Taking Back Freedom

"As a festival of liberty, [Hanukkah] celebrates more than the independence of one people--it glorifies the right to freedom of all peoples." -Theodor H. Gastor

One of the reasons that I love the holiday season is the richness of the many themes it offers up to our imagination. Light and darkness, giving and receiving, generosity, the incarnation of divinity, birth and rebirth, hope and peace and goodwill, waiting and expectancy, new beginnings, the triumph of good over evil, and freedom from oppression are just a few of the themes of this wonderful season.

As a preacher, it makes my work pretty easy. Christmas and solstice, Advent and Hanukkah, Kwanzaa and the New Year offer themselves to us as times to go deeper and sometimes even to get back in touch with elemental aspects of the human condition. One does not have to be a true believer in any sense of the word to appreciate this opportunity of the season. One does not have to interpret the Christmas story literally, for example, in order to benefit from the many truths which it contains. New life, new hope, and new opportunity are always a welcome possibility in each of our lives. The divinity that dwells with and within us is a welcome possibility.

Perhaps this year, whether individually or collectively, we need that possibility more than ever?

One simply needs to remain open. A sense of poetry and a love for metaphor is about all it takes to appreciate and make some meaning of the holidays. (And this is precisely where many of the rationalist arguments against religion fail: they lack that sense of our human need for metaphor and poetry and story.)

I feel blessed to belong to a religious tradition that, on paper, at least, encourages rather than discourages that kind of openness to possibility and metaphor, that openness to the poetry of life. Though I do not read the stories of Jesus’ birth as literal accounts, that does not mean that I don’t find much truth in them. Indeed, I would argue that an insistence on the literal kills the spirit. We argue over whether stories are True, rather than asking what it is in them that contains meaning and truth for our lives: that small-t truth that I am so fond of talking to you about.

Literalism and absolutism and their stepchild fundamentalism are the abiding sins of our time. They shut us off from one another, they preclude the opportunity to find common ground, and they utterly destroy the sense of mystery which I believe is at the heart of all religion and certainly at the heart of our existence. And it is not only those on the political and religious right who are susceptible to those sins.

This morning I want to look at one of the holiday traditions as a way of thinking not only about one of those major themes of the season, but also as a way to think more broadly about language in general and religious language in particular. That tradition is the Jewish celebration of Hanukkah.

Unlike the biblical stories of Jesus’ birth, there is good evidence that Hanukkah recounts an actual historic event. The story is told in the First and Second Books of the Maccabees, which form part of the Apocrypha (or extra) books of the Bible, as well as in the writings of the Greek historian Polybius.

In a nutshell, Hanukkah commemorates the victory of Judah the Maccabee (translated as "the hammer") and his followers over the forces of the Syrian king, Antiochus IV, and their rededication of the defiled Temple of Jerusalem in around 168 BCE.

One of the central themes of Hanukkah is religious freedom, something with which we Unitarian Universalists strongly identify and even claim to promote. But as the morning’s reading suggests, Hanukkah celebrates more than just the freedom of one people: in Theodor Gaster’s words, "Hanukkah commemorates and celebrates the first serious attempt in history to proclaim and champion the principle of religio-cultural diversity in the nation. . . . What was really being defended was the principle that in a diversified society the function of the state is to embrace, not subordinate, the various constituent cultures. . . . As a festival of liberty, [Hanukkah] celebrates more than the independence of one people--it glorifies the right to freedom of all peoples."

One can readily see, given the world we live in, how this freedom remains an important and in many places an unrealized dream. We are still struggling with issues of religious and cultural diversity, even right here in our own country, which claims to be a haven of religious freedom and an exemplar in the area of human rights, but which in recent years has often seemed to promote a particularly narrow and authoritarian brand of religion (the protection of which has even been legalized in a "religious preservation act" which is one of the most egregious examples of political double-speak perpetuated in our time).

This year, Hanukkah might serve as a reminder of how far we still have to go to achieve the reality of religious and cultural diversity and how constant must be our vigilance to be sure that whatever gains have been made in achieving it are not lost.

It is not enough to say that we believe in freedom. In recent years in our country we have been hearing an awful lot of rhetoric about freedom, about "spreading" freedom around the world, and about "making the world safe for democracy" and freedom. But too often, I believe, our actions have not spoken as loudly as our words. Too often the freedom we seek is only the freedom to control events in our best interests.

I see this ambivalence about freedom also reflected in our own religious tradition, which claims to be based upon the three principles of "freedom, reason, and tolerance." Sometimes I am embarrassed by the extent to which this "freedom" is abused among us, and here I am talking about our larger movement and not necessarily about our own congregation. What we really seem to want is our freedom, but not the freedom of others. Too often our freedom becomes a freedom "from," rather than a freedom "to." What we seem to desire is an easy freedom, rather than a disciplined freedom which requires us to be open to ideas that may be disagreeable to us or challenge us. We want a freedom to believe whatever we want, but without doing the hard work to discover what that is. We don’t really want a free and open discussion; we want to hear what we already believe, whether politically or religiously. It actually has sometimes made me embarrassed to choose and sing hymns about freedom, for I don’t wish to feel like an hypocrite.

The issue of freedom has been raised in recent years also in relation to the question of religious language. Our Association President, Bill Sinkford, has argued for a reappropriation of religious language, so that we can actually be engaged in the religious conversation that is taking place all around us. But some are horrified that this may mean that we are actually becoming more religious. What they seem to want is a freedom from anything that suggests we might be a religious organization or religious people, in spite of our origins in biblical Protestant Christianity.

(Others believe that freedom actually implies their right to believe in God or other traditional religious ideas!)

What gets completely lost at this level of argument is any suggestion of the levels of sophistication that actually exist in this conversation.

I have been put off as much as anyone in recent years by the assumptions inherent in religious language as it is used by many in the popular press and in what passes as mainstream religion in this country. I have actually found it embarrassing at times to be associated with any religion because of all that that word has come to imply or mis-imply. God forbid one should identify him or herself as a "religious" person; spiritual, maybe, but religious, never.

God, too, has suffered at the hands of those who would claim to know far more than it is possible to know. Many, including many of us, suffer from a too narrow definition of God. There is much more to God than the old mythology of a guy in the sky. Even the Hebrew Bible offers multiple versions of God, and ancient Islam contains theologies as sophisticated as its math. The issue is not simply theology, but theologies.

I have been bludgeoned by Jesus, too, and so am cautious when conversations suggest a trivial or literal interpretation of Jesus and his life or work. But in fact it is possible to be a follower of Jesus and a Unitarian Universalist, as many of my friends and colleagues can attest. Christianity is an incredibly rich tradition of which Protestant Christian fundamentalism is actually a very small and not particularly significant part. Many Christian Evangelicals, as a recent article in the journal Foreign Affairs suggests, have more in common with religious liberals than with fundamentalists, particularly on issues such as the environment and even on issues such as war and peace and human rights. And that is because of Jesus.

We need to spend less time bragging about our vaunted freedom and more time practicing it, and that goes for our faith as well as our nation.

Hanukkah reminds me of this, and forces me to ask why we have not done a whole lot better in the last 2000 years since the Maccabees won their great battle for religious freedom and cultural diversity.

The other evening, I heard a lecture by Congresswoman Mardi Walsh at the Boston Athenaeum which linked the great 19th century abolitionist Lydia Maria Child to the current debate over gay marriage. That lecture made me proud to be an American and a religious liberal (and a citizen of the Commonwealth). To mean anything, I believe, freedom must be extended as far as possible. My hope is that in the days to come, we might take back not only the word freedom, but also the religious language that we may have surrendered along the way. Let us not only practice what we preach, but re-engage in the larger conversation about Jesus, God, and religion.

The holiday season is a good time to think about these things, to get below the surface of our lives and of our convictions, and to rediscover what really matters. May we have the courage to be open to new ideas, and to revisit old ones. May it be so, now and always. Amen.

The Rev. Harold E. Babcock