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In 1896 a company named Sperry & Hutchinson came up with a brilliant idea.
They began to sell green-colored stamps to retailers – department stores, supermarkets, and gasoline stations – who then gave them away to their customers in proportion to the goods they bought at their stores.
It took a whopping 1200 S&H Green Stamps to fill an official savings book – and shoppers had to lick the backs of every single one.
That’s when the fun really began. You could head off to an S&H “redemption center.”
At the redemption center you could exchange any number of completed savings books for some neat stuff.
People would come home with a new toaster. Or a lamp. Or an alarm clock. Or maybe even a new couch. My mom regularly added S&H items to her kitchen.
At one point Sperry & Hutchinson was printing three times as many stamps every year as the U.S. government. They promoted their rewards catalogue as being the largest publication in America.
In 1964 the Kingston Trio, a popular folk group, sang “lickin’ them green stamps, lickin’ them blue” in their hit song Them Poems. Celebrities like Dinah Shore, in the picture above, gladly provided endorsements.
If you saved enough stamps and filled enough books, you could even negotiate what prizes you were seeking.
An elementary school in Erie, Pennsylvania redeemed 5.4 million stamps so they could buy two gorillas for the local zoo.
The heyday of S&H Green Stamps was the 1930s through the 1980s. Then the air went out of the rewards industry. Today all the redemption centers are closed.
But just in case you find a stash of unredeemed savings books in your great uncle’s garage, don’t despair. The S&H Company has completely digitized their entire catalogue. All those stamps can be registered as “green points” online and converted into cash. Green stamps have turned out to be a gift that never expires.
In Ephesians 1:7, the apostle Paul writes about another such gift:
“In [Christ] we have redemption through his blood, the forgiveness of sins, in accordance with the riches of God’s grace.”
In other words, there happens to be a redemption center that will never close.
It’s the cross.
We never need to bring anything to exchange for what is offered there. We don’t have to work hard, or store up our best efforts, or somehow manage to deserve the mercy of God.
To the cross we can bring our own spiritual brokenness and trade it, straight up, for God’s miracle of spiritual healing.
It’s a restoration that begins in this world and will be completed in the next.
When it comes to green stamps, it’s worth keeping your eyes open if you’re cleaning out your grandmother’s attic this weekend.
But when it comes to God’s plan of redemption, it turns out the only thing that actually needs to be saved is you and me.