Redemption – a Reflection on the Gift of Jesus and the Sign of Coke Bottles

By the Reverend Shirley Smith Graham

First Sunday after Christmas, December 30, 2007

Every so often words get saved from obscurity by fixtures of our culture.  So is the case with a perfectly good theological word, which has been rescued from the ash heap of obscurity and irrelevance by a habit of our consumer culture.  This is a word whose meaning was well known to our parents and grandparents but a word that perhaps is not so much part of our children’s vocabulary of faith.  This is a word as important as a life-line but a word which is, nonetheless, sounds a little antique to the generations known by their letters, Generation X, Y and Z.

So what is this perfectly good theological word? … which may not be a word we ourselves would even use? 

Redemption.  Redemption, … as in today’s reading from Galatians: “God sent his Son, born of a woman, born under the law, in order to redeem those who were under the law, so that we might receive adoption as children.” 

 
Redemption is such a useful word.  We redeem frequent flyer miles to be able to travel.  We redeem points to get good stuff from our credit card company.  When I was a kid, we used to redeem glass Coke bottles.

 
Alright, so I’m dating myself, but I know you remember them too.  Coke, and all the sodas, came in glass bottles.  (And am I the only person who thinks Coke tastes better from a glass bottle?)  And even though we bought those bottles of soda at the store, the bottles themselves never belonged to us … really.  If you every had occasion to be really bored, you might have read the bottle neck, with its imprint of white letters, that spelled “redemption” and noted the states in which the bottle could be redeemed at any local store.  That one word “redemption” reminded us, even as the cool, bubbly drink was going down our throats, that, as much as the liquid belonged to us, the bottle belonged to someone else.  That bottle belonged, in fact, to the Coca-Cola Bottling Distributor, whose agent, the grocery store, would give you 5 cents, if you returned what belonged to the distributor.  By the time I was drinking Coke, most people didn’t bother returning the bottles and getting the 5 cents.  But if they had … if they had scoured landscapes for litter and collected abandoned glass bottles, if they had rummaged through the trash to find discarded bottles, they would have found something valuable in Coca Cola’s eyes.  When something is redeemable, it has value in the eyes of the one who is willing to pay a price for it.

 
Do you know you are redeemable?  Do you know that even that thing about yourself that you like the least is valuable to God?  Do you know that God isn’t looking for you to be improved or to work yourself into perfection but only to be redeemed?  … that God isn’t waiting for you to have the moral equivalent of a face lift before you will be pleasing in God’s eyes.  Do you know that, scratched and scraped up as you are, you are as precious in God’s sight as that infant Jesus was to Mary’s eyes?

What good news to be redeemable!  Like that Coke bottle, to have a white imprint marking one as valuable in just the condition we’re in – regardless of wear, tear or imperfection.  What good news to be redeemable because of the person willing to pay the price, not because of the person we are.  The Coke bottle wasn’t valuable in itself.  Rather, it was valuable because the Bottling Company was willing to pay a price for it.

 
So it is with us; we are just like the Coke bottles -- so asserts the writer of the Letter to the Galatians.  Before the coming of Christ, all that we had to recommend us as God’s precious possession was our ability to follow God’s commands (or the law).  Before the coming of Christ, being in right relationship with God depended on doing the laws of God perfectly.  Such a high bar was set that no one could attain to it.  Throughout the Old Testament we see instructions like these (of Psalm 106.3): “Blessed are those who keep justice, and he who does righteousness at all times.”  But then, what about the rest of us?

 
As a human race, we have proved ourselves consistently unable or unwilling at key moments of life to make the right decision, to act with justice, to love God and neighbor as ourselves.  We even turned against God and betrayed his trust; and we turned against one another (Eucharistic Prayer C, p. 370).  By the time adult Jesus was calling people to forgiveness, by the time someone heard him say, “I am the way, the truth and the life,” we knew that we were unable to be justified by our own right-doing.  We knew that we needed to be taken out of the equation of 1) because we do right, 2) therefore God will love us.  We needed to be redeemed from that equation of perfection; we needed to be valuable not because of how good we were in ourselves but because of the goodness of the One who was willing to pay a price for us.

Pay a price indeed.  God loved us enough to become flesh, to leave that mystical realm described by John in his gospel, to come and be God among us.  To leave that place of pure glory – where “[I]n the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God; [where] [a]ll things came into being through him, and without him not one thing came into being.”  To leave that place of pure glory and to come to a place of not-pure-glory, to come to earth, among us, where the Word that had been too almighty to named takes the very specific name of Jesus, where the Word remains God but also is in human flesh.  In Jesus, God reaches across the mystery described in the Gospel of John and enters the realm of birthing, heart-beating, wailing, feeding and swaddling, a realm where humanity needs redemption.

 
So many of us wear around our necks a cross, or a pendant, that marks our faith in Christ.  How like those Coke bottles we are, after all then, those bottles that have imprinted around their necks the instructions for their redemption.  Without the imprinting of Christ upon us, without the sacred sign of Jesus upon us, sung in our sequence hymn, we would not know we are worth paying so great a price, that we are sinners of God’s own redeeming.

 
To whom do we belong?  To whom are we beloved?  To whom are we the pearl without price?  To the Word made flesh, Jesus, who has come to redeem us.  Amen.