Scriptures: Galatians 3:21-29
John 8:31-38
This past holiday weekend, late at night on July 4 after the fireworks had all died down, I re-watched for the umpteenth time that marvelous old movie “Yankee Doodle Dandy”, with James Cagney as George M. Cohan (I watched it, of course, in the original black-and-white; none of this ersatz coloring process for me). Cohan’s life and music testify to the dream of a free society, and that got me to thinking about the meaning of liberation. Deeply embedded in our national psyche is that sense of us as a “land of liberty” and the “home of the free”; it’s really the primary part of our psyche that we celebrate on July 4. This sense began in the French Revolution with its cry of “liberty, equality, fraternity”, but it came to mean so much more through the unique system of freedom that we as Americans feel we have come to enjoy.
Yet, in the past four decades or so “liberation” has come to have another kind of meaning when it is attached to the word “movement”. When we think about “liberation” in this context we know that there is still work to be done in order to make the hope-filled affirmation “Let Freedom Ring!” a reality, as we said last May in starting a “sacred conversation about race”. The flip side of American liberty is our need to recognize and identify where oppression and injustices still occur. We can bring ourselves as sensitive Christians to aid in this task. Liberation movements for such disparate groups as women, gays and lesbians, blacks, Hispanics, Native Americans, youth have each in their own way pointed out constraints on that sense of freedom we have insisted is the heritage of us all. This is the ambiguity of freedom that we face. Indeed, as a white-anglo-saxon-Protestant-heterosexual-male-over-30 (40? 50? do I hear 60?) there sometimes comes the plaintive feeling: “Where is the protest group I can join?”
Now, our first reaction when faced with an ambiguity like this is to make jokes. Indeed, the very dimunization of terms into “women’s lib” or “gay lib” is a way of trying to laugh away the seriousness of the claims. When they first arose nightclub and TV comics got plenty of mileage out of jokes on these subjects (I wonder how George Carlin is riffing on them about now? I even wonder if he’s surprised where he is…..but I digress). Even theology is not immune: “liberation theology”, rising particularly out of Latin America, has been condemned by the Pope and made the butt of revisionist humor in some theological circles.
So, what I would like to do this morning is to take the occasion of our having just celebrated an American July 4th holiday, which proclaims freedom and yet which also alerts us to the crying out of all kinds of liberation movements seeking justice, and use that occasion to point to the Biblical meaning of human liberation. The one thought I would like you to take home with you today is this: only as we participate in and learn from the various legitimate thrusts toward liberation alive in our world today will we in fact all become free. Human liberation, under God, means that we will know what Jesus meant when he said to his followers, “you will know the truth, and the truth will make you free.”
Christianity offers two questions to those who would be free: what are you seeking freedom from and what are you seeking freedom to? In regard to liberation movements, it is easy to be sympathetic with some of the freedoms from; for example, in relation to women, freedom from the inequality of wages for the same type of job, freedom from being seen as unable to perform tasks that were usually understood as “men only”, freedom from double standards of many kinds. And some of the freedoms to have become evident in recent years, as well, especially the freedom to seek and be a viable candidate for the highest position in the land. But some other “freedom to” questions move us in the direction of ambiguity and paradox.
Jerome Lawrence and Robert Lee get at these ambiguities in their play “Inherit the Wind”, about the Scopes “monkey” trial in the 1920’s, as the main character, lawyer Henry Drummond, reflects: “Progress has never been a bargain. You’ve got to pay for it. Sometimes I think there’s a man behind a counter who says, ‘All right, you can have a telephone, but you’ll have to give up privacy, the charm of distance. Madam, you may vote; but at a price; you lose the right to retreat behind a powder-puff or a petticoat. Mister, you may conquer the air; but the birds will lose their wonder, and the clouds will smell of gasoline.’”
Liberation never comes simply and directly. For with increasing freedom goes increasing responsibility to discover what it is a freedom for. The Christian is, spiritually, the freest of all persons, for he or she has accepted their acceptance by God. But along with this freedom from – from anxieties, from the need to prove ourselves worthy, even from the fear of death – comes the corresponding freedom to – to be servants, to be responsible for one another, to be sons and daughters of God. Martin Luther put it succinctly when he said: “A Christian is a perfectly free Lord of all, subject to none. A Christian is a perfectly dutiful servant of all, subject to all.” Paul said it, too, in his letter to the Corinthians: “Am I not free? Am I not an apostle?... For though I am free from all, I have made myself a slave to all, that I might win the more.” Within this paradox we find the meaning of Christian living and human freedom.
But such an understanding of freedom and servanthood does not end with paradox. It pushes ahead…..to crucifixion. You may have already discovered that the world does not like to be confronted with a truly free person acting as a servant of God. Our freedom as Christians means that, finally, we are not concerned with the world’s condemnation, we refuse to make gods out of status or unjust authority, we witness to a universal love that does not stop at national boundary-lines, we serve even those who claim to be our enemies. When we have been liberated by God our freedom comes into direct conflict with the prison walls of the world’s fears, prejudices, and guilt.
But crucifixion is not the last word, for Christian liberation is itself a foretaste of resurrection. When Martin Luther King Jr. exclaimed, “Free at last! Free at last! Thank God Almighty, I’m free at last!”, it was a truly experienced freedom even in the midst of the ever-present reality of assassination. He had taken the responsibility to serve the will of God, and in such service he found a freedom that already tasted of resurrection.
To be liberated in this Christian sense is the end-point of full human liberation. That’s why all liberation movements, with their claims for specific groups, are incomplete until they push toward a full human liberation. Yes, specific injustices, rights denied, and claims upon the body politic must be met along the way, and there is much that the church (even as an imperfect upholder of Christian liberation) can do to aid and learn from such movements. But the goals of these movements are penultimate goals until they are brought under the aspect of eternity – until they deal with the kind of liberation which embraces crucifixion and resurrection.
So, to say it again: none of us is truly free until all of us are free. The Christian who exercises her or his freedom in a society which has so many prejudices, fears, and guilt feelings soon finds that their own freedom does not bring them sufficient satisfaction unless they can see their brothers and sisters becoming free along with them. We need – for the sake of the Gospel – to bring our neighbor into the same freedom that we know as Christians. Not to do so is, in Biblical terms, death.
As a bit of a sidebar here, let me note that freedom has often been equated with license or permissiveness. As I hope is clear from the paradoxical nature of Christian freedom/servanthood, simple permissiveness is farthest away from the idea of being free as a Christian. God’s grace does not mean that we are free to do anything we want and hang the consequences; rather, our actions as free Christians mean we are ready to be responsible to the full will of God and the welfare of all our fellow human beings. The title of a little pamphlet the National Council of Churches put out some years ago about sexual ethics says it well: “Called to Responsible Freedom”.
Indeed, it is this kind of understanding of freedom that Paul has when he speaks to the Galatians about a freedom not based on the law which leads to unity. When Paul affirms that, “There is neither Jew nor Greek, there is neither slave nor free, there is neither male nor female [a truly radical idea for his time, by the way]; for you are all one in Christ Jesus”, he is affirming what modern-day liberation movements are telling us: that the law – which means not just legal systems but cultural constraints, social sanctions, institutional patterns of behavior – has tended to keep us separated from one another on a basis of inequality. The law has, in Paul’s words, “kept [us] under restraint until faith should be revealed.” Faith is what helps us to realize the freedom to become responsible servants. When this freedom is applied to others, then, in truth, we “are all one in Christ Jesus”. If liberation movements are to become movements toward human liberation, the insights of this passage from Galatians need to become central to our offering of liberation to one another.
When the truth of Christian freedom is revealed to us, there are, in essence, three ways we can respond. We can respond as did Jesus’ surprised listeners when, according to John, he proclaimed, “You will know the truth, and the truth will make you free”, by saying, “We are descendents of Abraham, and have never been in bondage to anyone” – not seeing the very contradiction in that statement: that loyalty to past legalisms and ways of life is itself the subtlest form of bondage. Or, we can respond as did Pilate when Jesus confronted him, asking, “What is truth?” – waiting for more complete knowledge, rationalizing our actions, and thereby postponing taking up the mantle of freedom. Or, we can respond as did Isaiah, who when confronted with a revelation of the truth of God responded simply, profoundly: “Here I am! Send me.” In that moment when he took upon himself the cloak of servanthood that he was to wear the rest of his life Isaiah was a free man – free in himself and prepared to live and die for the freedom of others. To respond as did Isaiah is to be liberated as a human being and as a Christian, and it means that we will live so as to bring all others into a unity of freedom – to make us all truly liberated.
Amen.
Dave Pomeroy
First Congregational Church, UCC
Las Vegas, NV
July 6, 2008