BREAKING AWAY
Rev. Dr. Joyce Antila Phipps
Texts: Judges 2: 16-23; Luke 5: 1-1
Some of you may remember a film made in 1979 called “Breaking Away.” In that film a young man who has just graduated from high school yearns for something more than his father’s life as a blue collar worker. The bicycle he rides becomes a symbol of his desire and the final race scene a metaphor for his ambitions. Even as an adult I resonated with the character Dave. That was the enormous appeal of the film; many of us resonated with the desire to be something more than what the world told us we had to be.
Like many times we break away from expectations placed on us, whether it’s good or bad is usually judged only in retrospect. This past week we commemorated the anniversary of the first sit-in at a Woolworth’s on February 1, 1960, in Greensboro, North Carolina, a move that changed the course of history. At that time, we were cautioned by our elders to wait, wait, wait.
But a new young generation of people were tired of waiting and broke away from their elders. Their actions propelled us into a sea of change that few saw coming. Those heady days filled us with hope for the future, a future that would not be like the past.
This morning’s Gospel reading is about that kind of breaking away. In what was a backwater of the civilized world, four men leave their old worlds behind and followed an itinerant preacher calling for repentance and change. Their families and their world probably responded like our families and world did fifty years ago: What on earth are you doing? For God’s sake, come back, come back to the way it always was.
Now there are times when breaking away from something established is not what needs to be done, what should be done. Our reading from Joshua this morning comes out of the context of the newly formed people of Israel, which in some sense could call itself a nation, something definitive with boundaries.
The various tribes have been driving other tribes out and taking over parts of Canaan, but in what becomes a common refrain, “the people of Israel did what was evil in the sight of the Lord.” Abandoning the Lord that brought them out of Egypt and the Covenant they made with God, they served the Ba’als, the local gods of Canaan. So the Lord raises up judges, shophet in Hebrew, to help govern the people.
As the text tells us, every time a judge dies, the people break away, worship the local gods, and, commensurate with this, fall into evil ways, ignoring the commandments, the laws, and the regulations that were promulgated, which, it should be remembered, govern the relations between people as well as the relationship between the people and the Lord. Needless to say, the Lord is not a happy camper.
These two texts are juxtaposed here for a specific reason. We need to consider when is it that breaking away is a good thing and when is it not. How do we as human beings judge when we need to break away? Some argue that tradition should be the framework and the context for what is right; others argue that a reading of the Gospel propels us into radical action and tradition be damned. These are not easy questions and our responses often depend on the situation, the context, the injustice we see, and the action required to correct the injustice or change the situation.
Not every action or example of breaking away concerns a situation of injustice; some concern our personal, our spiritual situations. For instance, breaking away may mean thinking about our faith or God in new and different ways than before. Most ancient conceptions of the universe had a heaven above and some form of death related place beneath; the Greeks had Hades and Hebrew Scripture refers to Sheol, a shadowy place for both the righteous and unrighteous. The concept of hell as a distinct place of eternal punishment does not emerge in Judaism until the second century BCE, and even then many did not accept that belief.
Back to the idea of breaking away from old concepts and ideas, our theological paradigm as to the nature of the universe changed, but not until after the scientific one, although it must be said that there is still a flat earth society of some religious minds pointing to passages such as 10:13 about the sun standing still.
Changing theological paradigms is sometimes even more difficult than battling societal injustices because new paradigms force us to think about God in a totally new and different way and that kind of shift may even make us live differently than before. Taking on the structural injustice of society often derives from recognizing what our faith demands of us and acting accordingly; in other words, it’s just living the courage of our supposed convictions.
Tackling the deep recesses of our souls to construct a new kind of faith is, in some ways, more difficult because that process involves changing our conception of ourselves. It is more than a mere intellectual process; it is a spiritual, a religious process.
The religious and theological questions we face sometimes overwhelm us. And the questions are theological in nature. Theology is, after all, more than a rational inquiry into religious questions concerning the nature of God; theology is a contact sport, to borrow a phrase. The process of doing theology is set within our world. Liberation and feminist theology uses the word praxis to explain the process of reflection in light of our experiences in the world. The process is circular: we experience the world in a certain way, reflect upon it and in light of our reflections act in new ways. Praxis encompasses our entire being in the process of acting, reflecting, and acting again. It means constructing a usable past in order to create a usable future, as my professor Letty Russell used to say; it means not taking “traditional,” that is, our view of tradition as God’s Tradition, which is open to all and can be expressed in an infinite number of names, concepts, ideas, and realities.
Breaking away from our previous intellectual and religious constructs means being willing to examine constructs, ideas, and practices that may be foreign to us but not to God. As people of the Christian tradition in a pluralistic world, we need to examine our approach to the infinitude that is the Divine, the Holy, the Transcendental and the Immanent in our lives. Unlike the people of Israel, this does not mean doing what is evil in the sight of the Lord, worshipping the Ba’als of our culture, money, power, influence. It means doing what we are called to do through the ministry of Jesus of Nazareth: to heal the hurts of individuals and society, to free the captive mind and spirit, and to declare the year of the Lord of justice, mercy, and reconciliation to all. Amen.