Friday of the First Week of Lent

Lectionary: 228

You say, “The LORD’s way is not fair!” 
Hear now, house of Israel: Is it my way that is unfair, or rather, are not your ways unfair?

For the past several years I have engaged with Veterans in the substance abuse recovery program, and we often speak of freedom. I ask, "Freedom from...? and "Freedom for...?" 

Very often, these red-blooded American men and women have only the vaguest notion of "freedom for...." They have been indoctrinated in the belief that "Freedom is to do what I want to do." But that freedom has led them to the worse kind of bondage, because they wanted to use alcohol and drugs. 

Most had experience in their families and among their friends of addiction and its consequences, but they nonetheless chose to pursue that reckless path of freedom. The more they used, they more they wanted to use! That kind of "freedom" led them directly -- remorselessly -- toward addiction and death. 

Should they experience freedom from the craving for their drug of choice, they will still suffer the belief that they should -- indeed they must -- do what they want to do. Doesn't the dominant culture continually urge them to do what you want to do and be what you want to be? There is shame on the very notion that you might want to do what others expect of you. 

Inevitably they run smack into a wall of limits. Their bodies break down; the law pursues them; their families reject them; employers fire them; friends avoid them; and acquaintances use them. 

And they complain, "The Lord's way is not fair!" And they're not wrong for their lord insisted upon their freedom, and their freedom is a train wreck. But they never doubt their notion of freedom. And they're equally sure that the American way of freedom is absolutely the best. Russians, Chinese, North Koreans, Germans, British: their freedom is so limited! They have no freedom! They can't even own as many guns as they want! (And guns are the most blessed sacrament of American freedom.)

Saint Paul, in his Letter to the Galatians, teaches a more reliable definition of freedom:

"For you were called for freedom, brothers [and sisters]. But do not use this freedom as an opportunity for the flesh; rather, serve one another through love. For the whole law is fulfilled in one statement, namely, “You shall love your neighbor as yourself.”

Anyone familiar with the Gospels will instantly recognize this second of the Great Commandments; the first being, "You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, with all your soul, with all your mind, and with all your strength." 

These commandments balance and complement each other. To follow one without regard to the other is to lose one's way. We must not enslave ourselves to the needs and wishes of our neighbors, nor should we abjectly serve our notions of an all consuming God. Neither God nor the neighbor can be known so well that we should surrender to their apparent demands. Rather, we spend our lives in the safe/anxious zone between them, with only the clue, "as yourself" to suggest where to go. I need not love God with relentless mortifications that lead to death. 

Saint Francis put it well, 

Holy obedience confounds all bodily and fleshly desires and keeps the body mortified to the obedience of the spirit and to the obedience of one’s brother and makes a man subject to all the men of this world and not to men alone, but also to all beasts and wild animals, so that they may do with him whatsoever they will, in so far as it may be granted to them from above by the Lord.

The last clause is important. The obedient saint followed the promptings of the Holy Spirit which would not permit him to feed wolves or sharks with his own body, or some other nonsense. In that ambiguous space between God's absolute prerogatives and the earth's urgent desires, the Man of God found his freedom. 

The Lord's ways are fair, we discover, as we search more deeply into the Spirit of Lent. 

Freedom is a jealous God who wants nothing less than our freedom in obedience.