The word that we might consider this week is “release.” It’s a familiar and interesting word for Christians. Usually, we talk about a release from something, someone, some condition, some situation. We know that often as new Christians we feel new, like we’ve just discovered something no one else has, right? That’s the work of The Great Invisible, of the Spirit, of The One that has No Name.

God said to Moses, “I am that I am.” And he said, “You must say this to the Israelites, ‘I am has sent me to you.’”
Exodus 3:14 (NET)

Although the definition of the word release has practical, secular implications (to set free, to move or flow freely, allow information, to discharge or remit, Apple Online Dictionary), for Christians its most powerful application often is in its spiritual context. In this newness, old situations, old definitions, old powers seem almost unfamiliar. We are in new territory…and that can be the issue.

"When a corrupting spirit is expelled from someone, it drifts along through the desert looking for an oasis, some unsuspecting soul it can bedevil. When it doesn’t find anyone, it says, ’I’ll go back to my old haunt.’ On return, it finds the person swept and dusted, but vacant. It then runs out and rounds up seven other spirits dirtier than itself and they all move in, whooping it up. That person ends up far worse than if he’d never gotten cleaned up in the first place."
Luke 11: 24-26 (TMB)

This explanation by The Christ 2000 years ago is familiar to anyone trying to break bad habits or change any negative behavior.

A new study in the Oct. 20 issue of Nature, led by Ann Graybiel of MIT's McGovern Institute, now shows why. Important neural activity patterns in a specific region of the brain change when habits are formed, change again when habits are broken, but quickly re-emerge when something rekindles an extinguished habit – routines that originally took great effort to learn.
“Brain Researchers Explain Why Old Habits Die Hard,” Cathryn M. Delude, News Office Correspondent October 19, 2005, MIT News

Behavioral research into recidivism among addiction patients has revealed that habits of any kind are neurochemically wired into our brains. What can bring back the old behaviors?

Graybiel speculates the beginning and ending spike patterns reflect the nature of a routine behavior: Once we start, we run on autopilot -- until we stop. Certain disorders hint at the potential importance of those spikes. Parkinson's patients, for instance, have difficulty starting to walk, and obsessive-compulsive people have trouble stopping an incessant activity.
Ibid.

If anyone would understand human weaknesses, it seems reasonable that Christ Jesus did. In the passage in Luke 11, He addressed not just the condition itself, but the context. So it appears that He knew that after “the demon” is gone, it can come back “far worse” than before it left. Remember that adage that says a relapse is worse than the original illness? It seems that The Christ understood very well that common human behavior of relapse.

Thomas Merton said: "A saint is not someone who is good. It is someone who has experienced the goodness of God." Saints understand that their failures and shortcomings do not disqualify them from receiving God's love; rather, their fallibilities bring the divine to bear in their lives in powerful ways. According to this definition, a true saint left the world in recent days: The writer, priest, alcoholic, divorcé and all-round self-proclaimed "ragamuffin" known as Brennan Manning. When young, Manning entered seminary and was ordained to the priesthood. He became a theologian, campus minister, spiritual director, author (his "Ragamuffin Gospel" should be required reading), and a practitioner in the way of Jesus, living among the poor as a mason's assistant, dishwasher, voluntary prisoner and a shrimper. But Manning's ministry and life disintegrated into horrific alcoholism. It took him years to get sober, only to relapse. When sober again he began writing in earnest, left the priesthood, married and moved to New Orleans (he was an avid Saints fan). His marriage ended in divorce, and again he landed in rehab.
“KEEPING THE FAITH: A saint goes marching in,” Ronnie McBrayer, Eureka Times Standard (California) May 11, 2013

When The Christ rescued the woman who was about to be stoned, He told her something that has been quoted both seriously and comically.

Jesus stood up and spoke to her. "Woman, where are they? Does no one condemn you?" "No one, Master." "Neither do I," said Jesus. "Go on your way. From now on, don’t sin." You’re missing God in all this. Jesus once again addressed them: "I am the world’s Light. No one who follows me stumbles around in the darkness. I provide plenty of light to live in."
John 8:10-12 (TMB)

Perhaps what we don’t recognize in Jesus’ words to this vulnerable woman was an antidote for inevitable relapse: “Go on your way.” In seven of eight Bible translations (NET, ISV, MSG or TMB, KJV, ESV, NASB, HCSB, NRSV) consulted, all of them have the word “Go” before He says “and sin no more.” Jesus didn’t dwell on the woman’s obvious relapses into relationships that disrespected her. He focused on her release; He told her to move on. There was a therapeutic reason for that and He seems to have done that a lot after He cured folk.

But Manning says that the greatest regret of his life is not his relapses. His greatest regret is "The time I've wasted in shame, guilt, remorse and self-condemnation ... I'm not speaking about the appropriate guilt one ought to feel after committing sin. I'm talking about wallowing in guilt, almost indulging in it."
Ibid.

When He healed the man of leprosy (Luke 5:14), He told him to tell no one but show himself to the temple priests. He told Jairus (Luke 8:55) and his wife to give their daughter whom He had just brought back to life something to eat. When He cured the Syro-Phoenician woman’s daughter (Mark 7:29), He told her to be “On your way!” (TMB). He gave them all something to do in their new life: “Go….Do.”

Often when we are released from an old habit or an old life that was damaging, it appears that the world has opened up for us. It is a powerful state, this newness, and it is unfamiliar territory. Brennan Manning who was so powerfully eulogized in 2013 by Ronnie McBrayer made a point about his relapses that we forget. Just because we are freed from an old life or habit doesn’t mean that it cannot be triggered again. We may have been released from something, but the more important question is what have we been released to?

Action precedes motivation and not the other way around. So at the action stage, the person makes the change. This action motivates a person to move on to the next step. If the previous stages have been glossed over and no plan has been made, then the action stage is short-lived and many people relapse to the pre-contemplation stage. The maintenance and preventing relapse stage is crucial; it is when the new habit is formed. This stage involves incorporating the new behavior until it becomes a habit. We have to put as much time and effort into forming our good health habits as we did into our bad habits. Often no thought is given to this stage and people assume that it just happens.
“Don't give up on your new year's resolutions,” Dr. Jacky Jones, The Irish Times, January 4, 2011

We are approaching the holiday season that comes with all the joy and angst that precedes the season of New Year’s Resolutions. There will be lots of media attention given to the latter in the first couple of months of the New Year, often jokingly. But what isn’t often talked about is the number of people who relapse back into an old life or habits that can sometimes be life threatening. Addiction research is replete with strategies to combat relapse and incorporate relapse prevention. Could The Christ’s commands to “go” and “do” be relapse prevention? Jesus rarely focused on guilt and self-recrimination of His followers. He did, however, rein it down on the heads of the temple cult, those who had abused the common people…us. Some of the fiercest words He spoke were to those same temple leaders.

You have minds like a snake pit! How do you suppose what you say is worth anything when you are so foul-minded? It’s your heart, not the dictionary, that gives meaning to your words. A good person produces good deeds and words season after season. An evil person is a blight on the orchard. Let me tell you something: Every one of these careless words is going to come back to haunt you. There will be a time of Reckoning. Words are powerful; take them seriously. Words can be your salvation. Words can also be your damnation."
Mathew 12:34-37 (TMB)

So the fact that Jesus didn’t focus on the time spent “wallowing” that Brennan Manning spoke of as his greatest regret was probably the first foray into “relapse prevention.”

Psychological treatment has fads and trends based on whatever current research is sparks interest and shows interesting results. For example over the last few years, the concept of mindfulness is au courant. This current trend originates from Buddhist meditation practices and coupled with other interventions seems to offer new modalities of treatment for relapse prevention.

Researchers studied what's known as mindfulness-based cognitive therapy, a combination of group counseling sessions and meditation exercises. For people with a history of severe depression, researchers found that replacing drugs with this type of therapy might work as well as continued treatment with medication. These findings add to a growing body of evidence that suggests group therapy can successfully keep depression symptoms in check, said Dr. William Marchand, a psychiatrist at the University of Utah who wasn't involved in the study. "Antidepressants are the gold standard for the prevention of relapse of depression," Marchand said by email. The findings, he said, show that "mindfulness-based cognitive therapy is an important intervention for the prevention of depressive relapse and equal to the gold standard."
“Group therapy may work as well as drugs to prevent depression relapse” BYLINE: Reuters , Egypt Independent May 1, 2015

Somehow over the last two millennia, Christians have taken “The Way” as the earliest Christians called the new Jewish cult and turned it into guilt, fear, and punishment. Christ certainly talked about sin but somehow, as the synoptic gospels were codified, the focus shifted more toward guilt about sin than the release from guilt and sin that Christ brought to us and bought for us with His life and death. When desperate people are searching for release, they will look any and everywhere. And unfortunately, it is sometimes more reliably found in books than in people.

Jesus spent his entire ministry hovering between these two [impulse and spiritual] camps of sin (while remaining sinless himself). On one side were the impulsive sinners. The religious leaders labeled all prostitutes, dishonest tax collectors, drunkards, rabble-rousers, and so on as "sinners". [sic] On the other side were the spiritual sinners. This group was, ironically enough, composed primarily of the religious leaders of the day, called the Pharisees and the teachers of law. Although outwardly the Pharisees looked like they had their act together,Jesus referred to them as "whitewashed tombs, beautiful on the outside, but filled with dead man's bones" (Matthew 23:27). In other words, the Pharisees were concerned with looking holy rather than being holy. Their pride showed up in the legalistic attitude that they had as they scorned the people who were beneath them in the religious hierarchy. Not only did they not love others, but Jesus made it clear that they also didn't love God. Like the Pharisees, the Church has often been more outspoken against impulsive sins and much less aggressive in dealing effectively with the more invisible, spiritual sins. However, Jesus did quite the opposite; take a read through the four Gospels (Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John) and you see that Jesus always saved his sharp and direct words for the spiritual sinners of his day.
Wagner, Richard. Christianity for Dummies. Hoboken: Wiley, 2004. Print

It may seem strange to use this book to partially explain the concept of sin, but if someone wanted to check out Christianity not from an apologistic or condemning position, this might be the secular option. If for the sake of discussion we accept the model presented by Wagner about two kinds of sin, truth is the African-American church has always had to deal with “invisible, spiritual” sin because that was the “boot on our corporeal neck” in the American institution of slavery that founded this country. Although we are and always will be at the vanguard of the struggle for justice and the righting of wrongs, we sometimes get stuck somewhere between release from and release to. We know what we have been delivered from because it is fresh. It is so fresh that it is easy to relapse back into that old habit, that old relationship, that old behavior, that old “impulsive” sin that is so easily recognizable. No doubt it can and does kill. But there are treatments, strategies, and obvious aides to get us out and back on track…if we can just get to them. What keeps the marvelous Body of Christ from preventing relapse and which relapse are we talking about? What forces inside our churches add to the continuing secularization of this country? If we think about “invisible, spiritual” sins, could that be what the un-churched see and experience? Our communities are struggling to survive and do we have the liberty and privilege to wallow in those invisible sins of greed, envy or jealousy? It is absolutely not as simple as stated, but it is critical to consider when we look at who is or is not coming to church, not to mention who is or is not working in the church.

So the question becomes what are we released to after The Nazarene has pursued us? Are we missing that step after someone’s possession by The Spirit of The Christ? After all, Christianity was not Jesus’ aim or His purpose: Salvation from all that separates us from Him/Her is, right? Form, fashion, procedure, codification, and accountability all have their place, but our business is living “The Way” of Jesus the Christ, isn’t it? And doesn’t that spring from inside, where The Invisible, The One, the “I Am that I Am” lives?

I fled Him, down the nights and down the days;
I fled Him, down the arches of the years;
I fled Him, down the labyrinthine ways
Of my own mind; and in the mist of tears
I hid from Him, and under running laughter.
Up vistaed hopes I sped;
And shot, precipitated,
Adown Titanic glooms of chasmèd fears,
From those strong Feet that followed, followed after.
But with unhurrying chase,
And unperturbèd pace,
Deliberate speed, majestic instancy,
They beat-and a Voice beat
More instant than the Feet-
'All things betray thee, who betrayest Me.'

These first fifteen lines of Francis Thompson’s (1859-1907) 182-line poem The Hound of Heaven must reach out to every soul that has struggled with any kind of alienation from life.

Although he lived a century ago, as Waldron argues, Francis Thompson's story is of contemporary relevance. In the past, many teachers hid the fact that Thompson was an addict from their students. The addiction is integral, however, to understanding both Thompson's life and his poetry. Had Thompson not believed that he had strayed so far from a loving God, he may well never have written a poem of such lyrical beauty and power as The Hound of Heaven.
“Francis Thompson: Author of The Hound of Heaven,” Michael Daniel, http://www.ad2000.com.au/articles/2000/may2000p12_57.html

Francis Thompson struggled with opium addiction, poverty, suicide attempts, and the tuberculosis that eventually killed him at age 48 on November 13, 1907. Born into a professional, comfortable, but austere pious Catholic family, he relapsed into his addictions many times over his short life, saved both by Wilfrid Meynell, the publisher of the Catholic Quarterly, Merry England, and a prostitute who supported him.

Between sending his manuscripts to Wilfred Meynell and meeting him, Thompson attempted suicide in his nadir of despair, but was saved from completing the action through a vision which he believed to be that of a youthful poet, Chatterton, who had committed suicide almost a century earlier. Shortly afterwards, a prostitute – whose identity Thompson never revealed - was to befriend him, give him lodgings and share her income with him. Thompson was later to describe her in his poetry as his saviour. But she would disappear one day, never to return.
Ibid.

Thompson, rejected by his family because he couldn’t conform to the middle-class model of success they had projected for him rather than the life he craved, one of the arts and humanities, experienced both the “invisible, spiritual” sins of his father (especially) and the “impulsive” sins of himself and a prostitute who saved him. Sometimes, all manner of separation from God consumes us, and yet…

Now of that long pursuit
Comes on at hand the bruit;
That Voice is round me like a bursting sea:
'And is thy earth so marred,
Shattered in shard on shard?
Lo, all things fly thee, for thou fliest Me!

***************
Whom wilt thou find to love ignoble thee,
Save Me, save only Me?
All which I took from thee I did but take,
Not for thy harms,
But just that thou might'st seek it in My arms.
All which thy child's mistake
Fancies as lost, I have stored for thee at home:
Rise, clasp My hand, and come!'

Halts by me that footfall:
Is my gloom, after all,
Shade of His hand, outstretched caressingly?
'Ah, fondest, blindest, weakest,
I am He Whom thou seekest!
Thou dravest love from thee, who dravest Me.'

In his poem Thompson elucidates from what we are released -

'And is thy earth so marred,
Shattered in shard on shard?

to where we are released -

All which thy child's mistake
Fancies as lost, I have stored for thee at home:
Rise, clasp My hand, and come!'

and by Whom we are released -

Whom wilt thou find to love ignoble thee,
Save Me, save only Me?

Whom will we find to love each other, those of us who wander in from an unsafe, unsanctified, wildly spinning world?

It's me, it's me, O Lord,
standing in the need of prayer;
it's me, it's me, O Lord,
standing in the need of prayer.
Standing in the Need of Prayer
African-American Spiritual, hymnary.org

Thank You, God, for release, for respite, for safety, for Home. Keep us in Your care as we wander in and out of desire, position, pontifications, and piety. Break us down to our most common denominator to remind us of our humanity. Only then can we see Your divinity shine through.

Only then.

Amen.