Love Slaves

Scriptures: Galatians 5:1, 13-15; 6:1-2, Luke 9:57-62

OK, be honest now.  What was your first reaction when you saw the sermon title in the bulletin today or when I posted it there last week?  Did you think we were going to be talking about something that happens just off the Strip in those rather sleazy “all-men’s” clubs that furtive little men pass out cards about to unwary tourists touting certain “services” (and that usually get strewn all over the Strip)?  No, I rather imagine that on further reflection you didn’t suppose that that’s where I was going – but it might have been interesting if we had publicized that title a little more widely to see what kind of a crowd we might have pulled in today.

This admittedly provocative title is meant to reflect one of the key paradoxes in our Christian faith which Paul puts forward so clearly in his letter to the Galatians:  that Christ has set us free, yet in our freedom we are called to love and therefore to serve.  These are the three “big topics” that we are all about today:  freedom, love, service.  It’s a bit heady to jump into these here during a hot summer Sunday, but that’s the leap we’re about to take.

Perhaps no one has put this paradox before us better than Martin Luther who wrote, “A Christian is a perfectly free lord of all, subject to none.  A Christian is a perfectly dutiful servant of all, subject to all.”  We like to hear the first part of those two sentences, don’t we?  Especially as Americans we relish thinking of ourselves as a free people.  And we rejoice as Christians that it is God through Christ who has set us free.  (By the way, for those of you who are keeping track of such things, today is really my July 4 sermon, since it’s about freedom, at least in part; next week’s sermon will actually focus on communion.)

But freedom can mean different things to us, depending on the context we are using.  We talk about a free-market economy or free trade and free enterprise.  President Roosevelt spoke of the basic “four freedoms”:  freedom of speech, freedom of worship, freedom from want, and freedom from fear. Freedom is often thought of as an utter lack of constraints (harking back to the “free love” movement of the 1960s – though we’re moving back into a risqué area here).  We like to insist on our individual rights, shouting out:  “It’s a free country!”

The Bible speaks of freedom differently and far more deeply – a freedom of conscience, a freedom from the burden of guilt and sin, a freedom of acceptance by God, and thus a freedom to approach God without fear. That was the key message Jesus brought, and it certainly is the centerpiece of the message of Paul’s letter to the Galatians.

“For freedom Christ has set us free.  Stand firm, therefore, and do not submit again to a yoke of slavery.”  What a ringing imperative!  But what exactly does it mean?  Commentator F. F. Bruce invites us to look at it a little differently when he translates it as “With freedom Christ has set us free.”  And yet another spin comes from the new translation The Voice, which reads, “So stand strong for our freedom!  The Liberating King freed us so we wouldn’t spend one more day under the yoke of slavery; don’t let anyone get you turned around and trapped under the law.”

And that’s really the issue for Paul.  What Christ has set us free from are those legalisms which tend to bind us, get in the way of our true service, and – most unfortunately – lead us to guilt.  In the verses leading up to verse 13 in this 5^th chapter Paul talks to the Galatians about how the rite of circumcision, if followed too legalistically or slavishly, can inhibit their free faith.  The church at Galatia was populated by Gentile converts to Christianity, and evidently one faction among them was pushing the idea that they needed to become fully Jewish first by following these ritualistic laws before they could become good Christians.  This, quite frankly, made Paul furious!  He sums up his attitude in verse 6:  “For in Christ Jesus neither circumcision nor uncircumcision counts for anything; the only thing that counts is faith working through love.”  Christ has called us to a new form of covenant that does not require such legalisms.

So what does that covenant require of us?  Quite simply – quite profoundly – love.  But of course you can’t just say that and stop there.  We’ve talked about this before – how understanding what it means to love as Christians takes us into all kinds of realms of figuring out how – practically – our love should manifest itself.  It quite literally takes most of us a lifetime of working at it to figure that out.

St. Augustine famously said, “Love God, and do what you will.”  For many this came to mean that as long as you love God, you can really do anything you want to, and God will forgive you – a rather blithe interpretation of this saying.  But the emphasis here is not on the second half of the statement but the first:  love God.  From that everything else flows.  Irene Conlan, a hypnotherapist and minister, has an excellent interpretation of this quote, when she says, “St. Augustine said, ‘Love God and do what you will.’  If the love is real what we will do will be to unite, to make things positive, to uplift, to soothe, to heal, and to serve.  We won’t have to take the time to decide whether someone is worthy, whether they believe the right way, whether he/she is ‘one of us,’ whether they are dressed properly or come from the right side of the tracks.  We will simply follow our heart and, in love, do what we can to help.”

“Do what we can to help.”  That’s a really key thought.  The kind of freedom Paul is talking about in Christ frees us to do our best in serving our Lord, to the extent of our abilities.  This is not a formula to lead us to guilt, not a way of wringing our hands and saying, “Oh, if only I were doing more,” not an invitation to inactivity just because we think we’re not doing enough.  Our freedom in Christ is a wonderful blessing because it delivers us from guilt or the need to follow legalisms or the power that our own self-indulgences can have over us.  That rather strange 15^th verse is Paul’s colorful way of describing how that power of our self-indulgences holds sway over us.  Baptist minister John Piper puts it this way:  “And remember, we can only love if we are free.  That is, love is motivated by the joy of sharing our fullness not by the desire to fill our emptiness.  [It is no] coincidence that verse 15 describes what wild animals do when they are starving, not when they are filled ([in other words, when they are] empty instead of content):  ‘If, however, you bite and devour one another, take care that you are not consumed by one another.’  When you are not filled with God it is sweet to eat your enemy.”

But we are filled with God.  That is our joy, and it is what gives us our freedom.  But what kind of a freedom?  Most often we think of this as being a “freedom from” – freedom from want, freedom from fear, freedom from giving in to our own self indulgences.  However, I would like us to begin thinking of what Paul is referring to here as a freedom to – specifically, a freedom to be of service.  The Indian poet Rabindranath Tagore has an epigram which has been one of my favorites over the years and which perfectly captures what freedom to be of service means.  He says, “I slept, and I dreamt that life was only joy.  I awoke, and I found that the only thing in life was to serve.  I served, and I found that to serve was the joy.”

Until we are serving one another through love, we have not yet found the freedom to which Christ has called us.  Until we are serving one another through love, we continue to operate under the legalisms that lead to guilt rather than grace.

Brad Beaman tells a story that illustrates the difference in attitude that serving in love can make:

“There was a woman who was married to a domineering husband that demanded her to follow a list of duties.  His demands were full of regulations and the marriage was drudgery for that woman.

“Her husband died and she later remarried.  This time her marriage was based on love.  It was not like the one she previously had, a marriage of regulation which required a list of dos and don’ts.  One day she found her old list that was written by her first husband and she read the list of all his demands.

“When she read the list she was surprised to realize that she was doing everything her first husband demanded and more.  She was now doing all of this willfully and even joyfully.  That is the power of love.”

Beaman goes on to comment about this story:  “In Galatians 5:13-15 we find the counterbalance to Grace.  It is Love….. Christ’s love is more powerful than rules and regulations could ever be.  Throughout the book of Galatians the theme has been the same.  Have nothing to do with legalism or salvation by works.  Avoid it like the plague.  Avoid a system of living that earns favor of God through regulations, rules or human effort….. Salvation is an undeserved gift of God.  Receive it freely….. Your salvation is all by grace.“

I added to the lectionary passage today two verses from the 6^th chapter of this letter, partly because Galatians 6:2 is one of my favorite verses in all the Bible, and partly because these verses complete the arc that 5:13-15 has begun:  “Bear one another’s burdens, and in this way you will fulfill the law of Christ.”  Now, there is something rather ironic in the fact that Paul returns here to talking about “the law” after admonishing the Galatians (and us) to avoid all legalisms.  But here he is referring to a higher law – that is, the law of love – what Augustine has in mind when he speaks of “loving God, and then doing what you will”.  “Bear one another’s burdens.”  This, in all joy, is what we have been given to do.

I first encountered this verse in a seminary class on literature when my professor, Robert McAfee Brown, was talking about Charles Williams’ novel Descent Into Hell.  In this novel a rather timorous Pauline Anstruther is asked quite literally by playwright Peter Stanhope to assume the spiritual burden that Lawrence Wentworth, an historian who is being consumed by jealousy and thus is beginning his own rather literal descent into hell, is experiencing.  Pauline resists the notion that she could do this, but Stanhope is insistent, and gradually Pauline begins to realize that it is possible – though terribly difficult – to take on someone else’s burden – and thereby to discover the deep joy that comes in so doing.  While here this is a fictionalized fantasy, the author Charles Williams (who, by the way, was a contemporary of C.S. Lewis and J.R.R. Tolkien, and thus one of the Inklings) makes it quite clear that he believes Paul is to be taken seriously and literally when he says that we are to “bear one another’s burdens”.  This is what it means to “serve the least of these” (as in Matthew 25:40) to “lay down one’s life for one’s friend” (as in John 15:13) to “love your neighbor as yourself” (as in the Greatest Commandment).  In other words, it is woven throughout the Bible – and especially the New Testament – that service to others is what it means to love God and to experience the freedom that God’s grace has given us.

We haven’t dealt as yet with the passage from the gospel of Luke that accompanies our other text today, and frankly I’m a bit perplexed as to why the lectionary constructors put these two together.  On the surface, this trek of Jesus along the road with (as the title of the passage in the NRSV has it) “would-be followers of Jesus” moving along beside him seems to have little to do with freedom and love and service and God’s grace and the law of Christ.  But if we push a bit deeper we see that what is happening here is that these would-be followers are looking for any excuse they can find not to do what their words are professing they want to do – that is, follow the road on which Jesus is leading them.  “Let me go and bury my father”; “let me first say my farewell to those at my home” – in other words, let me do those things that society requires of me rather than experiencing the freedom in Christ that will lead me to be of service.  And Jesus is sad, and perhaps a bit angry, and yet unrelenting in wanting these followers to realize that “With freedom Christ has set us free,” as F.F. Bruce translated the opening line from Galatians – free from societal expectations – free to serve and thereby become part of the Kingdom of God.

So, next week when you are thinking about and relishing the freedoms that come as the result of an Independence Day and of being part of a country that rightly celebrates the freedoms that are a part of our way of life, take a few moments to ponder the deeper freedom that comes from Christ – the freedom to be a servant, the freedom to offer love, the freedom to bear one another’s burdens.  For in all these ways you are indeed fulfilling the law of Christ.

Amen.

Dave Pomeroy