Sermon Series: What is Freedom? (Galatians)
Series, “What is Freedom?” (1) Freedom is maturity (Galatians 3.23-29)
Eastminster United Presbyterian Church, 2nd Sunday after Pentecost C, June 23, 2019
Tom James
What is freedom, and what does it have to do with Christian faith? That’s the topic over the next three weeks or so. Summer is a time when tend to think a lot about freedom. We have a holiday celebrating it in a few weeks. Hopefully, we have a little bit of extra free time during the summer, with vacations and warm weather for getting outside. But I feel like we often throw around the word “freedom” without thinking much about what it actually means. I think, deep down, we know that it doesn’t just mean doing what we want whenever we want. In other words, there’s something deeper about freedom than simply making choices.
But, again, what does Christian faith have to say about freedom? In our passage for this morning, Paul begins where it might be useful for us to begin: in the “before Christ” of our lives, before the meaning and value of Christ became apparent to us before we began to realize the difference that faith in Christ makes for us. A big part of that difference, we will see, is freedom. Now, I want to stress that this “before Christ” isn’t, for most of us, period of time that is left in the past. I’m living my “before Christ” right now, in a way, because there are all kinds of ways that, even now, I act as if faith in Christ hasn’t made much of a difference. I act faithlessly as if Christ hasn’t come. In fact, that’s what Paul’s letter to the Galatians is about: the people he was writing to were people who were tending to “backslide,” if you will: they were falling back into patterns of life and ways of believing that reflected a “before Christ” attitude. They were struggling with a tendency to lapse back into faithlessness. At one point in the letter, Paul calls them out: “O, foolish Galatians!” he says.
Christians from Galatia, we learn, were acting a bit like children, but not in a good way. Not in the sense of having wonder, of being marvelously open-eyed and open-hearted, not in the way of taking delight in the small things, like children are able to do. We need to think about what childhood was like in the ancient world. In a sense, there was no childhood, at least in the modern sense. Children were not segregated from the rest of society like they are today: they were not put into age-appropriate schools, there weren’t playgrounds and children’s programming and even much in the way of toys. Children weren’t really encouraged to play, at least not in a different way than adults. Children weren’t coddled and protected and prized the way they are today. In fact, children, from the time that they were able to move around, from the time they developed motor control, were considered apprentices, low-level workers, small adults, if you will, who were gradually assuming the burdens of labor and responsibility. Children usually did not have close relationships with their parents. Mostly, they were under the supervision of some kind of disciplinarian. In a wealthy household, perhaps it was a slave who was given the task of overseeing the children and directing their work. It is important to know, too, that in, in the society that Paul was writing in, children themselves were much like slaves in that they were considered part of the household possessions owned and totally controlled by the “paterfamilias,” the father of the house. In fact, the Latin word for “family” meant “possessions.” Families were what the patriarch owned.
Paul says, before faith came, we were under a disciplinarian. We were like children he says, in the sense that we were under the authority of someone appointed over us, a taskmaster. The “taskmaster” Paul has in mind here is the system of law. Ancient hebrew law would be the main example of this for his original readers. Teachers had been coming to Galatia and telling Christians there that the best way to be Christians was to be super-obedient to the Jewish law. After all, Jesus followed it, more or less. But Paul is comparing such obedience to the unfreedom, the slavery, of childhood.
Hardly anyone is telling us today that, in order to be faithful followers of Christ, we have to be obedient to the Jewish law. But there is a message out there that to be Christian, we have to adhere to a lot of other norms and standards that treat us somewhat like children. Michelle and I have been following a popular TV show on Hulu that is based on Margaret Atwood’s classic work of dystopian fiction, The Handmaid’s Tale. Atwood tells about the nation of Gilead which, in this fictional universe, has arisen to overthrow the United States. The founders of Gilead were Americans who came to believe that declining birth rates were threatening our strength and vitality and who blamed declining birth rates on the loosening of boundaries between classes and genders. Gilead arose to restore those boundaries, making it illegal for women to have careers or even to read, and assigning some women the role of childbearing while allowing them no role in rearing their children nor any prestige as women of the household. That was reserved for the wives of privileged men who are called “commanders.” These lucky women couldn’t have jobs outside the home nor read nor have any authority over men either. They were supposed to be the guardians of feminine virtue and humility, always encouraging the female slaves in the household to be grateful for the benevolent provision of the commander. Aside from the brutal oppression of women the show portrays, the other thing that strikes the viewer is how immature, how childish, how unable to deal with the complicated emotional life of human beings, Gilead is.
The Handmaid’s Tale is not supposed to be a prediction of where our country might go, but instead is trying to expose something of what is already going on among us. There is certainly plenty of misogyny in our culture, and many of the show’s fans have focused on that. But this issue of immaturity, of the way we put ourselves under the authority of simplistic moral codes that divide people into rigid categories. In our, real, world, it is not uncommon for someone to be praised as a “good Christian” for upholding what we used to call family value. “Family values” meant wholesome values of fidelity and generosity, but it also often meant rigidly defined roles. Family values came to mean men being good breadwinners, and women being good homemakers—and, just as importantly, never confusing those roles. Now, I want to say clearly that I’m grateful for my provider Dad and my homemaker Mom. There’s nothing wrong with traditional families like that. But Paul says something that we ought to hear as liberating news. In Christ, there is no male nor female, Jew nor Gentile, slave nor free. In other words, all the categories that people may have used in the ancient world, or in our own world, to sort people and decide who can do what and who can’t—in Christ, all of that is set aside. We don’t have to be bound to gender expectations anymore. These were amazing thoughts for the time, and there is some evidence that some Christians, at least, took them to heart: there were women preachers and healers and in the early church. In the church, very much unlike the secular world at that time, women could hold positions of power and authority. And, if we really think about what it means that, in Christ, there is no male and female any longer, the implications are broader and more life-changing than that. In Christ, we are freed to accept ourselves and each other as persons, and so we don’t have to confine ourselves and each other to roles. That is freedom. We can recognize that what gives us our identity is our unity with Christ and with each other, and therefore we don’t need to cling to the expectations and the demands that are imposed on us by our culture. That is freedom.
But it takes some growing up, I’ve found. There’s a lot of confusion on this point. People often treat freedom as something that is comfortable and easy, when the truth is that freedom is something we often try to hide from. Sometimes I’d rather just go with the flow or accept the prevailing opinion or shrug my shoulders and remain passive. That’s the child in me, and not in a good way. That’s the person who would rather not take responsibility, who would rather do without the burdens of freedom.
We celebrate freedom in this country, but so often we think we’re being free simply by having lots of choices, fifteen kinds of mayonnaise or a hundred varieties of yogurt, or ten kinds of Oreos (when all you really need is the double stuffed!). Sometimes we think we’re free by remaining noncommittal and unencumbered. Sometimes we think we are free when we don’t have to think too much, or when we don’t have to do any work. The truth is, we easily fall into the trap of thinking about freedom like we think about a vacation: just let me sit here in my chair, and have someone bring me my drinks. But that’s more like wanting to revert to childhood, isn’t it? The truth is that we are most free when we are being challenged when we learn how much more we are capable of than we thought. We are more free when there are no easy answers available and we have to get creative. We are most free when things get tough. We are most free when we grow up a little, and we have to have the courage to be who we are.
The goods news is that the Christian life in today’s world is just like that. There are no easy answers. There’s no cookie-cutter available to cut out the perfect faith that will work in every circumstance or that will never make us question. But there is grace. This freedom thing is not simply a burden that we bear alone. The grace that we have is that we are in this thing together, and God’s spirit dwells among us, teaching us to be free, calling us to be our truest selves, and giving us joy in a freedom that is shared. In the name of God, our creator and redeemer. Amen.
“What is freedom?” series, no. 2: Freedom is community (Galatians 5.1, 13-25)
Eastminster United Presbyterian Church, 3rd Sunday after Pentecost C (June 30, 2019)
Tom James
What is freedom? In the popular patriotic song “God Bless the USA,” by Lee Greenwood, there’s a line that says, “And I’m proud to be an American, where at least I know I’m free.” The “at least” has always struck me: as if the one and only thing to be proud of about being an American citizen is that one is “free.” As if there’s nothing else in our history, nothing about our accomplishments, other than something called “freedom.” As if Greenwood is being a bit defensive, as if he is trying to brush aside criticisms of the country. But the song never goes on to say what Greenwood believes freedom to be. Freedom is never defined. It is assumed, I guess, that everyone knows what freedom is. But philosophers and political theorists and novelists and theologians have been arguing about what freedom is for centuries. Can it really be so obvious? Or, maybe, it’s that freedom has come to mean simply “what we’re proud of as Americans.” As if it has no content except as a word we use to mark our identity. I don’t know what freedom is—all I know is that we’re its shining example. It’s very odd.
My guess that there is an assumption about what freedom is, though. My guess is that it has something to do with freedom to be an individual. It is freedom not to be bothered. Historian Phillip Pettit has argued that there are two traditions for thinking about freedom in western society. According to one of those traditions, freedom is not being interfered with. It is being able to do what we want, to be unencumbered by rules and regulations. According to the other, freedom means not being dominated. The thing about not being dominated, though, is that it requires something of us. We have to build up the inner reserves to avoid putting ourselves in situations where we are dominated. The traditional word for this is “virtue.” Freedom means developing virtues, or we might say “moral skills,” that enable us to live lives in which we do not succumb to domination to things that control us, whether they be abusive partners, drugs, or something else. Also, we have to have some kind of community support to avoid being dominated: someone to teach us how to be free. It also requires some set of rules and regulations that protect minorities, for example, from being pushed around by the majority. In fact, freedom from domination often requires intervention, even interference. It requires learning how to live with limits. It requires a community.
The freedom that the Apostle Paul talks about in Galatians has nothing to do with being left alone. It has nothing to do with not being interfered with. Throughout the letter, Paul is concerned that Christians in Galatia are being convinced that, in order to receive grace, they have to follow the Jewish law. Christ had freed them from the domination that they had been subject to—the domination of guilt, the domination of the demonic forces they believed were in control of the world, the domination of an empire that claimed their ultimate allegiance and even their worship, but they were trading in that freedom for a new kind of bondage—bondage to the law. They were becoming slaves again. And, so he says, “It is for freedom that Christ has set you free.” Don’t become slaves again. Don’t allow yourselves to be degraded. Don’t allow yourselves to be dominated. Reclaim your freedom in Christ.
It may seem to us that Paul switches gears when he gets to verse 13 of our passage—that, in fact, he totally reverses the point of his message. For, in those verses, Paul tells his readers to use their freedom in the right way, and he ends up talking about something very much like the requirements of the law. Paul lists a series of sins to avoid, and then he seems to suggest a series of virtues to try to emulate. But doesn’t this get us back to a lot of what Paul had been telling the Galatians to avoid? Doesn’t this get us back into a lot of effort to do the right thing, to show that we are good, to justify ourselves by our good deeds? Isn’t the same kind of thing that makes people slaves to rules and regulations? Am I really free if I subscribe to this list of dos and don’ts?
Once again, perhaps it’s a matter of what kind of freedom we’re talking about. If freedom means being left alone, if it means pretending that I’m not part of a community that I’m responsible to, or living as if I’m the only one who matters, if it means embracing the illusion that I’m an island unto myself and that I don’t need anyone and that I can use people for my pleasure or advance my interests, then, yes, what Paul is suggesting here is the very opposite of freedom? But the Bible never talks that way. It never endorses or even gives any credence our very modern view of freedom that is so invested in the independence of the individual and the brutal competition between individuals that our society says is natural and good. The Bible, in fact, doesn’t seem to regard that as freedom at all, but only a morally blind form of slavery—and bondage that is so blind to its oppression that it doesn’t even recognize itself as bondage.
The key point in Paul’s teaching, here, I believe, is when he says, “For if you live by the Spirit, you are not subject to the requirements of the law.” It is the Spirit of God who truly liberates us; it is the Spirit of God who is the true source of our freedom. It isn’t our preferences, which can be taken captive by the wiles of advertising and propaganda. It isn’t our armies, who can only protect us from external invaders and who can do nothing about the way that we willingly enslave ourselves. It isn’t our money, which can itself be a force that enslaves us. It is the Spirit, who aligns us with the very purpose for which we are created, who frees us to be our truest and best selves by enabling us to act in a way that fits our nature as God’s beloved.
Two quotes come to mind: one famous, the other not. Patrick Henry, speaking to the Virginia Convention in 1775, famously said, “I know not course others may take, but as for me, give me liberty or give me death.” Henry wasn’t saying, “leave me alone to make my fortune.” He wasn’t saying, “Get off my lawn,” or “Go, away, Britain, you bother me.” He was saying that it would be better to die than to live as one who is dominated. To be dominated is to be caught in a living death. And the second quote is, as I said, much less well known. It comes from Presbyterian preacher Frederick Buechner. Buechner meant it as a kind of test, a way for us to probe our souls a little. He says that if you have not cried for anyone but yourself over the past year, then chances are you already dead. Give me liberty or give me death. But if my freedom is just for myself, I might as well already be dead.
The Spirit of God gives us freedom and the Spirit of God connects us with each other. The Spirit of God is the spirit of community, the force that binds us to each other, the power in life that weaves us together, as Martin Luther King, Jr., put it, in a single garment of destiny. And, if Paul is right, there is no freedom worthy of the name unless we are woven together. There is no freedom from the ways in which we are put in bondage by a society that tries to isolate us as individuals and to pit us against each other unless we can learn to form relationships that resist isolation and competition.
It may come as a surprise us, but perhaps the Bible’s clearest picture of freedom comes not in the exodus from Egypt but in Paul’s list of the fruit of the Spirit. Love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, generosity, faithfulness, gentleness, and self-control. Against these kinds of things, Paul tells us, there is no law. In fact, there can be no law against them because the point of law is to preserve some semblance of community when would otherwise tend to tear each other apart, and love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, generosity, faithfulness, gentleness, and self-control preserve community better than any law. When the Spirit guides us, law loses its point. This is freedom.
So, to recap: last week, we said that, from a Christian point of view, freedom is maturity. Freedom is possible when begin to grow up a little and learn to live into the possibilities that God gives to each of us. Freedom is possible when we realize that God’s special gifts to each of us cannot be confined to the roles that society often puts on us. And this week, we are going further. Not only is freedom maturity, but it is also community. Freedom is possible only when we are liberated from our isolation and our selfishness by the power of the Spirit of Christ, a power that binds us to each other and enables us to share our lives with each other. These two are connected because they both involve being freed from the fantasies that so often hold us back, what Paul sometimes calls the “vain imaginations” that can become a form of bondage. We imagine either that society’s roles perfectly and completely define us or that we don’t need community at all.
We fall into these extremes because we tend to resist the work of the Spirit within us. But, nevertheless, the Spirit is within us, and among us. And, as Paul also says, where the Spirit of God is, there is liberty. In the name of God, our creator and redeemer. Amen.
Sermon series: What is freedom? No. 3, Freedom is life (Galatians 6.1-18)
Eastminster United Presbyterian Church, 4th Sunday after Pentecost C, July 7, 2019
Tom James
In 1984, there was a movie about the evils of dancing in a small, Midwestern town. A young man named Ren McCormick, played by Kevin Bacon, moved to town from the big city of Chicago, and he liked to dance. Unfortunately for Ren, the town had an exaggerated sense of propriety and a little bit of fear about the dangers of young bodies in motion. As fortune would have it, one of Ren’s young supporters in his campaign to bring a little Chicago liveliness to the sleepy town was Reverend Shaw Moore’s daughter, Ariel. Of course, Rev. Moore would be Ren’s chief opponent, the guardian of virtue and the loudest voice of small-town fear.
I mention the plot of this old movie, called “Footloose,” because it so clearly depicts the way Christian churches appear to people on the outside. We are the ones who are trying to uphold strict rules. We are the guardians of virtue and the loudest voices of fear. Even people in the church often believe that to be the case. When Michelle and I lived in Virginia, she was the pastor of a small church and I attended the adult school class. This was just outside the city of Richmond in an economically stressed neighborhood, and some of the members of that Sunday school class had very non-traditional family lives, with multiple kids from multiple partners, and there was a history of drug abuse and lots of other life difficulties in their pasts and present, too. One thing I noticed a lot from this group was a strong sense of guilt: a sense that they didn’t measure up. It was as if they believed that their difficulties made them outsiders, even though they were very much a part of the church. It was if they thought they were in Rev. Moore’s church from Footloose, always under his grim eye of judgment.
I was talking to a couple of my kids the other day about why their friends aren’t interested in church. And, wouldn’t you know it, it’s still 1984: a lot of people think of the church today as filled with people like Rev. Shaw Moore—people who want to keep people from dancing, if you will, to keep people from finding their joy and living their lives, people who want above all else to impose conformity on everybody, people who are afraid of change, people who are afraid of people, afraid of life.
That’s how we are seen, at least by very many today. We often find ourselves protesting that image others have of us. No, we’re not like that! We accept everybody! We’re not afraid of dancing—we’re not like the church down the street who doesn’t accept gay people! And, yet, there’s truth in the caricature, most likely. Religious people are trying to hold on to something that is in danger of dying, and so we often seem to outsiders like we are suspicious of them and suspicious of the world. We often seem to be the kind of people who live in fear of changing times, and who constantly scrutinize other people and who judge them simply for loving whom they love or having the history that they have or struggling with the problems they struggle with. We often seem to be people who are intent on holding to an ideal that may never have existed in reality but has always served as a way to judge people deficient and to deny the complexities and ambiguities of actual human life.
Paul was writing his letter to the Galatians to deal with a first-century version of this problem. There was in the church in Galatia a faction, maybe even a majority, of people who were really concerned to hold on to an old ideal. They believed in following the Jewish law, and even in excluding people who didn’t or who wouldn’t. Because there were people in Galatia who wanted to dance—to free themselves from the old rules because it seemed to them that Jesus had died to make them free. They experienced the same gospel that Paul knew: a gospel that announced that God had accepted them just as they were and that there was no need to conform to outward signs of religion like circumcision and other elements of Old Testament ritual. But, for the Rev. Shaw Moore’s of Galatia, that would never be enough. There were rules to hold on to, and these rules were more important than the people who followed them.
But there were other points of controversy as well. There were some who were judged because they didn’t conform to Jewish law, but there were others who were judged because they fell into sin. We’re not told exactly what the sin they fell into was, but there is a list of likely suspects back in chapter five. They include sexual sins and other things we might think of as “vices” like gluttony and drunkenness, but the overall tenor of the list of sins Paul gives us is that they are anti-social: most of them are about breaking up or damaging community—things like dissension and factionalism and quarreling. In fact, even the things we traditionally think of as “vices,” like gluttony and drunkenness, are probably on the list because they break up and damage community—not because drinking and eating are wrong or because there is a certain amount of food and drink that we are supposed to have and no more. Excess is a problem, for Paul, not because he is concerned to preserve a standard of moderation but because he is concerned about preserving community. Excess means someone else’s insufficient amount. Excessive food means someone else goes without. Excessive wealth means someone else’s poverty. And to break up or endanger community is to diminish freedom, because I can’t be free to enjoy the goods of life unless you free to enjoy them, too. In Christian vision, freedom is linked to community: no one is free unless everyone is free.
And what Paul tells us in the verses we read today is that these people who have broken or damaged community should be restored to community as gently and as thoroughly as possible. They shouldn’t be cast out but invited back. They shouldn’t be shown the door but encouraged to work their differences out. A loss of anyone is a loss for all. The Christian vision of life allows no room for throwaway people, by the way. If it is true that no one is free unless all are free, then no one can be simply consigned to a life of punishment. No one can be tossed aside or given up on without unraveling the very meaning of community and thus the power of the gospel. In the Christian vision, despite the stereotypes about religious people that we find in our culture, judgment can never be final. People are never judged to be cast out or rejected. The final judgment about everyone is that they belong in God’s community.
The brokenness of human life—all those imperfections, the things that embarrass us or make us feel ashamed, the things that we would rather hide from our church friends—these are part of life as we actually live it. The foibles and mistakes, the bad decisions and the snap judgments, as well as the moments of joy, the dancing, the sharing in good food and drink—all these are part of what of it means to be human. The freedom that Paul has been talking about throughout his letter to the Galatians is not the freedom of angels or saints, but the freedom of human beings in whom the grace of acceptance has taken root, enabling them to be glad in who they are. And, so, freedom is not freedom from life, but freedom in life, in the middle of the joys and the mistakes, the good decisions and the bad ones. Indeed, the freedom we have in Christ is the freedom to live as human beings—freedom from guilt and from perfectionism and from a whole range of inhuman expectations. Freedom to be just the people that we are—warts and all, as they say.
When Paul was writing his letter, it was typical practice to have someone else write down the words. Writing on parchment was tedious, and there were people who specialized in the task. But at the end of the letter, most scholars believe that Paul himself took pen in hand to finish with his own handwriting to underscore how personal this letter was for him. And, in the closing lines, Paul reminds his readers that what matters for Christian faith is not rule-following or any kind of perfection, but rather a new creation in Christ. In Christ, we are new people, and that is our freedom. What is new is not so much a set of virtues as an ability to accept ourselves and each other with the same grace that we have been accepted in Christ. In this new creation, there is no longer a distinction between observers of religious rules and nonobservers, between Jews and Greeks. In this new creation, there is no longer a distinction between those hold power in the household and those who serve, between male and female, free and slave. In fact, those imbalances of power no longer have a place or a point in Christ’s community. In this new creation, we share our goods and our prerogatives and our lives as freely as Christ shared them with us, and we aren’t bothered by concerns about our position or our authority or our success in the marketplace. If we have each other, we have everything.
Of course, we are a long way from experiencing this new creation in Christ. For now, we only hold to it as a matter of faith. We recognize that our freedom today is still incomplete because there are some who are not yet free. We still have prisons and poverty; we still have oppression and tyranny; we still have divisions and hostilities; we still have self-doubts and worries and fears. For us, freedom is still a hope and a promise as much as it is a daily experience. We look forward to the day when we are truly free because everyone is free. We look forward to the day and we commit ourselves to the hope that, by God’s grace, it will arrive. And then there will be peace. In the name of God, our creator and redeemer. Amen.
