Daily Lesson for February 5, 2019

Today’s Daily Lesson comes from Galatians chapter 4 verse 17:

“They make much of you, but for no good purpose; they want to exclude you, so that you may make much of them.”

Today is the Feast Day of Roger Williams and Anne Hutchinson, those two colonial troublemakers who caused such a ruckus in the Massachusetts Bay Colony with their ideas  about freedom. It is ironic that the Episcopal Church should dedicate a day to these two Puritans reformers who left the Church of England, and it is a sign of the broad influence their ideas of religious eventually had. 

Hutchinson was a strong-spirited woman, a mother of eventually 15 children, and apparently a profound Biblical exegete and teacher.  She began hosting gatherings of women at her home, where they studied the Bible and where she apparently called into question the male preachers in the Colony whom she said were preaching a “a covenant of works” rather than “a covenant of grace”.  Even more, some men were said also to have set in on her home studies.

Hutchinson was put on trial for what Colony leaders basically saw as rebellious anarchism. By calling into question the leaders of the Colony, they said she was calling into question the whole God-ordained idea of authority. Hutchinson was eventually found guilty and exiled from the Colony. She and several members of her family killed by Indians in the wilderness trying to make their way to New Amsterdam for refuge.

If you go back and read the excerpts of Hutchinson’s trail you get a sense of her mighty Spirit. They accused her of teaching “antinomiansim” — the idea that Christians are released from the dictates of the law by virtue of grace. This was sheer anarchy to the leaders. But Hutchinson asked if the law was most in-transgressible then why was Abraham willing to break it when he went to sacrifice Isaac?  

Read that and you get a sense of what her home studies must have been like.

And when they questioned her about her alleged teaching of men, Hutchinson reparteed with her own question wondering if teaching men was so bad why she was being asked to teach the all-male court.

Anne had smarts and guts.

Read the charges against Hutchinson and they sound so much like the charges leveled against Paul by the religious leaders in Jerusalem. By letting the Gentiles in Paul was breaking the law, subverting authority, undermining God’s order. 

But Paul called it what it was.  By making a big deal of the Gentiles the authorities were really making a big deal of themselves. They wanted what all Fundamentalists really want — to hold onto power and control and to undo anyone who questioned their right to them.

Though they were both banned from the Massachusetts Bay Colony, Hutchinson’s and Williams’s ideas of religious freedom eventually won out in America over their Puritan accusers. But a people must remain eternally vigilant, lest narrow-minded and control-motivated theocracy again try to grab hold of our nation. 

Marking today’s Feast Day and remembering the story is an important way of also remembering who we are and also who definitely don’t want to become.