Repression Obsessions

I acknowledged my sin to You, and I did not hide my iniquity; I said, “I will confess my transgressions to the LORD,” and You forgave the guilt of my sin. (Psalm 32.5)

The hit musical The Book of Mormon is ostensibly about the comic—and cosmic—travails of a group of Latter Day Saint missionaries who have the bad luck of being assigned to a Ugandan outpost. But in short order, you gather it’s really about people of all walks who suffer from having their religion screwed on a little too tight. You know who I mean. They’re the folks who are terrified of God, terrified of temptation, terrified of Hell, and, most of all, terrified they’ll get caught doing something unseemly by people as terrified as they are. And the only way of managing the terror they’ve chosen to live with is to mask it with manufactured happiness. 

The show quickly dismantles its characters’ clean-cut, cockeyed (and cocky) optimism with “Turn It Off,” a hybrid show tune and Sunday school ditty that says:

When you start to get confused

Because of thoughts in your head,

Don’t feel those feelings!

Hold them in instead

Turn it off, like a light switch

Just go click!

With every conflict a missionary confesses, the answer is, “Turn it off!” Feeling guilty about not protecting your mother from domestic violence? Turn it off! Troubled because you left your dying sister’s bedside to get in line for a new iPhone? Turn it off! Worried about being attracted to your own sex? Turn it off! But what if these gnawing emotions don’t go away? “Then you only got yourself to blame. You didn’t pretend hard enough. Turn it off!" If repression obsessions were unique to Mormons, this cheeky little number would be lamentably tragic. But haven’t we all, at one point or another, been told by someone—parents, ministers, teachers, counselors, you name it—to turn it off?

Repression is no help when confronting confusion and weakness. It’s a defense mechanism against guilt of both varieties, deserved and undeserved, and it’s completely ineffective in overcoming either kind. Repression feeds on guilt. If we stop feeling guilty, the thing we’re trying to conceal has no reason to hide. As long as we keep it hidden, we won’t come to grips with what it actually is. It may be something sinful and unhealthy and offensive to our Maker and those around us. Yet it may also be something holy and life-giving and essential to our God-given identity and purpose. As long as we refuse to examine it, we’ll never see exactly what it is.

The only way we can figure out what’s behind our repression obsessions is by turning the light switch on so we can see what’s really there. We invite God in and say, “Take a look at this. Here’s what worries me about it. If it’s wrong, show me the right way. If it’s what You want for me, grant me the grace to accept it.”

Psalm 32 models this prayer: “I acknowledged my sin to You, and I did not hide my iniquity; I said, ‘I will confess my transgressions to the LORD,’ and You forgave the guilt of my sin.” Repression cannot lead to holiness. Pretending we aren’t struggling won’t open our eyes to truth. If what we’re struggling with is sinful, we need to see that and invite God to forgive our wrongdoing and remove the guilt it creates. If it’s something we’re afraid of, we need to overcome our fear and lead lives of dignity in keeping with God’s plan and purpose for us.

Lent is our great sifting season, when we search our hearts and lay all they contain before God. Whatever’s got us confused and feeling guilty is not to be hidden away in hopes it will go away. For repression to work, it needs the thing it wants to bury and it needs the guilt we carry because of what we’re hiding. None of that is constructive. None of it will improve our lives. “Turn it off” isn’t the answer. “Turn it on—like a light switch.” That’s the answer. If we can summon the courage to do that, we can boldly talk it over with our Maker and bravely heed God's direction for our lives.

The Love Fast

Love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your strength, and with all your mind; and your neighbor as yourself. (Luke 10.27)

In the faith tradition of my youth, it was not uncommon for pastors to call impromptu fasts. He/she would urge congregants to “turn their plates over” and devote time ordinarily spent preparing and eating meals to prayer, Scripture, meditation, and other spiritual pursuits. These fasts were less about self-denial than carving out space in one’s day to commune with God.

That's really what fasting hopes to accomplish. It turns our attention away from our personal wants and needs so we can realign our lives with the things that God requires of us. But how can we know what those things are? The Great Commandment gives us the best place to start. “Love God with all you’ve got,” Jesus says. “And love your neighbor the same way you want to be loved.” In theory, that sounds fairly basic. In practice, however, it gets complicated very quickly, because the actions that Jesus commands us to take require us to make time to do them.

So we look at our days and evaluate how much of them we spend on ourselves—not only the “nice to have” moments of relaxation and pleasure, but also the “have to have” times that require concerted effort and sacrifice to make room for God and others. Can we surrender an hour’s sleep to spend it in loving communion with our Maker? Can we let go of a task that feels so urgent to us that we build our day around it and, instead, devote that time to helping someone else?

And what about our hearts? Can we consciously set aside our need for love and all of its trappings long enough to put God first? Can we harness our soul’s emotions to draw satisfaction from sacrifice, instead of searching for gratification—in some cases, going so far as avoiding emotionally fraught situations—that makes us feel good? Can we reorient our thoughts to realize the love we offer to others is every bit as important as the love we seek for ourselves?

These are hard questions that require vigilant attention. They insist on conscious awareness of opportunities to “turn our plates over”—not merely in the literal sense of a nutritional fast, but in the figurative sense of carving out time and space for God and neighbor. As we continue our Lenten progress, it’s vital that we remember God gets no glory in our sacrifice. The fast is meant to open windows to express love for God and those around us. A love fast that turns away from our needs and desires creates a love feast that will nourish and sustain us long after we depart Lent's season of consecration.

Do Not Fear

Do not fear, O Zion; do not let your hands grow weak. The LORD, your God, is in Your midst. (Zephaniah 4.16-17)

Enflamed with Defiance

Last Friday I was on the phone with a San Diego colleague who'd been awakened in the wee hours by an earthquake. “It went on quite a while,” he said, “long enough to look out and see the water sloshing around in my pool.” I told him I lived in L.A. when the Whittier earthquake struck and knew how unsettling it is. “Then there’s the eerie period waiting for the aftershocks,” I observed, adding that I was so unnerved that, for the first time since relocating to the West Coast, I seriously considered moving back home. “In the Midwest, we have the advantage of knowing a tornado or blizzard is headed our way,” I said. “We have time to brace ourselves. Earthquakes don’t give you that.”

As we concluded our business, I kidded, “Here’s hoping nothing else rocks your world today!” To which he replied, “We’ll be fine.” No sooner had I hung up than Walt rushed into the study and turned on the television. There it was: 27 dead in elementary school shooting. The ground shook so hard I gripped the arms of my chair. The prior evening, at our church's annual holiday remembrance service, I recited the roll of nearly 150 young Chicagoans killed by firearms in 2012. We sang songs of solace and hope, heard Advent poems about light’s power to conquer darkness, and prayed God’s strength in our endeavors to vanquish gun violence in our city. And now this—the latest in an increasingly frequent series of moments when it feels as though there’s nowhere to hide from an onslaught of mad violence we can’t foresee or contain. A brutal flood of emotions poured through me, threatening to take all of Advent’s optimism with it. I felt stranded in a midnight world of menacing evil.

This weekend, as we gather in our communities of faith, we must adamantly reclaim Advent’s promises of peace and salvation. We must attend closely to the prophets’ assurances that God hasn’t left us. Our worship—the hymns we sing, the prayers we pray, and every word we speak—must be enflamed with defiance. We will not surrender hope. God is with us. Christ is coming to us. Darkness will not stand.

Out of the Ancient Mist

Sunday’s Old Testament reading (Zephaniah 3.14-20) steps out of the ancient mist to grab us by the collar, confronting issues that could be ripped from today’s headlines. The prophet addresses a nation gripped with religious and social malaise. He takes prophetic office during the reign of Josiah, Judah’s great reformer. Previous kings were lax in honoring God’s demands for faithfulness and justice. As a result, the nation founders on the hollow shoulders of idolatry and conspicuous consumption. Unlike other prophets, who seek to restore the faith of God’s people after long nights of foreign opposition, Zephaniah speaks to a country rotting from within. The gaps between rich and poor, powerful and powerless, are wider than ever. Violence, injustice, poverty, and despair have reached intolerable levels. Only those who profit from Judah’s indifference feel safe. An even slimmer minority realizes their nation has lost its way. The vast majority has grown woefully apathetic, presuming things have got so bad they can't be fixed. “Not so!” Zephaniah cries. With true reformist zeal, he proclaims the advent of better times—“the day of the Lord,” he calls it—when God’s righteousness and faithful presence will once again prevail. Does any of this sound familiar?

After he scorns the corruption of Judah’s officials and indicts the majority’s lethargy, Zechariah speaks to the relative few profoundly distressed with their nation’s descent into chaos and violence. Listen to the confidence—the unshakable defiance—with which he assures them their faith will be vindicated:

The king of Israel, the LORD, is in your midst; you shall fear disaster no more. On that day it shall be said to Jerusalem: Do not fear, O Zion; do not let your hands grow weak. The LORD, your God, is in your midst, a warrior who gives victory; God will rejoice over you with gladness, God will renew you in God’s love; God will exult over you with loud singing as on a day of festival.

Then, speaking in God’s own voice, Zephaniah declares:

I will remove disaster from you, so that you will not bear reproach for it. I will deal with all your oppressors at that time. And I will save the lame and gather the outcast, and I will change their shame into praise and renown in all the earth.

God’s Song

Tragedies like the one we’ve just seen in Newtown, Connecticut evoke natural reflexes we struggle to absorb: first the horror, next the grief, soon followed by reproach and recriminations for not having prevented them, the vast majority of us ultimately believing the lie such horrors are unpreventable. We are momentarily quaked out of our national slumber and wring weak hands, as if nothing can be done to brake our perilous slide into chaos, violence, and fear.

But the Word of God reaches us this weekend in the defiant voice of a reformer from long ago, urging us not to surrender hope. Do not fear, it says. Do not let your hands grow weak. God is in your midst. The day of the Lord draws near. God will renew us in love and exult over us in loud singing. In the crushing darkness of our anguish, confusion, and despair, we listen for the faraway strains of God’s song beckoning us to the light of God’s day. The darkness that presently engulfs us will not stand.

God is with us. Christ is coming to us. The crushing darkness of our anguish, confusion, and despair will not stand.

Too Much Stuff

But who can endure the day of His coming, and who can stand when He appears? For He is like a refiner’s fire and like fullers’ soap. (Malachi 3.2)

My partner and I have lived in the same apartment for 18 years, which has turned it into a veritable archive of our time together. Our closets, shelves, and drawers are crammed with memories and artifacts. Many are meaningful. Some have lost their meaning; we can’t recall why we thought it necessary to hang on to them. And a few are hanging on to us. They remind us of unsettling conflicts and events that found us at our worst. There’s the note dashed off in anger, the vacation photo taken on an afternoon that went sour, the article of clothing that will forever be associated with an unkind remark from a friend or relative. We’re always surprised to find these things. The discomfort affixed to them is long gone. Yet stumbling on them still manages to churn up unpleasant emotions that open old wounds. That’s the trouble with too much stuff. Things you assumed you’d thrown out have a way of hiding in the piles. We don’t need them. We don’t want them. We don’t like them. But they’re there.

In our house, we’re most apt to find relics of conflict when cleaning up for visitors who will be with us for an extended stay. Making room for them gives us the impetus to purge our cupboards of a lot of useless nonsense, particularly things that resurrect dead ideas and deadly emotions. We actually look forward to hosting houseguests because our excitement about their arrival compels us to clear away reminders of old conflicts and unwelcome turmoil.

Advent works the same way. This is the time to sort through our stuff and toss out anything that may crowd out the Prince of Peace. Unhealthy memories and attitudes that hang on to us have to go. The peace of Christ is a costly one. It comes at the expense of long-held grudges and animosities and clinging to an unhealthy past as our means to justify nagging prejudices and behaviors. The prophet compares the coming Christ to a refiner’s fire that burns up our trash and fullers’ soap that bleaches out stubborn stains. Purged and purified, we will welcome the Babe we herald in carols of peace on earth, good will to all.

Charles P. St-Onge, a Lutheran pastor in Houston, writes

Immanuel will bring lasting, true peace. Not just an end to physical war, although that is what we usually think of when we think of peace. No, this is a deeper peace. A peace between us and God.

Two weeks from today, the Prince of Peace will arrive to make His home in us. It’s time to start cleaning house.

Expect the Unexpected

Now when these things begin to take place, stand up and raise your heads, because your redemption is drawing near. (Luke 21.28)

Back Into Rehearsal

A friend and I were discussing Advent, and he summed it up splendidly as, “waiting and watching for the thing we most hope for.” He didn’t elaborate on what “the thing” was. The conviction in his tone made clear that he meant the Second Coming, which surprised me. He’s an alumnus of one of America’s most famously (or, if you will, infamously) liberal seminaries and forged his career not in the ivied traces of highbrow theology, but in the sciences. Therefore, I assumed he viewed Advent as the season when Christians gain entrance to the wonder of Christmas by revisiting Old Testament prophecies that shaped New Testament accounts of Jesus’s birth. As he talked on, however, it became obvious his Advent focus centered on what many dismiss as a far-fetched possibility, rather than the celebrated event that occurred 2000 years ago.

 “Advent has always felt peculiar to me,” he mused. “It’s like we’re cast in this mammoth production and we rehearse like mad to get ready for it. But nobody can say exactly what we’re preparing for—what it will look like, how it will go, or even when it will happen. Year after year, we go back into rehearsal, thinking, ‘Maybe this time.’ But isn’t that how it went with the first coming? They kept praying and watching and waiting. Then—pow!—there it was. Those who were ready saw it. The rest missed it completely. They couldn’t see God, because Jesus didn’t come the way they expected. That’s how it will be the second time around, too, making Advent all about expecting the unexpected. How do we manage that? That’s the question that falls in our laps every year. And if Advent doesn’t gin up all kinds of conflicted emotions, it seems to me we’re not doing it right.”

Uneasy

Somehow my friend’s uneasiness with Advent—his faith that Christ will come again tempered with uncertainty about how that promise will play out—comforted me. Advent should make us uneasy. If we’re “doing it right,” we should feel deeply conflicted about it, because it asks more of us than we can manage. Each year, we reach for prophets of old and renew acquaintances with those who experienced the Bethlehem miracle as prototypes to emulate. Questions that challenge our belief in the Second Coming are no different than the ones that perplexed them. Our discomfort with hoping in a cosmic event that will somehow alter our reality is no different than Mary’s. When the angel describes the pivotal role she will play in God’s redemptive plan, her first question is, “How will this be?” (Luke 1.34) We ask the same thing when pondering Christ’s return. Expecting the unexpected is no simple task.

It’s not entirely wrong to say that those who awaited and witnessed Christ’s birth had a slight advantage over us. Their prophets were first-rate poets whose vivid imagery transformed everyday objects into extraordinary augurs. This weekend we hear the Promised One described as “a righteous Branch to spring up for David” (Jeremiah 33.15)—tipping off the hopeful that His pedigree would derive from Israel’s most celebrated king. Isaiah’s pages overflow with symbols and metaphors that spell out Messianic events with breathtaking precision. Even the minor prophets arrest us with their clairvoyant eloquence.

By comparison, Jesus’s Second Coming prophecies seem decidedly mundane and vague. In Mark 13, He talks about wars and rumors of wars, earthquakes, and famines as “the beginning of birthpangs” indicating Christ’s imminent return. This week’s Gospel (Luke 21.25-36) predicts bad weather: “There will be signs in the sun, the moon, and the stars, and on the earth among nations confused by the roaring of the sea and the waves. People will faint from fear and foreboding of what is coming upon the world, for the powers of the heavens will be shaken.” (v25-26) What are we to make of this? History has never known a time when there weren’t wars and rumors of war. Every generation is dealt its share of earthquakes and famines. Hurricanes, tsunamis, and atmospheric disturbances are part of planetary life. Yet Jesus points to these inevitabilities—and the tragedies they bring—as signs of hope! “Now when these things begin to take place,” He says in verse 28, “stand up and raise your heads, because your redemption is drawing near.” It’s here that the conflicted emotions my friend described rear up. How can we know what we’re waiting and watching for if we’re uneasy with what we’re looking at?

Biding Time

The great paradox of Jesus’s Second Coming prophecies is that their veiled randomness makes His message transparently direct. Because the signs He gives us are constant and inescapable, our longing for Christ’s return should also be constant and inescapable. Watching and waiting for the thing we most hope for should become as commonplace to us as turning on the nightly news. Expecting the unexpected should frame how we live out our days. We should believe something bigger is taking shape behind the violence of war, tremors and tragedies born of a groaning planet, disheartening rumors that fill the air, and turmoil roiling above our heads. “Heaven and earth will pass away, but My words will not pass away,” Jesus assures us in verse 33. Troubles that confront us come and go. Yet we remain, constant in hope, steadfast in love, our joy and peace secured by unyielding faith that Christ will come again.

And so we approach Advent’s rehearsal as God’s great biding time. It's the season when we root out our deepest fears and uncertainties—when we realize there is more to this world than what we see, know, and understand. It is when we follow Jesus’s instructions to the letter: we stand up and raise our heads, because our redemption is drawing near. Maybe this time we’ll see the thing we most hope for. It’s possible we won’t. Either way, Advent’s rehearsal prepares us to move forward in faith that something miraculous is moving toward us. By doing the hard work this season asks of us, we’ll be ready and know it when we see it.

Watching and waiting.