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God Gets Really Happy When We Are Ourselves
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| 8/26/2007 |
The Readings are found here.
What are the bonds that hold us down in life?
And what does life look like when those bonds are broken?
To me, that’s the heart of the passages from both Jeremiah and the Gospel. Because both are about a very basic idea, one that lies beneath a lot of the questions of sin and grace, struggle and salvation, and even doubt and hope. And that idea is – God’s joy over our being more and more who God made each of us to be, our being what God dreamed up for each of us deep in the divine imagination.
God gets really happy when we are ourselves.
And if that sounds disappointingly simple, let’s live into the Gospel reading for a moment, and it’ll become evident what a complex process it is. Becoming freed up is never easy.
For starters, in this case, Jesus has to disobey religious law to get the job done. And though the result was great – a woman was healed – that didn’t matter to the religious authorities. For a moment, their view had gotten skewed, and they were more interested in religion than in the person.
Now, before we go any further, it’s important to take this out of the first century in the Near East, and to realize it’s meant for any religious context – the underlying message is very broad-based. Religions of all stripes try, at times, to control God’s power that way. Instead of working on God’s behalf, we humans go to work on our own. Instead of freeing someone on their terms, we prefer to free them on ours.
The Gospel story is a great metaphor for that. Jesus set a woman free from bondage on the Sabbath day, and it was dissed for not being properly religious. How ironic – and what a difficult position for him to be in. Here he is, standing there, aware of the rich and really important tradition of religion that informed his people, informed him – he’s aware of that, and yet suddenly confronted with the reality of a human being who stands before him with all the problems of her humanity laid bare.
So here’s Jesus. The religion, or the human? He has to choose. And he does.
Now, I don’t say all this as someone who’s going to talk about being “spiritual but not religious” – obviously, I believe in the potential of organized religion, I feel called to it. I speak from within the establishment, not outside of it. But even as we stand inside of what is one of the founding churches of religion in this country, what’s important to recognize, what I think Jesus is reminding us, is that religion – in the 17th century, in the 21st century, or the first century – is a means but not an end. There’s another end, another point to the whole thing, and Jesus gets at it in a real physical, explicit way.
The point Jesus is showing us through this woman in Luke’s Gospel is our freedom within God – our freedom from the spirits that hold us back, the freedom to be the selves God made us to be and that most of us work all our lives toward being. Religion can help with this process, it can help a lot. But being religious in some proper way should not be mistaken for our fullness in God. Religion can be a way either of opening up that fullness in someone, or of shutting it down – of confining the fullness of a child of God, of editing or censoring what that person was made to be.
Religion can cause that problem. It can also fight it. Religion is only as good as the spirit that moves it. Which is sort of Jesus’ point here.
The day of worship, the official day of organized religion, Jesus seems to say, is supposed to be about freeing us from the things that have bound us. We may not be able to see what those bonds are just by looking into someone’s life. From the outside, we may not understand what grips them at the deepest levels. And that’s part of this story, too – look back at the Gospel passage. The first thing we’re told about this woman isn’t anything about her back. It was that she had a spirit that had crippled her for eighteen years. Now, whatever “spirit” meant to someone writing in the first century is a separate topic. But for us, I think it’s a pretty useful reminder that Jesus wants to free us from the inside out – because I think we all know that it’s on the inside where the very worst bonds can exist.
Jesus understands that; it’s kind of where he lives, and freedom from those things is kind of what he’s about. Which is what I want to bring home, where I want to take us.
But there’s a hitch here, first, a caveat, that’s also right here in the story. When we humans talk about freedom, we usually mean a freedom that we can control. That’s the kind of freedom that folks are usually the most comfortable with. For instance, the “freedom” that we “enforce” in another country – a paradox that doesn’t tend to bother us too much.
But the kind of freedom that Jesus brings to the woman in the Gospel, this is a much more unruly and uncontrollable freedom. It happens when and where it isn’t supposed to. It’s less something we plan for our lives, and more like something that re-maps our lives for us. It shows us the things that bind us, the stuff we know about, or at least can guess at, and the stuff that’s so deep or so big we haven’t been able to see the forest for the trees. Jesus’ brand of healing loosens these things that grip us, at the same time that his healing gives us even more shape and more form. It’s really kind of a cool irony – Jesus frees us up from what we’re not, so that we can be … what we are.
Which is why the stories of his healing are never to be taken strictly as physical healing, which would really just be a cure. Jesus’ healing takes place on a grander scale. It’s the deeper kind of healing that the soul longs for, the healing that can go underneath whatever our surface problems appear to be, and get down to the places in us where we are truly bent over, truly hemorrhaging, truly paralyzed, or covered in sores.
The world may not see those things when it looks at us – but then, what the world sees and what Jesus’ compassionate eyes see are two very different things.
And when Jesus reaches deep down into those places, it’s rarely just one clear-cut moment – that’s the difference between Jesus and magic. I don’t imagine that the woman in the Gospel story walked away feeling normal – at least, what “normal” had been for her. What was “normal,” what was “home,” had changed. Realistically, I imagine that, though joyful, she also felt awkward, off-balance, maybe stumbling a bit, into this new self, this new alignment. I imagine things took awhile to shake down for her, it took awhile for the dust to settle into new patterns inside.
But isn’t that the way it works, really? As Jesus does his work with us, loosening us from our bonds, freeing us from our bent backs, we can end up feeling estranged from what we had been, exiled from the inner world we used to know so well; we can feel we’ve lost the “clothes” that used to be comfortable, so to speak.
The theologian James Alison, a gay Catholic theologian who speaks searingly from what it’s like to be so rejected because of his sexuality by the church he loves, has a great way of looking at it. He writes that an exile – someone away from the homeland, away from the familiar – is someone who is having to let go of one self in order to discover a new one. To let go of one way of knowing who they are, and to grow into a new and probably better way of knowing who they were made to be.
And even though that can feel chaotic, it’s not – it’s not a loss with no gain. It is freedom to be more truly ourselves in every particularity and idiosyncrasy, every curve of the face and color of the skin and gesture and way of laughing and the things that delight us and the things that break our hearts. It’s not a freedom that calls us into formlessness – which is really only freedom from something. But it’s a freedom that calls us more and more into the forms we were made to be – the freedom to be something.
Which puts us right into the heart of the prophet Jeremiah’s call: the freedom to be who God has made us each to be – and God’s ability to lead us there, despite all our kicking and screaming. We are a bit like exiles, as God nudges us to let go of an older way of knowing who we are, and to grow into an even truer one.
When I was first experiencing my call to be a priest, the priest I was working with to figure it all out pulled out this passage of Jeremiah’s call. And during that time, I prayed over it a lot, turning it inside out and upside down and every which way, because it was turning me every which way. And what I found, through time and over time, is that God’s call to me, like that to us all, was really mainly to be more fully myself than I had thought possible or even understood was there.
It wasn’t just about a kind of job. I do believe God was calling me to be a priest, but it was more – it was to an identity that was woven into my being from the very beginning, whatever “beginning” means. And like Jeremiah, probably like lots of us, I resisted it at first – and at second, and third, and fourth….. I came up with reasons why this would never work, reasons this was surely about some grand and pretty picture but not about the gritty specifics of my own real day-to-day life.
But I learned I was wrong about that. When God works with us, God works with each of us deep in the stuff of our lives, in our very real relationships, in our work, in the gritty memories and glittering hopes that we carry – in the realness being bent over and in the hope of standing up again. It happens all over the place in our lives, and one of the most important places it happens is in our shared life together in the church.
Jesus didn’t take this woman off to some solitary place to be healed – he did it smack dab in the middle of the worshiping community. He didn’t say not to come together in religion – he just upped the ante on what that meant.
And that’s why being in this shared religious, yes “religious,” community is important – it’s not where we learn to be more proper, but where we learn to be more us.
It happens here when we worship together, when we are present to each other on a Sunday morning. Another great example is the DOCC program we have coming up next month, which will take us deep into our journeys alone and with each other. As we probe the questions of our lives, we’ll find that the ways God is working with us rise to the surface and bubble out of our mouths. And we’ll be more “us” in the Sages, or working with the kids, or the 20s/30s, now the Bridge. None of these things are about being a better person; it isn’t about self-improvement. Doing DOCC, or any of the stuff we do together, isn’t about spiffing up our spiritual selves, putting on our religious best.
Doing the things we do together here, whether formal or informal, whether planned, or coming out of nowhere – is about being more truly ourselves. God wants us to be, not more perfect, but more us. And I would hope that religious communities become the places that reflect that best.
That’s the real healing in this journey together. It’s about God calling us to be the people God has always known us to be. As we each live into that more deeply and beautifully, year after year, through the seasons of our lives – I have no doubt that God is smiling.
And we will all gather around, and just like the crowd in the Gospel, we will rejoice.
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