Redeemed

People, even more than things, have to be restored, renewed, revived, reclaimed, and redeemed; never throw out anyone.
-Audrey Hepburn

Audrey Hepburn apparently got the memo about our Terms of Resurrection series. Her quotation is a fountain of Easter words, and she points us to where such promises are meant to be poured: on the living and breathing people beside us.

This week’s text, which some of you many have preached from last week, describes the curious case of Saul, who was stopped short on the Damascus road and forced to evaluate the stars by which he had previously charted his life’s course. It also tells the story of Ananias, whose hesitancy about God’s plan for this Saul reveal his own doubts about the limits of who is worthy of being restored, renewed, revived, reclaimed, or redeemed, and his ideas about who to throw out.

If Christmas is the great vertical feast of God’s descent among us in flesh and blood, Easter is the season in which the width and breadth of God’s incarnate reach is revealed. The risen Christ creates and forms a redeemed reality that extends and exists beyond our hopes and certainties as well as our fears and failings. And in that place of utterly mind-bending newness, we can embrace one another as sisters and brothers as God calls each of us by name.   

But now thus says the Lord,
   he who created you, O Jacob,
   he who formed you, O Israel:
Do not fear, for I have redeemed you;
   I have called you by name, you are mine.
-Isaiah 43:1