Date: 17 July 2011

Text: Luke 3:7-18

Site: St. Luke’s United Church ~ Upper Tantallon, NS

Preacher: Kevin Little

How many of you have seen the film we are discussing this morning, O Brother, Where Art Thou? If you have you’ll know the film somewhat follows the storyline, albeit with a much different context, of Homer’s Odyssey. It is a film about redemption, a journey, and challenges along the way. Being a Coen brothers’ epic it is also funny.

In essence three prisoners break out of a southern prison in the 1930’s. One prisoner, Ulysses Everett McGill, played by George Clooney, wants to retrieve the $1.2 million in treasure that he claims to have stolen from an armored car and buried before his incarceration. With two weeks remaining before their prison sentence has come to an end Pete (John Turturro), and Delmar O'Donnell (Tim Blake Nelson), decide to join Everett.

Delmar and Pete are not the quickest of minds, nor are they equipped with the best judgement. Along the way we watch as Everett’s clever, albeit cynical, mind keeps coming up with new schemes to arrive at his planned destination. Delmar and Pete often upend those plans and the result is frustraton and comedy.

The world view of these characters helps better explain the religious themes that run throughout the film. You know Everett. He’s the one you know who is slick, cunning, manipulative, cynical. He knows the system is fixed, the little guy can’t win, so all you can do is take what you can, when you can. He loses no sleep over his deceptions as he knows this is the only way a working class guy like him can make it. Everett has no time for religion, in his view “God-talk” is all a massive distraction, what the wealthy and the elite use to keep the poor man down, that as long as the poor man is fixed on Heaven, as long as he is pious and honest the rich man wins. He always wins.

And you know Pete and Delmar. They are slow, unsure of themselves, prone to bone-headed mistakes and miscalulations, but basically they are poor folks who want to do right, who want to serve a Creator who loves them, who desperately want to start over, be forgiven, make amends, and find happiness, not with money but with relationships and spirituality.

And so we have this scene I want to play for you, as the three are hiding out from the authorities and end up in the middle of a large scale baptism. Listen and watch carefully.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IXcuqdgOgz8

“Come on in boys the water is fine!”

You know I have led Bible studies for 21 years. There are some who come because they feel guilty they go to church but never read the Bible. There are some who come because they’ve read the Bible but have no idea what the consistent message is. There are some who want to believe the Bible with the eyes of a child, like they did in Sunday School, but with their adult mind they know they can’t go back. There are some conservatives, traditionalists, liberals, progressives, who figure they’ve got the Bible figured out, so they go to set he rest of us straight.

But I never had a Bible study like the one I started at an inner city church a few years ago. There were three regulars, besides me. There was a woman whose son was in prison, likely for life, because he killed a man. She was filled with shame, anger, and guilt. There was the woman whose life had gone from bad to worse: failed marriages, children with deep problems, mental illness, addictions, poor, lost. She had been brought up in the church. There were happy memories there. She felt like she had lost her way. And there was the man who months later became a woman. I knew something was up when I used the pronoun “he” for her and was corrected by the rest of the group. She was a transgendered person, searching for acceptance from her Creator.

None of these women were content to sit and listen to my wisdom, to nod their heads when someone made a point they agreed with, to glean some Biblical context, historical criticism, or peruse the latest concordance. They wanted redemption.

Redemption means…

1. an act of redeeming or the state of being redeemed.

2. deliverance; rescue.

3. Theology, deliverance from sin; salvation

I wonder what we mainline folks do when we feel the need to be redeemed, to be rescued, to be delivered from sin? What do you do?

I know we like to make fun of the preachers who stand in the river, take the believer in their arms and force them deep under the water, proclaim something about being forgiven and having your sins washed away. It particularly galls us when we see one of these redeemed characters walking out of the river and into a lie, racism, or participating in the slander of some innocent.

But surely this is less about the need for some ritual of redemption and more about the way the newly saved get themselves in all sorts of trouble when they speak with such certainly, like everything now is set, the rest is easy. When the newly saved use that tone of self-righteous indignation, like a chain smoker who just given up the weed, they walk right into our skepticism.

But leave aside all that and focus with me on the need to have some ritual of transformation. Don’t you think all of us yearn for this release?

I think what holds us back is the sense that whatever we’re ashamed of someone else has done worst. We’ll be damned if we will step forward and admit we are a sinner and ask for forgiveness and to be rescued. Not when we know “Al” is worse. So we pretend a little longer, pretend more is OK in our life than it really is.

The United Church is trying hard to introduce a new concept, the perpetual act of reaffirming your baptism vows, that one is not baptized again, but throughout our lives we need to mark changes, renewal moments, our new identity in Jesus. It involves the laying on of hands. Members of the church come forward and lend their support to the one who feels the need to reaffirm her/his baptism vows.

Feel free to call on me any time to hear your story, the yearning for change, your need to be released. I claim no special powers, no special access to cleansing waters, and I certainly do not claim to be anyone’s moral superior. But I do know something about Jesus and I know he came to bring Good News, to save us from our pain, to save the world from its pain, to let the captives go, to set the oppress free. And I will be there if you, like me, yearn to be free.

Amen.