I will repeat this to myself: "Life will slow down. Life will slow down." Or, more importantly, "I will slow my life down." And "I will blog more often."
In the spirit of that last one, I'm posting last Sunday's sermon. No time to write more at the moment, though I'm working on something about today's funeral.
Dear friends in Christ, grace and peace to you from God our Father and our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ. Amen.
This Wednesday, of course, is the 4th of July. Like most Americans, you are likely to watch fireworks someplace and eat hamburgers, maybe go to the lake or to a parade, hoist the flag at your house and listen to somebody playing the 1812 Overture or the Star-Spangled Banner.
When I was a kid, my favorite part of the 4th of July was the sparklers. Have you tried those? They’re like tiny little fireworks that you hold in your hand, and you light them and they shoot off sparks, and if you wave them around in the dark you can see the patterns of light they leave behind them. I like the sparklers but I was also a little afraid of them – they fascinated me, but I was always worried that they would catch me on fire or burn my hand. They were irresistible and terrifying at the same time.
Which is fairly appropriate when it comes to thinking about the real point of July 4th. One preacher says, “we call it Independence Day but sometimes I wish we would call it Freedom Day, so we could spend a little more time wondering what that word means. What are we free from? What are we free for? How do I know I am really free? Is my sweet liberty strictly a political thing – my freedom to speak, my freedom to vote – or is it a larger concept?”* What does it really mean to be free?
Americans are famous for loving and promoting a few things: freedom is one of them, maybe the primary one, and family is another. Perhaps by sheer coincidence but perhaps not, our biblical readings today address exactly those topics and, as the bible usually does, it gives both a twist you might not expect. It’s a good week to be thinking about what it really means to be free – freed from something, and freed for something. It’s also a good week to think about family, given that holidays of any sort are often a time when we are around family whether we want to be or not.
What comes to your mind first when you hear the word freedom? Chances are, there are as many answers to that as there are people in this room. It may be a symbol, like the flag or the Statue of Liberty. It may be an action on your part, like voting or saying the pledge of allegiance or singing the national anthem. It may be a person or group – veterans or those serving in the armed forces right now. It may be an emotion or a feeling, something hard to put into words. What does it really mean to be free?
Some 1900 years ago, St. Paul wrote a letter to the Christians of Galatia, a region in modern-day Turkey. His letter survives as the biblical book of Galatians, from which we read this morning. As with any biblical book and especially Paul’s letters, we are not entirely sure what was happening in the community to prompt the correspondence, but from what we can tell, Paul was concerned that the Christians in Galatia were being told that they had to observe Jewish laws and rituals in order to be really Christian.
So it makes a fair amount of sense that, when Paul writes to them about their freedom in Christ, he says this: “For freedom Christ has set us free. Stand firm, therefore, and do not submit again to a yoke of slavery.” That’s exactly how we think of freedom most of the time: freedom from something; from slavery, from oppression, from dictatorships, from war, from being told what to do with life.
But, while Paul wants the Galatians to be freed from some things, he is more concerned about what they do afterward – what they will do once they realize that Christ has set them free. And so he makes a jump that sounds he’s going backward: “for you were called to freedom, brothers and sisters,” he writes, “but do not use your freedom as an opportunity for self-indulgence, but through love become slaves to one another.” Wait a minute, Paul. Are we free? Or are we slaves? Once you’re free, why would you go back to being anything else?
Martin Luther picked up on Paul’s paradox in Galatians in an essay he wrote called, “The Freedom of a Christian.” “A Christian is a perfectly free lord of all, subject to none,” he wrote, and, “A Christians is a perfectly dutiful slave to all, subject to all.”
Obviously, neither Paul nor Martin Luther were Americans – not by nationality and neither, it would seem, in spirit. We are proud of freedom. We throw that word around a lot, especially around the 4th of July. The question is whether we really know what we mean when we say it.
Most of our American use of ‘freedom’ comes from talking about what we are freed from. Freed from taxation without representation; freed from being told how to worship; freed from unjust or cruel imprisonment; freed from monarchy. It’s much trickier to decide what we are freed for.
Which brings us to Jesus’ rather odd words about family – another discussion familiar to Americans, and another time that the bible puts quite a different spin on the topic. The real problem at issue is the cost of discipleship; the expense of following Jesus and his way into life. One potential disciple says with great fervor to Jesus, “I will follow you wherever you go.” Jesus warns him that this path has its complications, but he indeed invites him to follow, right now: and the man says he has only one thing left to do. “First let me go and bury my father,” he says, and if Jesus were really about family values the way we normally talk about them, we would expect Jesus to say something like, “yes, that’s appropriate, honor your father by burying him well, and then come and follow me.” But instead, Jesus bluntly tells them all that there is no turning back, even to honor parents or bid farewell to family – “no one who puts a hand to the plow and turns back is fit for the kingdom of God.”
We have claimed for many years that the United States is a Christian nation, but although many of the founding families were Christian, making such a claim is much more complicated than we might think. What would it mean for us, as a nation, to say that freedom means becoming a slave to all? What would it mean for us, as a nation, to say that Jesus’ vision of family has very little to do with mom, dad, two kids and a dog, and almost everything to do with obedience in faith? This is a lot harder than flying a flag at the church or singing “God Bless America” at a baseball game. The bible asks us hard questions about freedom, and what it’s really for. And Jesus asks us hard questions about family, and what it really means. There are no easy answers here. Freedom and family are like the sparklers you hold in your hand: beautiful and dangerous, irresistible and terrifying. Scripture warns about both, perhaps because God knows how quick we all are to make idols out of almost anything we can find.
What it comes down to in the end is a question of who we really are. You are an American, this is true. Whatever ethnic background your family comes from, however many nations are represented in your family tree, I am assuming that at least most, if not all, people in this room are citizens of this country.
And you are part of at least one family, if not two or three. You are sister, brother, husband, wife, cousin, uncle, child, parent. You are all of those things and each of them has shaped your life, but none of them contains the whole of you. You are Christian. You are a child of God. That is your truest identity, and it takes precedent over all others – over nationality and ethnicity and even family itself. You will not grow out of it. You can try your best to leave it behind, but even if you are the one to walk away, God still will not abandon you.
The freedom we find in Christ allows us to keep all our other roles in perspective. The call to love Jesus above everything else is a hard thing, but once we are tied to him, we find a freedom nothing and no one else can give. It is an irresistible and terrifying demand, and we afraid it will burn us, but following it will light up everything else. For if loving Jesus means losing something along the way – or even losing everything, should it come to that, even including nation and family and everything in-between - we are not to fear, because "buried in Jesus’ demand is also his promise"*: that true freedom does not belong to any flag, that Christ’s family is more diverse and far-reaching than we could ever have imagined, and that binding ourselves to him and enslaving ourselves to one another, is the only real freedom we will ever find. Amen.
*Two quotations taken from Barbara Brown Taylor: the first from "The Cheap Cure," in Home by Another Way; and the second from "Learning to Hate Your Family," in Teaching Sermons on Suffering: God in Pain.
