Sermon - Freedom

Preached on June 30, 2013, at First Congregational Church of Tallmadge, Ohio, UCC.

Scripture: Galatians 5:1, 13-26

For freedom Christ has set us free. Stand firm, therefore, and do not submit again to a yoke of slavery.

For you were called to freedom, brothers and sisters; only do not use your freedom as an opportunity for self-indulgence, but through love become slaves to one another. For the whole law is summed up in a single commandment, ‘You shall love your neighbor as yourself.’ If, however, you bite and devour one another, take care that you are not consumed by one another. Live by the Spirit, I say, and do not gratify the desires of the flesh.For what the flesh desires is opposed to the Spirit, and what the Spirit desires is opposed to the flesh; for these are opposed to each other, to prevent you from doing what you want. But if you are led by the Spirit, you are not subject to the law. Now the works of the flesh are obvious: fornication, impurity, licentiousness, idolatry, sorcery, enmities, strife, jealousy, anger, quarrels, dissensions, factions, envy, drunkenness, carousing, and things like these. I am warning you, as I warned you before: those who do such things will not inherit the kingdom of God. By contrast, the fruit of the Spirit is love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, generosity, faithfulness, gentleness, and self-control. There is no law against such things. And those who belong to Christ Jesus have crucified the flesh with its passions and desires. If we live by the Spirit, let us also be guided by the Spirit. Let us not become conceited, competing against one another, envying one another.

Sermon

“For freedom, Christ has set us free,” Paul writes to the church of Galatians. And so Christ sets us free, just as God set the earth free in its creation, and God set the Hebrew slaves free from Egypt, and God set the nation of Israel free from exile in a foreign land, “for freedom, Christ has set you free” from anything that enslaves people; free from that which oppresses people, and free from that which keeps us in the sins of hatred, jealousy, resentment, selfishness, mistreatment of others and mistreatment of ourselves.

Christ sets us free from all of that, and Christ sets us free to live with the fruits that God’s Spirit gives.  Freedom is freedom from, and freedom to: freedom from brokenness; freedom to live full and abundant lives in the love of our neighbors.

I grew up under the care of loving and responsible parents who, like many of their generation, were generally always around at home, mostly my mother, to care for me and my little brothers. If she needed to go to the grocery store after school, we all went.  I have some memories of the very first times when I was deemed responsible enough to be left home alone for several hours in the evening when my parents and brothers were gone.  I was maybe nine years old. What an amazing time. The freedom of it!  I did things just because I could: I’d run around the house shouting. I’d eat dessert before the dinner they left me, and maybe I wouldn’t even eat the dinner. I’d just dump it in the garbage and dump some other things on top so no one would see my uneaten dinner. I’d turn on the television in the family room and then play my records on the nice stereo in the living room, and play them loud.

And the great fun of all this is not that I had been secretly wanting to live this way. I didn’t want to live like this, but I did these things just because I could. I had some freedom, so I tried it out.

There is something about the brokenness of our human nature that can’t help doing things just because they are there when we have lots of freedom from restraints and very little sense of freedom to anything except being free from.

This is the week when we in the United States of America celebrate our independence. “Land of the free.” “From every mountainside, let freedom ring.”

The Declaration of Independence signed on July 4th is a proud, stirring, and important heritage. Originally a declaration of freedom from a kingdom who had little regard for the well being of its colonies, except as a revenue stream, over the generations this country has struggled to free all those who have been denied the fullness of its promise. On a week when we remember the courage and sacrifice of those who have served in the military to defend the freedom of this nation, we do well to also remember the courage and sacrifice of those who spoke up and stood up for the freedom of slaves, women, immigrants across the centuries who were once scorned, and minorities who have been segregated out of the full promise of freedom. We have come a long way, and I am proud of my country. I see God at work in the history of our country, Christ at work to free people from oppression, discrimination, hostility, and economic slavery, and the work continues. For freedom, Christ sets us free from all that enslaves us, but sets us free to … what?

Not free just to be free. Paul writes that “you were called to freedom, brothers and sisters; only do not use your freedom as an opportunity for self-indulgence, but through love become servants to one another.”

We are free to live our lives in the service of loving our neighbor as we love ourselves. Because when freedom becomes freedom for its own sake, a freedom from all commitments or obligations, then we have made freedom itself an idol, and we are enslaved by it.

Freedom is the title of a novel by Jonathan Franzen, written a few years ago, that tells the story of an American family struggling with freedoms of different kinds and the national ideas of freedom in the past decade since 9/11. It is largely a tragedy about freedom’s misdirections. One of the main characters, whose husband earns enough for her to stay at home, and has now raised two children into adulthood, is described in this way: “By almost any standard, she led a luxurious life. She had all day every day to figure out some decent and satisfying way to live, and yet all she ever seemed to get for all her choices and all her freedom was more miserable” (page 181). 

Christ sets us free to live in the loving service of others, and the paradoxical truth is that only in giving away our lives in love are we truly free. Remember, Jesus said that those who give their lives are the ones who save them.

What Paul was writing about was that Christ sets us free from having to please God as a condition of being saved, being loved, being forgiven by God. We don't have to please God because God is pleased to love us without our having done anything first. We are God’s creation, God’s children, and so we are free from worrying about whether we are loved, whether we are valuable, whether our life has meaning.

You are loved.

You are valuable.

Your life has meaning.

We are freed from requirements and conditions and freed to live our lives for the goodness of this life God has given us. We are free to receive God’s gifts, to receive the peace a summer morning with fog in the valley, and the gift of a cool breeze on a sunny day, and beauty of a late summer sunset and the fireflies that light up the twilight. We are free to receive the gifts of rich meals, good music, a story well told, games and sports, dance and the arts, and the rich blessings of friendship and family. We are free to receive and enjoy this life because these are all gifts from God who loves us as God’s own children.

And free also are God’s gifts given to us in comfort, support, healing, peace-making to meet the heartache and violence in our lives. We are free to receive these gifts as well, and it may be that these gifts are worth more to us than any day of laughter.

We are free to receive God’s gifts just as we are with no preconditions, and we are free to worship God for all these gifts, for the undeserved, unearned freedom we have to live our lives in the midst of so much grace. This kind of worship, the kind of worship in which we encounter God with the confidence of people freed by God, in which our joy overflows in praise and thanksgiving - this kind of worship leads us to the turning point between what we are freed from and what we freed to.

The joy of freedom is not in the freedom of choices to make in every given moment to match our preferences.  The joy of freedom is in the commitments we make. William Willimon, who was the chaplain at Duke University for many years, remembered one rainy awful Sunday morning when he was walking to the church for services and ran into a stranger who said hello and, in the camaraderie of being out together on a terrible day, asked what he was doing.

“I’m going to church.”

“Really?” The stranger asked. “Why would you wake up on a morning like this and decide to go to church?”

“Oh no,” Willimon said. “I didn’t decide this morning. I decided 40 years ago to go to church on Sundays, and that has freed me from having to make a new choice each week.”

American freedom is not about being able to do whatever I want, although you’ll probably hear some of that this week. No, American freedom was a declaration of independence from corrupt rule so that we would be free to commit ourselves to being a nation in which we committed to protect each other and to promote the common welfare of our neighbors, as the Constitution puts it.

“You were called to freedom, brothers and sisters. …Through love, become servants to one another.”

We know that any commitment worth making will take away our choices and diminish that sense of complete freedom. The loyalty of friendship, the vows of marriage, the responsibility of children, the commitment to volunteer service or vocational calling, the promise we make to provide for the well being of a child who is baptized in this church. It is in these commitments that we discover the real freedom for which Christ has set us free. Freedom to give ourselves in love to others, and know that nothing can ever prevent us from the freedom to receive and share God’s gifts.