Through Stained Glass: The Third Week of Lent -- Becoming Free

                  

The Third Sunday of Lent                 

A brother came to visit Abba Moses and asked him for advice. The old man said to him, “Go, sit in your cell, and your cell will teach you everything.”

Reflection Title: Becoming Free

Scripture: Exodus 20:1-17; Psalm 19; 1 Corinthians 1:18-25; John 2:13-22

In the fourth century, the desert fathers and mothers went to live in isolation, far from the cities they believed corrupted the soul and distanced them from God by celebrating personal indulgence over self-discipline. Today, we live in a world where everything seems permissible, where slogans about individual freedom have become the public mantra, and where we are conditioned to believe we can say anything we want, whenever we want, to whomever we want—our unfettered will and personal passions the only guides to behavior. 

As Christians, we see the world differently. We know there is a responsibility attached to God’s gift of free will; there is a structure that defines our lives, a creative tension between our chronic individualism and God’s stabilizing ordinances. In Exodus, God shapes the beloved community—not with a threatening set of rules that tell us to “do this or else,” but with an ethical instruction guide to living in loving relationship, a kind of touchstone we embrace against our lesser instincts. “More desired are (God’s ordinances) than gold…sweeter than honey and drippings of the honeycomb,” says the psalmist. God celebrates our ability to choose freely precisely by offering us a liberating framework through which we can live into our best selves. As James Finley writes, “Our deepest freedom rests not in our freedom to do what we want to do but rather in our freedom to become who God wills us to be.” 

Discerning who God wills us to be…that is the existential question we grapple with all our lives as Christians. What are our special gifts and talents? How do they intersect with the needs of others? How must we put ourselves at risk (remember risk-taking from last week?) for the beloved community? In our questioning, we know and understand that we are and always will be “works in progress.” Unpolished…unfinished…always emerging…free to become more tomorrow than we are today. This “becoming” is what we mean by spiritual development, and it is the work of a lifetime—freely awarded and guided by God. Thomas Merton reminds us that “it is a superficial freedom to wander aimlessly here or there, to taste this or that, to make a choice of distractions…it claims to be a freedom of ‘choice’ when it has evaded the basic task of discovering who it is that chooses.” If we see the commandments handed to Moses simply as rules and regulations for us as individuals, they become only about our personal success or failure, and it is easy to avoid probing our relational identity too deeply. If, on the other hand, we consider the commandments as ethical teaching, we are drawn into the broader context of community and of our individual responsibility within it. Our individual freedom is relevant only in the context of our relationship to others, and God’s teaching becomes about invitation and sharing, not exclusion and judgment. 

When Jesus disrupted the temple, he turned the world upside down. Rampant and untethered individual freedom had distorted community life and ignored God’s precepts. As tables flew, it must have felt like the situation Walter Brueggemann describes when he says, “The world for which you have been so carefully prepared is being taken away from you by the grace of God.” This is indeed liberating grace—grace that sweeps our ego-constructed worlds away, reminds us how to live, and gives us more freedom than we could ever imagine or realize on our own. Our responsibility—our challenge—is to engage in the kind of self-reflection and self-examination that will enable us to use our God-gifted freedom wisely.

Like the desert fathers and mothers, we, too, must regularly “go into our cells” to discover ourselves again—to hear anew God’s promise to show “steadfast love to the thousandth generation of those who love me and keep my commandments.” Lent is a call to do that work again and again and again. May you have the courage to enter it with joyful abandon!

The Questions for the Week:

• How do the popular slogans we hear about freedom penetrate our cultural life and shape our attitudes toward ourselves and others? What ethical considerations, if any, are embedded in them? How do they relate to God’s instructions to the Israelites?
• When have you felt most free? What adjectives would you use to describe these feelings? What do you need to do in your life to sustain your own sense of liberation? How does this intersect with your role in community? How is it different from the superficial freedom Merton describes? How do you feel God living God’s self in you?
• Dietrich Bonhoeffer called his prison confinement a “steam bath for the soul.” How do you live with God’s commandments? Are they restrictions that elicit fear? A warm blanket of comfort? An awakening of opportunity? Or something else?
• Mark Nepo writes, “It is difficult to fly from the birdcage if you see the bars as branches on which to rest.” Where do you find yourself substituting your own ideas of freedom from the ones God has provided you? How might you disrupt the comfort offered by your own ego?
• How are you taking time during Lent to move into emptiness, to be mindful of the Holy Spirit, and to risk using your birthright gifts in service to community? 

The Practices for the Week:

• Create a prayer or meditation space in your home or garden—a kind of “cell” where you can peel away the layers and let the cell tell you all you need to know. Keep a journal of your discoveries.
• Explore the ways that form and structure create freedom of expression by writing Haiku, an acrostic poem using words like free, becoming, precept, wisdom, or other words from the scripture readings; a collect; a sonnet; etc.
• Honor the Sabbath. Turn off your devices—TV, phone and computer—and throw away your “to do” list of things you’ve saved for the weekend. Try not to drive anywhere. Don’t find time for “work.” See what freedom you can discover by resting with God and in relationship with those around you.

The Prayer of the Week:

Be still and know that I am God.

Be still and know that I am.

Be still and know.

Be still.

Be.