Through Stained Glass: The Third Week of Lent -- Becoming Free: Paying Attention to the Questions

 Becoming Free -- Paying Attention to the Questions

1 Cor. 7:25 - 10:1-13

Mark 5:21 - 7:23

           The gospel readings for this week recount important miracle stories, episodes in which Jesus demonstrates his power, exorcises demons, and heals suffering people in order to free them from their limitations and eliminate obstacles to their personal fulfillment. In every case, he removes burdens that keep folks from living their best lives. He restores—or in some cases establishes—their freedom to live meaningfully in a society that has often marginalized them. He frees them from their own fear and empowers their agency within the community. In Mark 6, Jesus gives instructions to the disciples—the missionary commands that will govern their conduct as they travel on behalf of his ministry, and in chapter 7 he challenges the “false teaching” of the elders, liberating the system itself from rigid practices that inhibit personal growth and accountability. 

In his epistle to the Corinthians, Paul is also working out a system of practices to guide community life. He speaks at length about his own freedom in doing so, admitting that he takes on different roles to reach different folks. “What then is my reward?” he writes. “Just this: that in my proclamation I may make the gospel free of charge, so as not to make full use of my rights in the gospel. For though I am free with respect to all, I have made myself a slave to all, so that I might win more of them.”

Everything we have read this week is about law and freedom—the law to guide us and the freedom to become whole under the law. As if this were not enough, we have also been making our way through Hard and Holy Work on Kirk Night, examining the Exodus story and its call for us to re-examine our systems of belief, to pay attention to the places where laws and cultural norms have restricted freedom, and to open ourselves to new and more just ways of being in community. From the beginning of the week with Psalm 119, in our reading of Exodus, and through the gospel of Mark and the letter to the Corinthians, we have been exploring both our external and internal worlds through the lens of God’s commandments to the Israelites—our “conscience companions,” if you will. We have done that alone “in our cells” and together with others in our church family.

We live in a time that demands our attention. We can easily find examples of “false teaching” and of man-made laws designed to marginalize some in order to raise others to power over them. Like Paul, we must work out our theology in the context of the world around us; like the disciples Jesus instructs, we must sometimes make choices about where we go and what we do; like the psalmist, we beg God for guidance and help in re-committing ourselves to the justice, mercy and love Jesus embodied through his miracles. This is indeed “hard and holy work.” It takes discipline, devotion, self-awareness, and honesty. It requires us to take risks. It encourages our vulnerability. Whether we like it or not, the world too often promotes a kind of self-centered freedom that exploits our desire for power, safety, influence, and control. Based on fear, such a system discourages our questions and diminishes our freedom to become again with each new day. 

In his letter to a young poet, Rainer Maria Rilke advised him to “love the questions.” Kelli, in fact, preached a wonderful sermon on this during Adam’s sabbatical! Rilke writes:

Be patient toward all that is unsolved in your heart and try to love the questions

themselves, like locked rooms and like books that are now written in a very

foreign tongue. Do not now seek the answers, which cannot be given you because

you would not be able to live them. And the point is, to live everything. Live the

questions now. Perhaps you will then gradually, without noticing it, live along

some distant day into the answer.

Isn’t this what becoming free is all about? Aren’t God’s precepts and Jesus’ teachings and Paul’s theological ramblings in fact questions we must ask ourselves every day? Isn’t this the constant hard and holy work of our lives? 

Some years ago, I visited the Galleria dell’ Accademia in Florence where the famous statue of David lives. It is stupendous and unforgettable. But most arresting to me was not this masterpiece, but the sculptures of “prisoners” emerging from blocks of stone that lined the corridor into the main chamber. Michaelangelo famously said that “the sculptor’s hand can only break the spell to free the figures slumbering in the stone.” I like to think of our becoming as this kind of release. God generously, lovingly, hopefully breaks the spell, and we emerge from our slumber in mesmerizing fashion from the stones and earth of our origins. But we hold onto the rock, and through our growing understanding of ourselves and our place in the world, we live into our God-gifted freedom— with God’s cosmic memory our lasting embrace.