Overcoming is Redemptive

It was weird to write 2026 on the top of my notes for meeting today.

I’m not quite old enough to remember when 2001: A Space Odyssey came out, but I’m do have my own version of that date that’s in the future, and it’s from the movie Back to the Future, which came out when I was ten. In Back to the Future, which maybe we should watch as a family, Marty McFly travels to the distant past, to 1955, and then travels to the distant future, which happens to fall on the date of my fortieth birthday, October 21, 2015.

The future was amazing, in an eighties sort of way. When we got to the actual 2015 and we still didn’t have hoverboards or flying cars, lots of us Gen Xers were very disappointed. For my part, the moral of the story is that I don’t know what’s going to happen in the future. Of course, the movie completely missed that in the future I would carry around a hyperconnected supercomputer in my pocket (actually two of them), and that I would mostly use the supercomputer as a way to distract myself and to let other people distract me.

But it is funny, right? We just really don’t know what’s going to happen, not even if we’re really smart about it. We don’t know how the things we do now are going to shape us in the future.

Back to that trillion dollar distraction machine I carry around in my pocket, I started following this rabbi on Instagram, and no, the rabbi isn’t Jesus, and no this isn’t the start of a joke, it’s literally just this rabbi whose videos I sometimes watch on Instagram. As a side note on that, today’s meeting is a little bit about redemption, and there’s something quite redemptive about the distraction machine I carry also connecting me to the teachings of this Instagram rabbi on the Internet.

Anyway, this week, I’ve been thinking about hardship, and a video popped up in my feed telling a story about Moses asking God for help, and God giving Moses what he needed to become. To become what, we might ask? To become Moses!

Moses had quite a few advantages in life, despite being dumped into a space pod and sent from the planet Krypton to be raised by foreigners. Oh wait, sorry, that was superman, Moses was the one who was abandoned by his parents to be raised by a shepherd. Wait, wrong again, Moses was the reed basket in the Nile.

It’s a very relatable story. I wonder how many people have retold the story of Moses as a really good YA story? Abandoned by his parents, but raised in the palace as an outsider, only later to become The Special. I guess that’s probably half the YA novels I’ve read.

So Moses gets raised by the Pharoah or at least the Pharoah’s people, and has a reasonably time of it until he’s like 40, at which point God gives him what he needs in order to become who he must become.

What Moses needs, apparently, is a felony conviction.

I do want to point out that there is a victim besides Moses in this story, here’s a snippet of the story from the second chapter of Exodus:

One day, after Moses had grown up, he went out to where his own people were and watched them at their hard labor. He saw an Egyptian beating a Hebrew, one of his own people. Looking this way and that and seeing no one, he killed the Egyptian and hid him in the sand.

That poor murdered guy didn’t even get his name in the story, and even though he was a jerk, he didn’t deserve to be murdered and left in the sand.

Tradition tells us this book was actually written by Moses, but that doesn’t make any sense to me, because by the same tradition, Moses is also alleged to have written about his own death. But my point is, Moses murdered a guy because he was beating up one of his people, and that’s from the most sympathetic telling of the story, so sympathetic that tradition has handed down that it was written by the murderer.

You might recall that the reason the Hebrew children are in Egypt is that Joseph went down there during a famine and got super cool with the Pharoah at the time. And thinking about Joseph for a moment, think of all the hardship that turned him into who he became. His own brothers threw him in a well and sold him into slavery, talk about hardship!

I know that this meeting has felt like a bunch of disparate stories of Moses and Marty McFly, but there is a point to all of it. You are going to encounter hardships in your life, and when you do, one of two things will happen:

* It will kill you, and you’ll be dead,

or

* you’ll overcome it.

Those really are the only two outcomes, I suppose there are three outcomes if you count being in the s**t as a separate one from still being alive, but I think those two are synonyms.

I’ve spent the past twenty years telling you all that I don’t think suffering is redemptive, and I still believe that. I was raised with this theology that Jesus suffered on the cross because I’m a sinner, and that the torture he endured, not the overcoming of it, but that actual suffering, is the reason for my redemption. While I do believe that the teachings of Christ are centered on redemption, that specific tenet is deeply disordered in important ways. It’s led to Christians doing odd things like wearing hair shirts. But it’s also led us to doing horrific things like causing intentional suffering to people accused or convicted of crimes, because, you know, redemption.

That’s some b******t.

But overcoming hardship, there’s something there that’s incredibly redemptive. When I think back on overcoming hardships myself, they’re my most redemptive and formative moments. I think about the time I got depressed and failed two classes one semester in college. That, led to a whole chain of events - moving to Seattle, getting a job, living with my brothers - that in turn brought me here. And specifically, it brought me here as a person who has some understanding of anxiety and depression, and who can use that perspective to help others. Talk about redemption!

Our overcoming hardships is the most redemptive thing in our lives.

We don’t know what’s going to happen, or how it’s going to turn out, anymore than we did in 1985 when Back to the Future came out. But we do know there will be hardship, and overcoming it is what’s going to make us who we will become.

I love you all, and as we light our candles, I’ll be thinking about overcoming and the hardship I’m undergoing right now of still not having a flying car.

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