We are awash in anxiety as a culture.
How do we heal it?
Cultural scripts can make us anxious, which I wrote about last week. Accept ‘normal’ thinking about the self—that my life is entirely up to me and about me—and anxiety is almost sure to result. Our track record shows our self-imposed cultural pressure produces anxiety, not heroes.
Here I want to make a paradoxical pastoral observation for the sake of giving you hope and peace: Religion often makes anxiety worse.
Someone comes in with their life in tatters, looking to be seen and noticed. They are hoping someone somehow someway will let them know their pain will end someday (soon). And we overlook them. Subtly communicate they don’t fit it. Over-talk them or under-engage them. Outright shame or ignore. We don’t read the room or have emotional quotient high enough to see what they are actually asking. So we have a theological vocabulary conversation when they want a heart one.
They ask, “Do you see me?”
Our (usually) unintended response, “No, we don’t.”
Or someone really messes things up. They have an affair, make a really dumb financial decision, or spiral into a crisis of their own making. We can’t bring ourselves to say something hopeful and graceful. “We don’t care where you’ve been, but we are here to help you where you’re going.” Somehow, from somewhere, we think communicating shame for their past is a penance that must be paid before they can go into their future.
Or someone tries hard to do what’s right, tries to find and keep the rules and laws of God, is sincere and well-meaning. They attend to all the prescribed actions of the Church. Attend weekly? Check. Join a group? Check. Serve? Check. Give? Check. But they feel they never measure up. They have done what’s been asked, but feel their existence still has no justification. Their experience of God is plagued by guilt and fear, not peace and love.
From my seat as a pastor, I can't not see it. Religion often makes anxiety worse.
More anxious about being accepted, more anxious about finding forgiveness, more anxious about finding justification for our existence.
Why?
Jesus named it in the Sermon on the Mount: What you have heard it said.
It’s a phrase Jesus uses on repeat (see Matthew 5-7) to unveil religion that falls short of the gospel.
Behind every 'you have heard it said' you always find religion. What’s religion? The accepted, expected, respected, elected way to get God in your corner.
It's the common ways we think about what we have to do to close the gap between us and God. You have heard it said is colloquial in every culture and generation.
Common spiritual wisdom in our culture treats spiritual practices like vitamins that somehow magically change our spiritual microbiome. We take the pill, ingest it, we are whole. Consequently, modern spirituality functions like an advancement in technology for the heart and operates with the same hubris: all problems can be fixed with the right technology.
-Take the prayer pill and life works out.
-Pop the Bible pill and solutions are revealed.
-Take the Church pill and your family difficulties and/or personal loneliness will vanish.
Religion is a spiritual technology. It’s an app for the heart. If you download it and make sure to do the regular updates, if you upgrade from the freemium version to the premium, all will be well.
And the problem, as with all technology, is that religion doesn’t actually require God.
It’s an outside-in solution, but what you are bringing in from the outside is your own actions, not God. Why? You are certain closing the gap is up to you.
I think we miss this because salvation is also an outside-in solution. You cannot save yourself. So, you invite God in.
But you have heard religion say to smuggle in something sincerely good, and this will be your rescue.
Morality and spirituality.
Spiritual practices and spiritual checklists.
Good actions, motivated efforts, correct theology.
“Rescue yourself, no one is coming. Not even God,” religion whispers.
Ironically, both religion and culture are the accumulated sayings of “someone” we’ve all agreed is right. We go—collectively—with what we have heard said. It’s general and deadening.
What’s the gospel counter-weight to religion?
In contrast, Jesus says something specific and personal. “You have heard it said, but I say to you.” (see Matthew 5:21-48 for examples)*
Jesus is noting that religion always gets it half right. When he says 'you have heard it said,' he is affirming their religious intuition that God says what is consequential about life. Religion always affirms the divine. It just assumes getting to God is on us.
This is why religion makes us anxious.
How can it not? Anxiety is what happens in my gaps. I don’t know if I can close them.
Between me and my fears.
Between me and the future.
Between me and people’s opinions.
Between me and my mistakes.
So if it’s up to me.
Discerning all the divine rules.
Keeping them all, fastidiously.
Learning who’s in and being self-righteous toward who’s out.
I don’t know if I can close that gap.
Beware! This way is anxiety born of religion.
Jesus is against religion as commonly understood and did not come to perpetuate it. His strongest condemnations were against it (see Matthew 23) because it bears down on your heart as condemnation.
In the 'but I say to you' of Jesus is your personal, specific good news. He reaches out, “not to condemn…but to save you” (John 3:17), with an invitation to anyone worn out from religious anxiety to “take his kind yoke and light burden because he is gentle and comes to you with a humble heart” (Matthew 11:20).” He justifies your existence “by faith”, not your hard work (Romans 3:28) and infuriatingly to anyone proud of their efforts, and gladly to anyone exhausted by the same “saves people by grace” (Ephesians 2:1-10).
Friends, Jesus closes your gap.
Peace I leave with you; my peace I give you. I do not give to you as the world gives. Do not let your hearts be troubled and do not be afraid.
John 14:27
*Jesus in the Sermon on the Mount is not throwing out the commandments of the Old Testament, he is calling people away from a shallow, religion-as-way-to-God practice of them. Spiritual practices and disciplines do form and shape us. But they are responsesto the grace of God versus attempts to earn the grace of God, in which case they crush the heart.
Pastor Scott Marshall, Wichita First Church of the Nazarene