at it. In the video, she had just landed a stunt that she had never done before, and when she was finished, she came over to her mom and asked, “Did you get that?”

She wanted to make sure that the “win” was documented. And that’s how it is when it comes to our victories, but not so much when it comes down to our failures. I mean, who of us after we have made a major misjudgment after we have acted out of character, after we have inflicted an injury upon someone, will look around and say, “Did anyone get that?” No! We hope that no one has noticed or at least that no one will say anything. We hope that we can cover it, or, even better, bury it so it never makes the record.

It seems that the Psalmist doesn’t have this luxury in the text today.

“Out of the depths I cry to you, O Lord”

It seems as if that which he would have preferred to bury has engulfed him. I don’t know about you, but my most earnest cries of repentance are not just when I mess up. I have a little standard prayer for that. It usually goes a little something like: “My bad God, I could have done that better. Help me to do better next time.” That’s pretty much it.

My most earnest cries for repentance have come when my mess is uncovered–when the people I have injured or offended are pressing against me in some way because of what I have done and I am dealing with the consequences. And this is not just me who has this tendency. I don’t if you have heard about these people in the news: BBQ Becky… Permit Patty… Pool Patrol Paul? That last one was right here in North Carolina. These are people who have become famous (or infamous), who have gone viral because they called the police on their neighbors for something that has been given the hashtag #existingwhileblack. While these people were doing normal things like having a cookout, a little girl–a young entrepreneur–selling water, and somebody just trying to swim with her son at her neighborhood pool. These infamous folks felt that these black people were not supposed to be in these spaces doing the things they were doing, so they called the police.

We know about these things because all of them were caught on video. And if you watch the videos, you will find that, during the encounters, these people are completely unapologetic. In the case of Pool Patrol Paul, the woman asks him for an apology and he is totally unresponsive. It’s not until they went viral, until they became memes, until there was this public outrage and outcry that these people became very penitent, sometimes to the point of tears. And by this time, no one was trying to hear their apology.

The psalmist delivers a bit of good news to us this morning: God hears us when we cry out from the depths. God hears when nobody else will. God forgives when others are unwilling. The steadfast love of God endures forever, and God is committed to our redemption. So as I thought about this, I asked myself, “If that’s the case, what is this guy still waiting for?”

“I wait for the Lord”, he says, “my soul waits, and in his word I hope; my soul waits for the Lord more than those who watch for the morning, more than those who watch for the morning.”

It seems as if there is a disconnect between God’s intention for him and his lived experience. It seems as if God has given a promise of redemption, a word of redemption, and yet the psalmist still finds himself in the depths. He’s still in a hole!

God has great power to redeem. I believe that today. I believe that redemption is God’s project. But like the psalmist I would have to project the completion of that project to some time in the future. God is making all things new. I believe this is true. Yet, as look around I have to concede that God has been at this for a while. You know, there has been stuff that has been taken care of; it’s been fixed. Then, there’s some stuff that God appears to be working on; it’s in process. We’ve made some strides, but we haven’t arrived yet. Then there is a whole bunch of other stuff that the Lord apparently hasn’t even gotten to yet because it is still a mess!

So the psalmist seems to be hopeful that, for him, it will not be much longer. He has hope that somehow he will make his way out of the hole that he is in–that he will see the goodness of the Lord in the land of the living. But I’m not certain that everybody who makes this petition for redemption can have the same hope. I’m afraid that we live in a time, at lest in this country, that we are making it almost impossible for people to recover from their failures–where, even as Christians, we would much rather see people as ruined than to see them redeemed.

I don’t know about BBQ Becky, but Permit Patty and Pool Patrol Paul did eventually offer apology or express the desire to do so in person, but no one accepted it. They both lost their jobs…and people celebrated. And though I understood the celebration, I wondered whether or not we could really mark it as a victory. When I voiced this opinion, some people said to me, “These folks will never change their behavior until they feel it. They don’t care about the impact that they have on other people. Until they begin to feel it themselves they won’t change.”

I know that is true, but I wonder how much is enough and how big of an impact is necessary. Is being shamed across the World Wide Web sufficient to change their behavior? Should they lose their livelihood? Should their families be impacted? Do they deserve to receive death threats? I’m just asking the question. If someone says something that is racist or sexist or homophobic is there a statute of limitations on this? Can we consider the possibility that a person can be a different person today than the person that they were 15 years ago, or 10 years ago or 5 years ago or even last week.

I’m just asking the question, but I will admit to you today that I am not asking for a friend, I am asking for myself. Because I’m not the same person that I was 15 years ago, or 10 years ago, or 5 years ago. I’m changing. I’ve been changing, and I happen to think that I am growing–that I am changing for the better. But in every stage of that growth, including the place that I’m in right now, I will say something or do something that will require me to make supplication for forgiveness and redemption. And when I make that supplication to God, I have and assurance that God will hear me, and the assurance that God will forgive. But it’s everyone else that I’m concerned about. And you should be too!

“If you O Lord should mark iniquity, O Lord who could stand?”

Here is what the psalmist reminds us in this question: all of us have the potential to be where he is, the only difference is that some of us have yet to be exposed. You see, I said that we like to keep certain records. We would prefer to keep records of our victories and not our failures, but we don’t have a problem keeping records of other people’s failures. We don’t mind marking the iniquities of others. But the thing about these records we keep as a society is that they are incomplete, because some people’s activities are scrutinized while others are ignored. Some people and some neighborhoods are policed while others are actually protected.

So our records are incomplete, but God is aware of everything! God knows about every iniquity, every indiscretion, every act of injustice that anybody has ever committed against anyone else. God is aware of it all. And when I consider that, then it’s no wonder that God is not keeping a record. I mean, when you think about it, there is really no point. All of us have failed so significantly and so often that the differences between us are statistically insignificant. Keeping a record of our failures and iniquities is about as pointless as keeping score at a 6 year old softball game. Everyone is uncoordinated, nobody really knows how to play the game. There are so many errors that it’s not even worth keeping score. God says: “I don’t have time for that!” Imagine that! The God who has all the time that ever was and ever will be says, “I don’t have time for that!”

All we really need to know is that, if God was keeping a record, none of us would have a leg to stand on. And until we realize that, until we realize that we too stand in need of redemption, we won’t extend it to others because it will seem like too generous a gesture.

“Now wait a minute preacher: extend redemption? I’ve heard of people redeeming themselves and that makes sense to me, because if you got yourself into a hole you should be responsible for getting yourself out of that hole. I’ve heard of self-redemption. And I would concede, as I sit in a church today, that God redeems people. It’s right there in the text, ‘O Israel hope in the Lord! For with the Lord…is great power to redeem. It is the Lord who will redeem Israel from all its iniquities.’ See it’s right there, I can’t redeem anybody,only God can do that! That’s God’s job!”

Well, that’s what the Psalmist says, but y’all remember when we used to think that God alone controlled the seasons and the temperatures and the sea levels? And then we realized that we could do stuff that would release gases into the air that would change the entire climate. I bring this up simply to suggest that maybe we have agency. Maybe we have power. Maybe if God has power to forgive and to love and to redeem, then maybe we have power to do the same thing.

And maybe that is why the psalmist is still waiting. Because he has the promise of redemption from God, but he still finds himself in a hole. You know, we can tell someone they are free to go, but it doesn’t matter a whole lot if we’ve barricaded the exit. When we take this position that there is nothing you can say that I am willing to hear, that there is no apology that I will entertain, that there is nothing you could ever do to restore my confidence in you, we can proclaim God’s message of redemption until we are blue in the face, but until we are willing to make room for these people to re-enter the community, they will still be waiting…and so will we.

Because the person who committed the offense is not the only one who stands to benefit from redemption. If me going about my life is complicated by someone calling the police because they don’t think I belong in a certain place or that I should be free to do certain things, then the only way I can’t really be free in my black body is if they are redeemed from their racism. I don’t like it, even as I say it, but if racism can’t be redeemed, then racism will always be a part of my lived experience. I wish that God alone had the power to redeem and didn’t place any of that power in our hands because then I wouldn’t have to wait. I wouldn’t have to wait for a public outcry or cultural shift for someone to do right by me. I would prefer divine intervention. I don’t like that God has given us agency it this redemptive work, but acknowledging this agency does give me an incentive to make room for redemption.

What does it look like to make room for redemption? It means the we have to foster space for repentance. We literally need to create a climate where people are encouraged to confess their sins and their failures because they understand that they will not lose everything.

It reminds me of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission that was formed after apartheid ended in South Africa. The government believed that the commission was necessary “to enable South Africans to come to terms with their past and to advance the cause of reconciliation.” The Commision they held Amnesty Hearings, where people, under certain conditions, were allowed to apply for amnesty. They would not be punished for their crimes if they came and told the whole truth. And it was very controversial, but they felt that it was necessary because you can’t really repair something until you know the extent of the damage. And not only that, if offenders could tell the truth about what they had done, and they could sit in the same room with the victims and hear the truth about how it had impacted them, then maybe they could come to a place of repentance and start moving toward redemption.

What does it look like to make room for redemption? It make look like taking a hard look at prison. And not just who we put in them, because we know that is obviously inequitable, but also questioning the power of prisons to redeem people. Do prisons really serve justice or do they just put people into a hole that is nearly impossible for them to get out of? And are there other forms of justice that can restore offenders back to community and repair what has been broken?

How do we make room for redemption?

A year ago Ken Parker, a former KKK member and, at that time, Neo-nazi, found himself in a parking garage in Charlottesville, VA because he had been marching for his white rights in a all black uniform. So he and his fiance retreat to this parking garage and there they encounter a Muslim filmmaker, Dia Khan. Dia Khan sees past that Neo-nazi uniform, past his purpose and intent for that day. She peers all the way to his humanity and offers him assistance in his time of need. Her actions must have sparked something in Ken Parker because, a few months later, he found himself before a Christian community testifying of the person he had been, the things he had been involved in and how he was in the process of changing. Last month, Ken Parker became a member of a very different organization than he was a part of last year. Last month, Ken Parker was baptized into the All Saints Holiness Church, an African-American congregation that was willing to make room for redemption.

In 1999, Dorothy Holloway’s son was killed by 16-year old James Murphy. Dorothy spent 15 years in what she would call the “hell of unforgiveness.” Something happened a few years ago. There was a change of heart that allowed her to make a little more room, and she sent a letter to James Murphy, her son’s killer, letting him know that she had forgiven him. Making room for his redemption, they began to form a relationship. James says that “When I received that letter saying she had forgiven me, I knew then that God had been listening to my prayer.” She now advocates for his release, believing the time he has served is enough.

I wonder today, what would happen if spent less time keeping score and more time making room for redemption.