Just As I Am: What Kind of Freedom is This?

Galatians 5:1, 13-25

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.

The church where I preached this sermon on June 30, 2013, does a “fifth Sunday surprise” whenever a fifth Sunday comes up during a given month. Based on the theme of freedom and input from me, the worship team chose to use this video as the “surprise” portion of worship. I built the sermon to connect with it.

Video shown before sermon: Lost Boys of Sudan (10 minutes)

Special thanks to my friend and brother in Christ, Paul Gatluak Both, for letting me tell a bit of his story as part of the sermon. Paul is in South Sudan right now for the next two months; your prayers would be greatly appreciated.

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It seems like an appropriate week to be talking about freedom.

This coming Thursday our nation will celebrate 237 years of independence. This week is also the 150^th anniversary of the Battle of Gettysburg, a devastating although critical battle in our country’s Civil War, which resulted in the abolition of slavery. And in just this past week, a number of our basic freedoms have been addressed by the Supreme Court and by the Congress – specifically, voting rights, marriage equality, and immigration rights.. So, in the words of the Gettysburg Address, it is altogether fitting and proper that we should talk about freedom this morning.

But we can’t talk about freedom without understanding what still keeps us in chains. Beyond the more well-known and horrible forms of slavery, where people are bought and sold, there are other forms of slavery that affected people’s lives in Paul’s time, and that affect us today as well.

When Paul says, “stand firm, and do not submit again to a yoke of slavery,” he is referring to the rules and requirements of the Jewish Law. The Galatians were mostly Gentiles. Some Jewish-Christian missionaries were telling the Galatians that they had to be circumcised like the Jews, and follow certain dietary laws, to be true Christians. When Paul found out about it, he was outraged. As Paul writes just before our passage, those who want to be justified by the Law have cut themselves off from Christ. This idea of “favor comes from good behavior” directly contradicts Paul’s core foundation for our faith that we have been saved by God’s grace alone. He tells them and us, you either follow the Law, guided by your own interpretation, or you follow the Truth, guided by the Holy Spirit.

We run into the same problem today when we try to turn the Bible into a rulebook for how to live our lives. When Christians today try to live good and holy lives by figuring out what the Bible says is correct and not correct, the problem is not whether we are doing the right or wrong thing. The problem is that we have turned off the path of trusting and following Christ. Our path is diverted away from freedom and into the slavery of trying to earn our salvation.

The story of the Bible is not a set of rules, but rather a story of God’s love for all God’s people, despite the mess we make of things at every turn.

The Bible is not the only rulebook we are encouraged to follow. The systems and institutions that surround virtually every aspect of our lives all come with their own rules and requirements. In the video about the Lost Boys of Sudan, we saw how governments create a form of slavery by imposing oppressive rules, especially when these rules change without warning, and the people living under them must change their lives accordingly.

The boys in the video were forced to flee for their lives from their Sudanese homes, and then several years later they were evicted from Ethiopia and had to flee again.

Rules and requirements create slavery for some people in every form of government, whether democratic or not. Each of the changes made this week by our Supreme Court and Congress may be interpreted as freedom for some and slavery for others. This is the problem when systems and institutions trump the commandment Paul says is the sum of all the law, to love your neighbor as yourself.

Our economic system also creates rules and requirements that enslave us. Poet and author Wendell Berry wrote in an essay that ““Most people are now finding that they are free to make very few significant choices. It is becoming steadily harder for ordinary people – the unrich, the unprivileged – to choose a kind of work for which they have a preference, a talent, or a vocation; to choose where they will live…or even to choose to raise their own children. …..And most individuals (“liberated” or not) choose to conform not to local ways and conditions but to a rootless and placeless monoculture of commercial expectations and products…… We want the liberty of divorce from spouses and independence from family and friends, yet we remain indissolubly married to a hundred corporations that regard us at best as captives and at worst as prey.”[1]

And there is cultural norm slavery, too. If we want to keep up with the latest fashions, or home décor, we must buy and dispose of things, over and over and over again. If we want to fit in, to be accepted by our peers, we must look and talk and dress and behave in a certain way, and set aside anything that doesn’t fit the culture. This is a form of slavery, because it masks who we truly are, and it sets up rules and requirements for what is called happiness in the present culture, at the present time.

Besides rules and regulations, the other primary source of slavery revolves around constant care and feeding, whether it’s the maintenance of our own self interests, or the expectations of ourselves and others. Both result in slavery, because they pull us away from what God calls us toward.

When our minds and our hearts become cluttered by forms of self-gratification – the idols, and addictions, and lusts that so easily creep in and consume us – these things take over our lives and crowd out all the space in our hearts for loving one another. Paul addresses this issue when he says, “do not use freedom as an opportunity for self-indulgence.” He addresses it directly, because there was concern about what the Gentiles would do with their freedom if they were not bound by the law. Those Gentiles who had come to believe in Christ had certainly lived lives of self-gratification up to that point, so it was a reasonable concern.

It’s a reasonable concern for us too. Emptying ourselves does not come naturally. We are filled with anxieties that we try to tamp down by adding things to our lives, and these things can expand into habits, and behaviors, and addictions that spiral out of our control. And then we are talking about slavery again.

The expectations of others also become chains that enslave us, filling up our lives with priorities that crowd out God’s call to us. The needs, wants, and comforts of our families, friends, and workplaces leave little time and space in our busy lives. And we come to believe that all the things we do for all of these people are essential, that none of them can be set aside.

And then there are the regular visits to the gym, and the bucket lists we make for ourselves, and our life plans and goals….well, there is so much to do and so little time to do it.

And then we hear Jesus, in our gospel passage from Luke today, as he responds to those who say they want to follow him. He calls them all to set aside their excuses and their other priorities. Even the reasons that sound reasonable to us, he tells them and us that we must set them all aside to follow him. Their excuses to Jesus were their chains of slavery to the things of the world. “I can’t quite yet because…”….. “I’ll be ready to go as soon as…”. The hard message of these words straight from Jesus, is that our first priority is to follow him.

Being guided by the Spirit means letting go of all other rules and requirements, all other needs for care and feeding and maintenance, anything that gets in the way or stops us from loving one another with all our hearts, all our souls, all our minds and all our collective strength.

Whatever keeps us from loving one another is a form of slavery.

It diminishes us, it diminishes the body of Christ, and it diminishes the world.

But enough about slavery! Let’s talk about freedom. Nelson Mandela once said, “To be free is not merely to cast off one’s chains, but to live in a way that respects and enhances the freedom of others.”

As we hear from Paul, true freedom is loving one another, even to the point of becoming slaves to one another. Full servanthood is what’s expected. We are slaves again, but to love each other.

We are free only when we can empty ourselves for one another, be fully generous with all that we have to help one another, guided by the Holy Spirit. We are free then to be the people who God made us to be, to be free Children of God, no matter what our circumstances. And this brings us back to the Lost Boys of Sudan.

You see, I have a dear friend and brother in Christ, named Paul Gatluak Both. He has been a classmate of mine at the University of Dubuque Theological Seminary, and he is one of the Lost Boys of Sudan. He came to America in the 1990s, and has lived in Iowa and upstate New York. He is married with two young boys. And he is filled to the brim with love, for God and for others. When you get to know Paul, you know immediately that sharing the love of God is truly his number one priority, in word and in deed. (Pictures of Paul projected; see bottom of post).

You see, Paul has known oppression perhaps more deeply than any of us here can imagine. And yet he lives his life filled with abundant love and joy in Christ, and by loving others freely.

[A funny thing happened while I was finishing up this sermon Saturday morning. A FB chat popped up just as I was working on this section, and it was Paul. He wanted to let me know that he had arrived in Africa safely, and to thank me for the prayers and support. He has gone back to South Sudan, this newly formed country, with supplies of medicine that he has gathered through a donation drive in Dubuque over the past six months. He will be there for two months before coming back for his last year at seminary. What a Holy Spirit moment it was to jump into a conversation with Paul as I was deciding what to tell all of you about him!

And here is what he said to me, and what I am glad to be able to pass on to all of you: “We serve a great God.”]

There is a well known quote about freedom in the book by Viktor Frankl called Man’s Search for Meaning, and it reminds me of Paul and the other Lost Boys. Viktor Frankl was a psychiatrist and a Holocaust survivor.

He writes, “Everything can be taken from a person but one thing: the last of the human freedoms – to choose one’s attitude in any given set of circumstances, to choose one’s own way.”

We are called to freedom: the freedom that comes from a heart filled with an attitude of love, and emptied of all that wants to keep us in chains; the freedom that Christ gave to us in the form of unearned grace; the freedom of knowing we can never measure up, and Thanks be to God, we are not called to try.

We are called to love one another, above all rules and regulations, above all expectations and self-interests;and when love and compassion become our top priorities, setting everything else aside, and not looking back….then we have found true freedom.