FOR FREEDOM
Galatians 5:1,13-25
A Communion Meditation

by the Reverend Odette Lockwood-Stewart
 

"For freedom Christ has set us free."
This passage from Paul's letter to the Galatians has been the most preached text at Fourth of July celebrations of this nation's Declaration of Independence.

Yet on the Fourth of July, when the rhetoric of freedom is so frequently used to celebrate national autonomy, when distinctions between citizenship and discipleship are so often blurred, it is important to ask, "Whose freedom?"  It is important to remember that freedom in Christ does not cut us loose from others, but binds us to one another in love.

This morning's reading focuses the question of freedom around one specific issue from religious law and practice of that day.  But today I'm not talking about circumcision. Today I believe we are called to freedom from unwritten law of individualism and the false god of self-interest.
Let this be a declaration of interdependence:
"For freedom Christ has set us free."

New Testament Scholar Richard Hays writes, "This freedom is to be sharply distinguished from 'autonomy,' a word that means literally 'self-law.'  To be autonomous is to be, paradoxically, at the mercy of ourselves.  By contrast, the freedom of which Paul speaks is freedom in Christ, a freedom that says, 'It is no longer I who live, but it is Christ who lives in me.'
 (Gal. 2:20) (New Interpreter's Bible, p. 310)
Freedom in Christ is not only freedom from, it is freedom for...
Paul continues in, verses 13-15 ... he says, "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."

Slavery's shameful legacy makes it a difficult word to claim in any positive sense.  But this text... suggests a life of radical mutuality.  It calls us to freedom for deep and profound obligation.  In Christ's love we are bound to each other despite our inclinations to isolate and defend.  Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. called it a "web of mutuality." Freedom in Christ recognizes and lives in God-given right relationship between people, and peoples, and all creation.

In her recent book Blessing the World, Rebecca Ann Parker, the President of Starr King School for the Ministry here in Berkeley, tells about an experience she had in western Pennsylvania in 1976 as she started out on a back roads cross country trip with a friend.
Late that day we came down through hill country into a valley.  It had been raining hard, and as we neared a small town, we noticed blinking yellow lights warning of danger.  We saw fields covered in standing water and passed several side roads blocked off with signs saying Road Closed.  "Looks like they've had a flood here," we said.  Coming into town, we crossed a bridge over a wide river.  The water was high, muddy, flowing fast.  Sandbags lined the roadway.  "Gosh," we said, "they must have had quite a bit of high water to contend with here.  Looks like it was a major flood!"
We headed out of town, following a winding country road, ...  Then we rounded a bend, and in front of us, a sheet of water covered the roadway....
...We started to turn the car around.  The water was rising behind us as well.  Suddenly we realized the flood hadn't happened yesterday or last week.  It was happening here and now ... The cold water of the storm poured down on us, baptizing us into the present - a present from which we had been insulated by both our car and our misjudgments about the country we were traveling through."

Dr. Parker then observes, "This is what it is like to be white in America.  It is to travel well ensconced in a secure vehicle, to see signs of what is happening in the world outside your compartment and not realize that these signs have any contemporary meaning.  It is to misjudge your location and believe you are uninvolved and unaffected by what is happening in the world.
                        (Blessing the World:  What Can Save Us Now, pages 25-26)

Remember that bumper sticker of just a few weeks ago?  It said, "I love my country ... I just think we should start seeing other people."

The biggest mistake we could make on Independence Day would be  to misjudge (our) location and believe (we) are uninvolved and unaffected by what is happening in the world.
We have to start seeing other people!

We shake our heads at reports about the Wall being built on our border with Mexico ... a wall that has evidently been built in part on Mexican land, a wall known Mexico as the Wall of Shame.  Our businesses continue to benefit from underpaid immigrant labor while immigrant families, even families in United Methodist Churches in this annual conference, are being separated.  Citizens are being imprisoned... and those who are most vulnerable are placed in even greater jeopardy.

In the context of public debate and lack of political will to demand humane immigration laws, policies and practices, we gather at the welcome table of Jesus Christ.   We are set free to see other people.

I remember so well the face and voice of Ernie, a good soul in my first church in Los Angeles who shouted at me, "My people have had trouble with immigrants ever since we came to this country!"  The story doesn't begin ... or end ... with us!

 The biggest mistake we could make in claiming the freedom we are given in Christ is to believe it frees us from connection.  We are freed for connection.  We are freed for commitment, responsibility, relationship, genuine community, obligation, servanthood!  If that doesn't sound like, "you can't tell me what to do I know what's best for you freedom.....you are right.  It is not."   In Christ, we are bound to the people of Darfur - we are bound to the detainees in Guantanamo Bay.  

Tomorrow, July 2nd, is the 99th anniversary of the birth of U.S. Supreme Court Justice Thurgood Marshall.  On a fourth of July many years ago, he called us to say "yes" to our love of country by saying "no."  He said:  We must dissent from the indifference.  We must dissent from the apathy.  We must dissent from the fear, the hatred, and the mistrust...We must dissent because America can do better, because America has no choice but to do better.

"For freedom Christ has set us free" means that the ties that bind us as followers of Jesus go far beyond obligation.  Freedom in Christ is the magnificent opportunity to freely choose to live in the world as brothers and sisters.

We grow in freedom, or we submit to the yoke of slavery in ever new and ever familiar forms.  "For Freedom Christ has set us free ..."  Thanks be to God.