Finally Free?

Galatians 5:1, 13-25

June 27, 2004

St. Paul United Methodist Church

Rev. John Fleming

Let’s try this this morning and see what happens. Let me throw a word up in the air and see what happens to it when it comes down and lands as an image in your mind. Here is the word, freedom. Do not dismiss the most obvious image of freedom that crosses your mind, the one of a flag waving, a soldier fighting, or a veteran reflecting on a time gone by. This is my last Sunday to be here for two weeks. Susie, Annie Grace, and I are taking a few days off for our annual vacation. We will not be here on Independence Day, when Bryan and David McNeil play, on the organ, their rendition of The Stars and Stripes Forever. For some, the image of freedom goes hand in hand with the Fourth of July.

There are other images that land in your mind when you hear the word freedom. Just ask the teenager and she will tell you. Perhaps it is close to the time when she will leave the nest for college. Part of her cannot wait to get out of her parents’ house. Part of her is tired of the boundaries and the rules. Part of her thinks that if she hears the speech, “If you are going to live under my roof, you are going to follow my rules” one more time, she is going to throw up. Part of her cannot wait to be on her own, to study when and if she wants to study, to go to bed whenever she wants to go to bed and to decide whether or not to do the kinds of things that her college friends are doing. Part of her wants that. But surprisingly there is another part of her that does not mind the boundaries. Freedom. That is the image in her mind when she hears the word. I heard about a morning news program that interviewed several people on the street, out in California, when the lottery there was hovering around the eighty five million dollar mark. The reporter, with a microphone in her hand asked several the question, “What would you do if you won the lottery?” The first four quickly said the same thing, right off of the bat, and you can probably guess what they said. I will let the first guy tell you. These were his words, “The first thing that I’d do is to quit my job!” Freedom for these four meant not having a responsibility or an obligation or a duty to get up every morning and to go to work. They knew what they wanted to be free from. I want you to hear this; for these four, it was unclear what they were going to move towards, in their lives, other than not having to go to work.

At Annual Conference this year and every year, there is part of a morning that is dedicated to honoring those who are retiring. There were seventeen retirees this year. Each was given the chance to address the conference, to say a few words about their ministerial life. When I retire, in twenty-nine years, I will go to the microphone and say, “Bye.” I sat and listened to all of the speeches. Most, if not all of them, said the same kind of thing. Most reflected on what they had done, and thanked the ones who had been a part of it and the ones who helped them along. It may have only been one who talked about his future ministry and what he was going to do with the rest of his days. For the others, the sixteen, like the potential lottery winners, for them, freedom was retirement and not working. Let me say something strong here. When it is my time, when I am in their shoes, my freedom would be rest from the pressures of this high calling and from my greatest fear, disappointing you and letting you down. Freedom, the word itself is full of images.

For the apostle Paul, writing to the church in Galatia, the idea and the image of freedom means liberty from following all of the rules that the ten commandments had become. The temptation in our time, in fact in all times, is to make religion just a matter of rules and to believe that those who obey al or most of them are the ones who are saved and those who cannot are the ones who are not saved. This, of course, is bad theology and what makes it worse is that when this happens, God is made to be the enforcer of this system of rewards and punishment. Paul did not like that way of thinking. I do not like it either. Paul believed that because of the death and resurrection of Jesus, we were free from such thinking and such bondage.

But in Galatia, there were a group of teachers, known as the Judaizers who insisted that Christians were obligated to keep the Mosaic law. We have talked about these Judaizers before. In the churches that he founded and pastored, Paul preached that we are free and that we are saved by the grace of God. The Judaizers came to the towns after Paul had moved on and would say something like this, “You know, Paul was not exactly right about everything.” Then they would lift up the rules, in particular the one that required circumcision, as mandatory and something that had to happen to be right with God. Imagine it. You have heard what Paul has said and what the Judaizers have taught. You are a rule follower from way back. What will you do?

In Galatia, the argument had gotten so fierce that Paul had to address it. Some of his words are these, “If ....you bite and devour one another, take care that you are not consumed by one another.” So it had gotten bad in Galatia. Paul had to write to his church. He wanted them to read these words, “For freedom Christ has set us free. Stand firm, therefore, and do not submit again to a yoke of slavery.” Read our lesson carefully and you will discover what I did in it. Paul talks about the dangers of freedom. He lists three. First, he says, slavery is so much easier than freedom. It would be much easier if it were only prison bars that kept us in bondage. I wonder if what I am about to say will resonate with anyone. Wouldn’t it be nice to put away, to be free from the things that we have always done? You know, the sins that have entangled us for so long? Wouldn’t it be nice to be free in our relationships to be who we are instead of who others expect us to be? Wouldn’t it be nice to not fight and fuss and to be up in arms in the relationships of our lives? Wouldn’t it be great to be free in those relationships? That leads me to another thing that we need freedom from, the patterns that we have followed, maybe even inherited. Wouldn’t it be nice to say that just because my father did that or my mother did that, does not mean that I have to?! Wouldn’t it be nice to be free from our fears. That line in the sermon is for me. If it’s appropriate to you, too, then grab hold of it. It would be great to turn from these things that enslave us and to see new possibilities. When Paul talks about the yoke of slavery, he is talking about bondage to sin and an old life. He wants us to know that it is a lot easier to live the life of sin. But don’t do it, he says. Stand firm, he counsels. Exercise your freedom he admonishes. So the first danger of freedom is that it is easier to continue in a past life.

Here is the second danger. Freedom can easily destroy the community. Do not use your freedom, says Paul, for self-indulgence. Do not use your freedom just for yourselves. Instead, use it for the sake of everyone. Notice what Paul does next; it is a great move. Paul says, “...through love, becomes slaves to one another. For the whole law is summed up in a single command, “You shall love your neighbor as yourself...” Law followers cannot argue with that. But I want to say this, not always, but sometimes, loving your neighbor is much easier than loving yourself. The danger with freedom is to use it only for yourself.

Then there is the third danger. Freedom can often crumble into the belief that moral truths are not certain but are to be taken case by case, individual by individual. We all have to make hard moral decisions, I know that. Sometimes we have envisioned a devil on one of our shoulders and an angel on the other. They whisper in our ears and argue with one another about what we should do. Making moral decisions is harder than that. Paul tries to tidy it up a bit when he says that there are two forces at work in us, the flesh and the Spirit. We make decisions based on these two forces, Paul would have us to believe. We can follow the work of the flesh or we can observe the fruit of the Spirit. Paul gives us the list for both of these. On the fleshy side are things like licentiousness, sorcery, envy, strife, jealously, anger, quarrels, dissensions, factions, and carousing. On the Spirit side are things like love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, generosity, faithfulness, gentleness, and self-control. Paul writes, “There is no law against such things.” Of course there’s not! My problem is that I have never been altogether comfortable with keeping these lists and my behavior as separate as Paul does. I would love to tell you that I always live a life in the Spirit. I do not! You would never convict me of sorcery or fornication, but envy, jealously, anger, quarrels, and dissensions, these things I tend to be guilty of from time to time. Follow the Spirit life and you will live life to the fullest. Follow the other, and you are headed straight to destruction. What did you think that I was going to say?

Well, let me ask us this, what should we do with these words this morning? I started our sermon by asking you to put images of freedom in your minds. I helped us to picture soldiers and veterans, teenagers, and what life would be like without work responsibilities. Let me ask you to picture something else. What is it that we would do with a wide open future. Now, a lot of us know what we would not do, like work. Most of us know what we would seek our freedom from. But if you were free, if you were really free, what would you move towards? What would you do?

I think that Paul lists the fruits of the Spirit here not to make us feel bad, but to give us something to strive towards. Freedom for Paul, is not the destination. Freedom is the means, the vehicle that we drive to be in service to one another. That is why he says that if we are going to be enslaved to something, it had better be love. “You shall love your neighbor and yourself,” he writes. You might even think about it in this way. Doing this, loving, leads us to spiritual growth. It helps us to have things like joy, peace, and gentleness. It helps us to be kind and generous. Freedom, Paul might say, is using your gift, what you are good at, for the benefit of those around you! There is a reason that you have a gift!

One of the illustrations at the beginning of this sermon was about the possibility of winning a lottery. The United Methodist committee against gambling might not like me using the illustration once, much less twice, but let me close with this. I saw and heard the interview of the man who won a lottery in California. His winnings were not eighty-five million dollars, but his pay out was significant. He was interviewed on television and asked what he was going to do with the money. Listen to what he said, “I am going to pay off my three children’s school loans, because I am bound to take care of them.” I am bound to take care of them. That, for me, is the image of true freedom. Let us pray.