20 March 2006

This week we continue to look at the Walter Brueggemann's chapter Duty as Delight and Desire in "The Covenanted self.

Trying to speak of obedience in a self-indulgent society can be problematic - the first problem as stated on Friday is the dichotomy of "grace and law."
The second dimension of our problem is the Enlightenment notions of unfettered freedom of "Man Come of Age."...to slough off any larger authority to which obedience is owed, and that with special reference to the traditional authority of the church.... This Enlightenment ideology has received its popular form in a Freudian theory of repression in which human maturation is the process of emancipation from communal authority that is extrinsic to the individual person and therefore fundamentally alien to mature humanness. Thus the human goal is movement beyond any restraints that come under the category of repression.
It turns out, of course, that such a model of unfettered freedom is an unreachable mirage. The individual person is never so contextless, and in the end the fantasy of such freedom has culminated in the most choking of conformities.

It is as though we see one group that is so wrapped up in legalism that there appears to be no freedom - or even - freedom is viewed as a part of what will cause our demise and fall into chaos. Then...on the other hand, it is as though we dropped into a permissiveness that any attempt to write in limits to our actions and call for restraint will be clobbered as being oppressive. In many ways, I wonder if both these extremes are really a popular as one side tries to paint the other. What I see most often is a selective use of law and freedom. It is usually set up to benefit whomever it is that is trying to create a living environment - such as a family or church or community. We must enter into the work of talking about obedience by bringing it into everyday life and showing how one can be obedient and free. In fact, for a community of any size to grow and mature, it must maintain a tension between these two. We must not be afraid to say "yes" and to say "no" so that we do not squash people under a perpetual "no" or let them float away with an uncontrollable "yes."

Connection: Think good parents...think good teachers...think good neighbors. In each of these cases, there will be opportunities for great freedom and use of boundaries and limits. Both of them used together really does begin to shape the character of individuals and groups.

Lord God, you hand off to your people the beauty of community. Then, you call us along a path in which we are bound together as one people whose consideration for the welfare of all causes us to deliberate about how it is that we will live together so that we each are honored and encouraged to continue to grow. Within our life together we ask that your Spirit will guide us when we find it difficult to do just that. Amen.