Lead Us To Freedom

March 7, 2024

Dear siblings in Christ,

Theologian Marcus Borg, in his book Speaking Christian, identifies four major scriptural metaphors for the human condition – slavery, exile, sin, and infirmity. He also offers some interesting reasons why sin emerged as the primary metaphor. They mostly have to do with giving the Church, the institution, lots of power and control. While never denying the reality of sin – just look around you for confirmation there – Borg says that sin needs a demotion. Slavery, exile, and infirmity provide equally rich understandings of who we are and what God has done for us in Jesus Christ.

Lent is traditionally the season where we amp up our emphasis on sin, that already-in-first-place metaphor. But maybe not. Last year St. Simon’s emphasized the experience of exile during Lent. As you have perhaps noticed, this year our emphasis is on slavery and the freedom Jesus’ life, death, and resurrection offer us, both individually and in community with others.

But freedom and slavery are kind of dicey to talk about in our national context.

Take slavery, for example. I am a white person, descendant of other white people, none of whom were ever literally enslaved. I have never been physically bound or imprisoned. To speak of myself as being enslaved to many things (see our confession in the liturgy Sunday) could be seen as a horrible act of cultural appropriation. Our black siblings could read that as a massive insult to the suffering and injustice white people perpetrated on black people with literal slavery for centuries. White girl, you aren’t even close.

Speaking about the liberty and freedom Jesus brings us could also land sideways. Those words and the concepts they represent were understood as inalienable rights – for white, male, property owners, anyway – by our founders. They are patriotic words not spiritual ones for most of us. And I fear they have become misconstrued to mean “I get to do whatever I want”, with no corporate obligation or responsibility. Because America.

We take all the power and beauty out of scripture when we interpret it literally. So this Lent, I invite each of us to consider our enslavement and the freedom with which we are gifted in Jesus Christ as the potent scriptural metaphors they are. Nothing more and nothing less. Where do you feel trapped and powerless? Stuck? What behaviors do you repeat over and over and over that are unhelpful at best, destructive at worst?

During this holy season of Lent, may each of us allow God’s presence to shine light in the shadowy corners of our hearts and minds, reveal those places we are imprisoned, take us by the hand, and lead us to the true freedom and liberty gifted to us in the life, death, and resurrection of our brother Jesus.

With love and in faith,