Religion has played a powerful role in human evolution and the shaping of societies. Sometimes it’s a benevolent force; othertimes, not so much. It can even (often) be malevolent not only to human beings but to nature as well. And yes, as the famed atheist, Sam Harris, says “What will replace organized religion? The answer, I believe, is nothing and everything.” In this sermon, I explore a kind of religion that could serve us well. I’ve titled it, “Vision for Religion,” and it’s based on the Song of Songs 2.8-13 and Mark 7.1-8. Preached on August 29, 2021
1.
We are each birthed into the world in absolute freedom, perfect wonderment. We enter the world without a map, without a role, without an identity other than being the beloved offspring of Life’s longing for itself.
If you really pay attention to the entrance a baby makes into the world you will notice that they arrive light, with no burdens, no job description, no demand on them—not really, not truly, not ontologically. Some parents or grandparents or siblings can be foolish and controlling and cruel; they can place unnecessary and spiritually unwelcome expectations on a baby, expectations no baby ought to have to deal with and certainly shouldn’t try to live up to.
Life hands babies no burden other than being what and who they are. God hands them no such burdens either.
Neither life, nor the divine, shackles babies with predetermined paths for them to run, particular jobs for them to do, masks they are to wear.
Each infant enters this life clean, clear, free—full of wonder and wonderful themselves.
But that doesn’t last long, does it? It doesn’t take long for us to force a form onto the fresh, soft, unformed clay of their lives. It doesn’t take long at all for their lives to harden into set patterns and behaviors and identities, and, our hands too heavy upon them, they can feel the crushing burden of expectations that never really fit them very well, even if those expectations were well-intentioned. And it doesn’t take long for that child who inherits the demands and maps and masks of others to take that load upon themselves and believe that’s who they are after all.
You know all this, don’t you? But I wonder to what degree you’re aware right now of the burdens-of-being placed on you by others, things you’ve come to believe make up who you really are.
Long ago many of us traded our authentic lives for a life handed us by others, losing the freedom and wonder and wildness of our original lives, and set out upon a path of life that’s led us away from the goodness of what poet Mary Oliver calls, “our one, wild and precious life.”
2.
There are many reasons we settle for what I call “a second hand life”—living a life someone wants for us, living as a stranger to our own souls, living inside the cramped quarters of a respectable and predictable life, while denying, ignoring, or minimizing the splendor and power and genius of our original innocence, goodness, and beauty.
One of the reasons we live a “second-hand” life is this—
The divinity that dwells in each of us, the sacredness of our souls, the freedom and wonder that is the birthright of every one of us, can be a terribly frightening force to those who want to hold on to their power no matter what—those who want to keep things in order, make things safe, and protect what they’ve got.
This fear of losing power is why police states arise, why dissidents are targeted, why artists and writers and preachers, young visionaries and their mothers are often jailed or otherwise silenced. The Taliban are not just an anti-democratic force of suppression in Afghanistan, the same forces are present everywhere—repressive forces are present in our families, in our workplaces, schools, and religious communities. They are present inside us too. We all have inner voices of tyranny that imprison our souls out of fear, a fear that dresses itself up in the fancy clothes of safety and security, convention and morality.
We are born into the world in absolute freedom, perfect wonderment. We enter the world without a map, without a role, without an identity other than being the beloved offspring of Life’s longing for itself. We are given this life as a journey to discover and liberate our souls. But there are forces outside us and inside us that don’t want us to find our souls, honor our souls, or let our souls carry us into the joy which is our birthright.
Instead of joy, happiness, and the wonder of wide-open spiritual living, those forces want for us, a prison. That may sound crazy, but that craziness is central to the dilemma of being human.
3.
It’s one thing to talk about how free we truly ought to be, but a lot of us are frightened by the prospect of our spiritual freedom.
Inside Fyodor Dostoevsky's novel The Brothers Karamazov there’s a tale that illustrates the tragedy of this dilemma. Dostoevsky, a Russian artist writing in the late 19th century, tells the story of Jesus returning to sixteenth century Spain at the time of the Inquisition. After performing a number of miracles, the people recognize Jesus and flock to him at the great Cathedral in Seville. Alarmed, the leaders of the church, the Inquisition, arrest him and sentence him to death by fire the next day. The Grand Inquisitor visits Jesus in his prison cell to tell him that the Church no longer needs him, thank you very much. To this, Jesus says nothing. Reveling Jesus’ silence, the Grand Inquisitor proceeds to lecture Jesus and tell him why his miracles and teaching are interfering with the mission of the Church.
“Why did you come back,” the churchman asks, “to interfere with our work? The mistake you made, Jesus, is that you respected humans too much. And you had too large and hopeful a sense of their soulful freedom. That level of freedom is dangerous for human beings. And so we, the Church, corrected your work. Instead of the wild invitation of freedom that you offered to them, we, the Church, have offered them something practical, predictable, and dependable. And they like that, they need that. What we give them holds them down but it keeps them safe. So, why did you come back to interfere with our work?”
Religion doesn’t intend to say this, but this is often what it communicates, more with its actions than with its words: “Jesus, why are you interfering with our work of protecting people from themselves, our ways of guarding them from the freedom that they don’t know how to handle? What we do for them will hold them down, but at least they’ll be safe.”
This is what’s happening in our Gospel reading today. The religious are annoyed that Jesus plays footloose and fancy free with the tradition. “There are reasons for these laws,” they say. “When you turn people loose from what will keep them safe, there’s no telling what kind of trouble they’ll get into.”
Of course, those laws held truth. That there was truth in them wasn’t the issue. For Jesus the issue was that religion had inverted things. Rather than the laws serving the people and advancing the common good, the common good and the people who were to benefit from that good were made to serve the laws instead. “You hypocrites,” says Jesus. “You are pretenders; you’ve turned religion into a bunch of rules you use to control people and don’t have a clue yourselves about the animating experiences of the divine, the liberation and journey of the soul, which is what religion is for, after all.”
On one side of the conflict is Jesus—the one who understands the original beauty of the soul, the one who honors as sacred the role of mystery and openness and curiosity. Jesus calls us out from the constraints of religion gone bad and into the wilder experiences of life that are the animating force behind religion when it’s good, experiences that can keep us from settling too long inside the static world of religious and social convention.
Jesus had a reverence, says the Irish poet John O’Donohue, a reverence for the “wild possibility that sleeps and dreams in the clay of every human heart” (John O’Donohue). That wild possibility is the original innocence that first enters the world at the birth of every child before any of us have a chance to map out their lives, lay claim to their lives, or manipulate their lives according to our ambitions and fears.
That’s what Jesus is about. And then there are forces both outside us and inside us that don’t want that for us at all. They want what’s practical, predictable, and dependable. And the problem is, those things are so often so good and necessary for human society that we become attached to them and their benefits, and when we do, we trade the “wild possibility that sleeps and dreams in the clay of every human heart,” for practicality, predictability, and dependability. Too often this is what religion does, and when it settles for this, it goes awry, it becomes another form of tyranny, maybe the most terrible form of tyranny, despite its good intentions.
I think this is one of the reasons many of us find ourselves depressed from time to time. There’s an aching in our souls for so much more. And religion, the very thing that’s supposed to guide our souls into the fullness of their original freedom, too often doesn’t. Too much of religion doesn’t want Jesus’ optimism about the goodness of our souls—it doesn’t want his reverence for the “wild possibilities that sleep and dream in the clay of our hearts”—it doesn’t want Jesus to interfere with its work of protecting us from our souls.
This is why we must choose wildness over predictability, joyfulness over practicality, and the ecstatic over dull, dependable duty.
4.
And this is exactly why the Song of Songs (our second reading today) is read or sung in Jewish synagogues by Jews on the eve of the Passover. Singing the Song of Songs is an attempt to rescue religion from itself:
Look! My beloved comes, sings the Song,
leaping upon the mountains,
bounding over the hills.
Imagining the relationship between God and us this way isn’t about some kind of predictable piety; it’s ecstatic, wild. Like what happens when we’re in love.
When the Jews sing the Song of Songs each year, they foster an annual conversion of religion back to its source:
Look! My beloved comes to me and says,
‘Let me see your face,
Let me hear your voice,
for your face is lovely
and your voice is sweet!’
Imagining God as such a lover is anything but practical; this is joyful, beatific, nearly delirious with happiness. Like what happens when we’re in love.
When we’re in love there are no laws. Love itself is the only law that matters.
And whenever we love, Jesus says, we can begin again, we can be born again. And if we begin to love again, if we are born in love again we can taste again the absolute freedom, the perfect wonderment of our origin, the beauty and goodness of our souls.