Mark 2:23-3:6
“Freedom of Worship”
August 12, 2018
Picture this – there’s a cabinet on the wall with a duck decoy sitting atop it and an animal head hanging high above in another corner. The mood is jolly with a lathered man sitting in a barber’s chair hovered over by a white-haired man wearing glasses and wielding a straight-edge razor. Sitting close by is one man in a jacket and tie holding a newspaper wide open while a kindly looking older man dressed in black is beaming and next to him in partial view, an African-American man is sitting and waiting beside him. This was the scene that Norman Rockwell captured with his usual attention to detail through his original draft of Freedom of Worship. Rockwell had envisioned how he would express the concept of tolerance, trying with paint, to depict that such tolerance was “the basis for a democracy’s religious diversity.” He purposely thought that putting a variety of representations of diversity in religion and race in a common everyday scene like a barbershop would bring this point home.
The problem Rockwell ran into, however, was that in order for those who would see the painting to recognize the notion of religious freedom, he would have to resort to using stereotypes. The man in black was, as you can probably imagine, a Catholic priest but for the rest of the non-clergy to be identified he had to paint the Jewish man in the barber’s chair with over exaggerated Semitic features. He put the African American man in modest work clothes while the supposed Protestant customer was dressed in professional attire. Rockwell ultimately determined that the notion of religious tolerance was not going to come through with this scene. So with a deadline looming with the Saturday Evening Post and a sincere desire to depict the phrase “Each according to the dictates of his own conscience,” that he had heard repeatedly in his head, Rockwell started over again using a number of Arlington folks with last names you might recognize like Hoyt, Squires and Secoy, to arrive at the version we see here that incorporated such symbols as a rosary and a religious book.
When we talk about freedom of worship it has traditionally been viewed as individual choice when it comes to how or if one practices a faith. When making his State of the Union address, Franklin Roosevelt in describing it said that it is the “freedom of every person to worship God in his own way – everywhere in the world.” This whole idea has become blended and conflated with the concept of freedom of religion which is a much broader idea that may include such potential actions as the freedom to publicly display, advocate for, protest and proselytize. To complicate it all, the First Amendment of our Constitution says that “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion or prohibiting the free exercise thereof.” That makes it as clear as mud, doesn’t it?
What could and should freedom look like when it comes to worship, faith, and religion? Here in today’s Gospel reading, Mark tells of Jesus who bristled against the Pharisees’ strict interpretation of rules around work on the Sabbath. Jesus was a faithful Jew who valued the Sabbath and knew that Sabbath keeping was grounded in liberation. Jesus here was not saying that adhering to religious practices was wrong. He was instead pointing to a new way of understanding who God is. He does it by challenging not the rules themselves but rather the purpose behind them. Here Jesus is confronting these practices by healing, he is challenging accepted actions so as to release God’s love for good. He speaks up not to oppose worship or religion but rather to bring light and life to bear where previously there was a strict adherence to rules sometimes just for rules’ sake. In following the guidelines of one’s faith, Jesus is demonstrating in both word and action that religion should always act on the side of justice. By then the faith leaders had grown so accustomed to observing the Sabbath in a very particular way, even though well intentioned, that they had locked away their capacity for mercy in the name of tradition. Jesus, on the other hand, saw that to act with compassion was to embrace the power of a faith in God and was a way to live out that faith while honoring the concept of Sabbath.
This weekend the eyes of our nation have been on Charlottesville, Virginia. Extraordinary measures have been taken by bringing in hundreds of law enforcement officers and closing down and limiting many public places so as to make sure that the violence of last year does not repeat itself as marches by White Nationalists are scheduled in both Charlottesville and Washington, D.C. today. Concerned faith leaders in Charlottesville have been meeting this past year and have joined together across denominations, feeling as one UCC minister there put it, that she has been “Called to action by my faith.” That has meant going out beyond the walls of houses of worship to address racial, social and economic injustice in their community. What has upset many of the clergy in Charlottesville is how “religion, and Christianity in particular, is used by some – including American white nationalists – as a weapon of oppression against people of different races, genders, sexualities, and faiths.” (www.c-ville.com, 8/8/18)
The hard aspect of the concept or concepts of Freedom of Worship and Freedom of Religion is that often in the name of religion one group has claimed divine authority and has used God’s name to bring devastation, ignoring completely Christ’s message of grace and love. We need only look at the history of Christianity from the Crusades and Inquisition centuries ago to the Third Reich during the lifetime of many of you gathered here this morning.
Were Norman Rockwell to paint Freedom of Worship these 75 years later, it would most likely look very different and would need to have been expanded. Back in the 40s, Rockwell concerned himself only with Catholicism, Protestantism and Judaism. In this painting there is no representation of Islam, Buddhism, Hinduism or the “Nones” who are those who don’t claim affiliation with any religion, which is now about 25% of the U.S. population. All these traditions of faith are growing within today’s America.
We continue to wrestle with how much expression of one’s faith should dictate policies, laws and local practices everywhere from schools to workplaces to the public square. And we in the U.S. are not alone in this struggle. In Europe, a recent report found that over the last few years there has been an uptick in the acts of hostility about religion with at least a third of the countries in Europe having political parties that openly oppose religious minorities with such efforts as banning fasting during Ramadan for teens in Austrian high schools and laws against head scarves in public in France. For many there, the word Migrant and Muslim have become synonymous with each other as the hostility toward them has increased.
What will we, as followers of Jesus, do with the freedom of worship that we treasure here in the United States? Will we express it in such a way that we will spread the message of love and mercy that marks us as people of faith? Will we be able to hear the question posed in the sixth chapter of Micah, “What does the Lord require of you?” and answer with the response of our lived experience being, “To do justice, and to love kindness and to walk humbly with our God?” May we find a way, so help us God. Amen.