REGULATORY RELIGION RECONSIDERED

Set us free, O God, from the bondage of our sins, 

and give us the liberty of that abundant life 

which you have made known to us 

in your Son our Savior Jesus Christ.

99 people out of a hundred see Christianity as a strait jacket, 

    a set of rules to keep us in line. 

But today’s Collect is a prayer for freedom, Set us free O God.

Paul says, For freedom Christ has set us free.

Again, he says, Where the Spirit of the Lord is, there is freedom.

Paul's Christianity is all about what he calls 

          liberty in Christ Jesus. 

In today’s lesson from Isaiah, God says,

      Is not this the fast that I choose:
     . . . to undo the thongs of the yoke,

      to let the oppressed go free,
              and to break every yoke?

The Judeo-Christian story begins with Moses freeing slaves. 

Then Matthew portrays Jesus as the new Moses.

So, how did Christianity get turned 

           into a policies and procedures manual?

We find the answer in one of the most important books 

      of the past century, Escape From Freedom, 

       by psychoanalyst, Erich Fromm.

He wrote it in 1941 trying to understand fascism.

Fromm said modern culture gives us a negative freedom.

It offers no sense of the common good, 

        only individual freedom from

any sense of duty to each other`. 

That freedom from leaves us alienated, anxious, and afraid.

It casts us adrift, uneasy, not knowing how to live. 

Especially in times of change, when anxiety surges,

    we long to escape from freedom.

Fromm said we resort to conformity and authoritarianism

 to escape the anxiety of freedom. 

We try to make sure everyone is alike;

    and to keep the conformity in line,

    we set up authoritarian hierarchies.

We can do that politically or religiously. 

We turn God into a cosmic dictator, 

    stroking and slapping us into sameness. 

Regulatory religion makes us feel a bit safer.

We swaddle our fear in rule-bound religiosity.

It sedates our fear, but it’s not so good for our life. 

Fromm says that negative freedom, freedom from, 

    is doomed unless we match it with positive freedom, 

       freedom to, specifically the freedom to live dynamically,                   

     creatively, and compassionately engaged with the world. 

Psychoanalyst Michael Parsons defines mental health 

      as being fully alive

    and says the path to health starts with discovering     

what stands between us and being fully alive. 

Being fully alive means we experience 

        the ever-newness of things.

We see and appreciate other people for who they are.

We taste food. We hear music. We see the sky.

Jesus said, 

     I have come that they may have life and have it abundantly.

Biblical freedom is positive freedom  

        -- freedom to wake up and live all the way. 

Give us, we just prayed,  the liberty of that abundant life 

which you have made known to us 

in your Son our Savior Jesus Christ.

Whatever holds us back from abundant life, the Bible calls sin.

In the Bible sin isn’t rule-breaking. It’s bondage. 

In Isaiah God says,

      If you remove the yoke from among you . . .

         then your light shall rise in the darkness
         and your gloom be like the noonday.

The yoke is anything that holds us back 

           from being fully alive. 

If we break the yoke, we flourish. 

In regulatory religion, sin may be some naughty rule-breaking.

But hamartia, the Greek word in the Bible we translate as sin,                    

        doesn't mean that.

It’s an archery term meaning to miss the mark.

The novelist Walker Percy asked,

    Is it possible for a person to miss his life 

    as he might miss a bus?

Yes. Happens every day.

Sin is to miss the mark, and the mark is our own life,

        our abundant life as Jesus said,

our one wild and precious life, as Mary Oliver said. 

We don’t miss the mark by making a bad choice. 

The New Testament doesn’t call sin a bad choice.

It repeatedly calls sin bondage, an addiction,

    not necessarily to a chemical but bondage 

   to thinking and feeling in ruts,

    any set ways of interpreting situations, 

    any habitual moods and attitudes.

The question for us, as individuals and as a community, is: 

what attitudes, what habits of thought, emotion, 

and behavior stand between us and being fully alive?

Some of our bonds are patterns we learned early in life.

Others come from the spirit of our present time and place. 

Paul called those culturally prescribed 

     feelings and attitudes the wisdom of this age

      in today's lesson. 

In Romans, he calls them,

     the powers and the principalities of the present age.

Fascism in the 1930s 

    and Islamic fundamentalism in the 1980s are examples.

But we are not exempt. 

Some of us remember the Red Scare of the 50s, 

     then the libertine madness of the 60s, 

     followed by our own fundamentalist backlash in 80s.

The most common form of cultural bondage is fear. 

Jesus didn’t actually have much to say about sex, 

          drugs, and rock & roll.

The instruction he gave by far more often 

          than any other was Do not be afraid. 

God has not given us a spirit of fear but of power 

    and of love and of a sound mind. 2 Timothy 1: 7.

We all have our individual fears. 

Our families have their fears. 

And the place we live has its own set of fears.

So how do we get free of bondage to fear?

The answer we learn in Epiphany, the season of light,

     is to take our fears out of the closet.

They get their power from hiding in our unconscious 

            or semiconscious minds.

We can shine the light of Christ on them 

        just by looking at them, 

naming them out loud, 

and telling someone else about them. 

Our fears hold us in bondage 

     because we don’t even know what they are. 

So, here’s my invitation to you this Epiphany:

Don’t try to conquer your fears. That will backfire.

Don’t banish them with heroic courage.

Just look at your fears, name them, and let them be. 

Make an inventory of your personal fears, 

     your family fears,

     and the fears that beset the place you live.

Broomfield fear may not be the same as Aurora fear.

For the personal fears, 

      you can journal about them or make a list. 

For the community fears, 

       it’s best to talk with someone else 

who lives where you do. 

Figure out together what your community is afraid of. 

Then, if you are so inclined, 

     you might have a word with Jesus about it.

And, if you’ve got a little Ignatian streak, 

     you might engage your sacred imagination

     to hear what he’s got to say.

He can be pretty surprising at times.

Maybe he’ll quote the immortal words of Geena Davis  

       from The Fly: Be afraid. Be very afraid.

But probably not. That isn’t what he said in the Gospels. 

So call the fears out of the darkness and into the light. 

We are an activist culture; we like to solve problems. 

We want to jump in and fix things. 

But Epiphany isn’t about fixing. 

Epiphany is more patient.

It’s about awareness, mindfulness, 

         simply seeing how things are.

Just knowing makes all the difference.

Jesus knew that awareness, simple awareness, 

      is gently but powerfully liberating.

That’s why he said, 

You shall know the truth 

and the truth shall make you free. 

                                                                             Amen

NEAR AT HAND A CANDLE GLOWS

We get our share of wind and snow 
     here on the Front Range, 

     but we also get some warm, sunny days 
     in a Colorado winter. 

That doesn’t happen in Russia’s Ural Mountains 
         this time of year.

Winter there sets in early and stays long. 

Their average temperature for this month 

            runs minus 6 degrees Fahrenheit.

Boris Pasternak’s poem A Winter’s Night is set 

     in the Ural Mountains in February.

The night is a dark, cold blizzard; 
       but in the poet’s room, a candle glows. 

He writes: 

     It snowed and snowed throughout the land

     A ceaseless snowing

     On the table a candle glowed . . . . 

     Out of the yard, snowflakes swarmed 

     To beat against the windowpane.

     The blizzard sculpted on the glass

     Designs of arrows and of whorls

     On the table, a candle glowed.

(quotations are blended from different translations

 for clarity)

David Lean directed the classic movie, Dr. Zhivago, 

             based on Pasternak’s novel.

In that film, Lean includes an unforgettable visual

      of this poem’s bitter night and the glowing candle.

For Zhivago, as for Pasternak, the night was a metaphor 

     of life in totalitarian Russia, where art and faith 

     were both condemned as counter-revolutionary.

Holy Russia, once the most Christian of nations,

     saw churches looted and priests murdered 
                in the Revolution.

In the land of Dostoyevsky, Turgenev, and Pushkin, 

     literature was broadly held in contempt 
                 and specifically censured

                 just for dealing with the personal life. 

Pasternak was a Tolstoy-disciple, 
     Russian Orthodox, mystical Christian

     and he was a Romantic artist who worshiped 
    at the altar of beauty.

He was deeply personal 
 – the opposite of a  political ideologue or propagandist. 

He lost friends in the Great Purge of 37.

His own name was on the execution list, but Stalin said, 

     Leave the holy fool alone. 

Then Stalin changed his mind. 

Pasternak’s mistress, Olga, was sent to the Gulag 

      for 4 years of interrogation 
      trying to get incriminating evidence against him. 

He had to reject the Nobel Prize on pain of deportation.

Pasternak’s time was no bed of roses. 
It was a night of blizzard.

But while the blizzard howled in his outer life; 
          inside, a candle glowed.

On this Candlemas, we ask: what was that candle?

The last two stanzas of our poem read:

To the candle a draft from the corner blew
And the flame gave a toss
And two angelic wings it grew
In the shape of a cross

All February is the blizzard’s to command
And so it goes
A candle glows near at hand
A candle glows.

The breeze, the draft, the Holy Spirit if you will, 
       blows the flame into the shape of a cross.

The candle is the light of Christ. 

February, the cold season of our life, 
        is the blizzard’s to command, Pasternak says.

But a candle glows near at hand. 

We Christians do love our candles. 

We love them because they emanate something 
         like the light of Christ. 

Last week we heard Isaiah prophesy, 

Those who walked in darkness 
          have seen a great light. 

Those who dwelled in a land of deep darkness

       -- on them the light has dawned.

Today’s gospel fulfills that prophesy. 

 When old Simeon saw the baby Jesus presented 
         in the Temple, he said, 

My eyes have seen your salvation . . . 

             a light to enlighten the nations . . . . 

 Classic Christian spirituality is called the 3-fold path.

It consists of purgation (which means ego-surrender),

illumination (which means seeing the light in our darkness), and union (finding our true selves in God).

They aren’t serial stages, so you do one, 
           then proceed to the next.

All three are happening every day.

In Epiphany, we learn the way of illumination.

Illumination can be a mystical 
            flash-of-light experience like Paul’s.

But usually it’s something more ordinary, 
          yet just as precious.

We stop to notice the candles glowing in our lives. 

We can find our blizzard pretty easily. 

These are challenging times for all of us as a people.

And each of us has our individual winds 
             of fear and despair.

But in the midst of all that, just look around ask:

     who or what are my candles?

Whose smile brightens my day? 

Who shows me some courtesy, even kindness? 

Who makes me laugh? Who holds the Christ light for (me)  

in the nighttime of (my) fear?

Our candles are oft-times people – but not always.  

It could be a book or a ministry.

It could be the choir or the Farmer’s Market 
        or the Women’s Gathering.

It could be a song, a poem, or skiing. 

So, what are the candles in your dark blizzard?

The way of illumination stops to notice them. 

Then we recognize them for what they are 
       – let the Spirit breathe on each flame

     until it forms a cross.

Recognize your candles for the light of Christ.

They are nothing less than Jesus mediated

 – knowingly or not, intentionally or not –

     by this utterly human world.

Look at your candles and say, Thank you, Jesus. 

Then remember what you’re here for. 

Jesus said, You are the light of the world.

Paul said, You are the light in the Lord. 

          Walk as children of light.

You are here to be the light for someone else. 

We don’t become the light by acting flashy or impressive.

It’s a candle, not a stage light from Vegas.

The candle’s glow is gentle, unobtrusive. 

We share the Christ light not so much  

              by what we do or say as how we listen.

We can be the light for each other just 

     by being faithfully present, and respectfully caring,

by seeing each other as God’s children

and ourselves as agents of God’s love. 

Our Evening Prayer begins,

     O gracious light, pure brightness 

     of the ever living Father in Heaven,

     O Jesus Christ, holy and blessed. . . 

Our Eucharistic Prayer says,

     You have caused a new light to shine in our hearts. 

So when the blizzard howls in your life, 
       
       remember Pasternak’s promise,

     Close at hand a candle glows.

Notice it. Cherish it. Share it.