Choosing Redemption Last month, while talking about forgiveness and redemption at the Recovery Church circle, the question came up of whether or not we can be redeemed from God’s love. Hearing that phrase, I imagined a demon bargaining with God to gain control of some poor peasant’s soul, as if God were in the business of buying and selling. Originally, redemption meant to buy back what one had sold. In ancient Mesopotamia, as Robert C. Ellickson and Charles DiA Thorland point out, life was precarious. Families were vulnerable to “crop failures, illness, and attack by pillagers.” [1] Families often had to borrow money, then were unable to pay it back.…
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Pentecost, the Holy Spirit, and God’s Hands
Riding Roller Coasters Years ago, while preparing to preach about Pentecost, a holiday that at the time I knew nothing about, I discovered that one of my Unitarian Universalist colleagues had once been a Pentecostal minister. Pentecost and Pentecostal must be related, I figured, so I asked him to explain what this holiday was. He didn’t answer directly. Instead, he told me about an amusement park in the town where he grew up. The park was famous for its roller coasters. When he’d been a boy, they had this old wooden one. The train would chug along, inching up the slope, painfully cresting the hill, and then dash down the…