The Fifth Sunday of Lent, 25 April 2012

When I got to know Lillian she was in her early 90s. She lived on her own in Portsmouth's North End, not very far from the house where she had spent her childhood. Her family were Plymouth Brethren, but they used to attend Sunday worship at London Road Baptist Church, where they would sit in the gallery with the Callaghan family. She always remembered that in those days their son was known as Leonard.

I used to take Holy Communion to her. Her world had shrunk to one room, where she lived, ate, and slept. She saw her City Council carers every day; she saw me every month; and she received occasional visits from the niece who was all the family she had.

She was very unhappy. She had much to be unhappy about. I remember that one winter afternoon I arrived to find her sitting in almost total darkness. Four of the five lightbulbs in her room had expired, and her carer had told her that health and safety did not allow him to climb a ladder to change them. But over time I discovered that there was more to her unhappiness than the indignity of old age. She told me about the young man who had fallen in love with her more than seventy years previously. 'He was besotted' she said. Her family approved, and gave him every encouragement. He begged her to marry him. But Lillian couldn't stand him, and longed to be free of his attentions. Times were hard and the young man decided to emigrate to Australia. He would go, he said, only if Lillian would follow him and begin a new life on the far side of the world. Seeing her chance, Lillian agreed. She went with him to the dock at Southampton and waved him off, knowing full well that she would never keep her promise. She never saw him again.

Her family were furious and were determined that she would not be so headstrong again. They arranged for her to marry her cousin, and this time she had no choice. Lillian rarely spoke about her husband. I supposed that the photograph that sat on top of the television, of a man a gentle face and wavy hair, was of him. On an early visit I was surprised to pick up a teaspoon and find it emblazoned with a swastika. Her husband had been in the navy, she told me, and the teaspoon was a trophy he'd taken from a captured Nazi U-Boat.

But that was all, until one day when I was visiting another elderly parishioner, coincidentally also called Lillian. She asked after her namesake, and then enquired 'Has she ever told you about her husband?' 'No' I said. 'He was homosexual' she said 'he left her and went to live with a man'.

Suddenly the pieces of the jigsaw fell into place, and the picture the pieces revealed was of a hellish vortex. Lillian's fundamentalist Brethren upbringing; her deceit of that first suitor; her coercion into marriage; her husband whose sexual orientation would at that time have exposed him to prosecution, and would in street-fighting Portsmouth have endangered his life; his abandonment of her: all these combined to produce a toxic mix of shame, guilt, rage and disgust. She was unhappy, and her story remains one of the unhappiest I have ever heard. It is one of the reasons why I believe in redemption, which I understand as death and resurrection.

Lillian was trapped. She was trapped by her guilt at her treatment of the man who had loved her. She was trapped by her belief that as a punishment she had been married to a man who could not love her. She was trapped by the conviction that she was quite alone in the world and she was trapped by the suspicion that everyone else was happy in a way she hadn't been since those far-off days at London Road Baptist Church, where the future Prime Minister's sister had played the piano for the Sunday School.

It is easy to dismiss the notion of redemption as a concept belonging solely to the market place, as a sub-Christian theology, unworthy of the God who is love. But Lillian was trapped by her guilt at her deceit, by her belief in her punishment and by her conviction of her isolation. She was powerless to free herself. She needed to be redeemed. She needed to take hold of her Baptism. She needed to believe that God had forgiven her her deceit of that young man. She needed to believe that her marriage was not a punishment but a tragedy, for her and for her husband. She needed to believe that she was not alone. But the belief that she had been forgiven, the belief that she had not been punished and the belief that she was not alone was, to Lillian, belief that was cross-shaped. For Lillian to believe that she was forgiven; for her to believe that she was not the victim of a cosmic punishment; for her to believe that she was not alone, she would have had to surrender the foundation stones that had constituted her identity for over sixty years. She would have had to die to self and be born anew. And that death and resurrection - that redemption - is, I believe, made possible only by the grace of God's Holy Spirit.

That is what it is to be redeemed. It is to give up whatever we cling to most closely, and to re-discover ourselves as nothing less and nothing more than the beloved children of God. It is to die and to be re-born.

I wish I could offer you a post-script, a happy ending to Lillian's story, but I can't. I often sat with her, longing that through the Scriptures, through the sacrament of Holy Communion, or, more particularly, through my wise words, she might take hold of her Baptism and might believe herself forgiven and beloved. But she did not. When I left Portsmouth she was still unhappy, and she died some years later. And this apparently unhappy ending taught me one of the things from which I need to be redeemed - the false vanity of priesthood which takes itself too seriously. I am still learning, even though there is unimpeachable precedent for the Lord being carried on the shoulders of an ass.

Of course I don't know how Lillian's story really ends, if it has ended, for it ends with the One with whom it began, with whom all our stories began. We have been plunged into the cleansing, killing waters of Baptism, there to die and to be re-born. We are redeemed. And the One who has redeemed us is faithful, and he will complete his work.