"Called Into Freedom"

Galatians 5:1, 13-26

I need to be here this morning.  I don't mean that I need to be in the pulpit.  I mean that I need to be in this sanctuary, at this Table with my church family, because this has been one of those weeks.  In the early hours of Monday morning, I sat beside my mother-in-law's bed while she lay dying.  Over a period of a couple of hours her shallow, intermittent breathing slowed until it simply stopped altogether.  In a matter of minutes, her coloring changed, her breathing stopped, and what Jan has referred to as "her long goodbye" was complete.  So for much of this week we've been attending to the arrangements, and experiencing the emotions and grief brought on by her death.

 Then, we at UPC are concerned about Merwin Hutchens, one of the saints of our congregation who is in critical condition in ICU at Seton Hospital. I dare say hardly a week has gone by in recent years that Merwin hasn't been at the church changing light fixtures, taking the newsletter to the Post Office, or tending to any number of other jobs around the church. Then, on Tuesday, Mewin's wife Diane ended up in the emergency room badly bunged up from a fall. A leaky heart value was diagnosed, and now she's trying to beat back an infection so that the doctors can go ahead with heart surgery.  Like Merwin, Diane's help around the church cannot be quantified.  She's a walking encyclopedia when it comes to knowing the history of UPC. She knows where every switch, fuse box, and fixture in our building is located, and how it operates. For years we've been teasing her about our need to download her brain, because her knowledge of the church building is so extensive.  So Merwin and Diane are much in our thoughts and prayers this morning.  In addition to these concerns, many of you have surely had your own challenges and struggles this week. As I say, it's been one of those weeks. 

And in the midst of such events as these, we heard Paul speak to us about freedom. "For freedom," Paul declares, "Christ has set us free." What does freedom mean—not as some abstract, philosophical concept—but as a word addressed to a community of faith that is subject to all the limitations and struggles of life, a community constantly contending against—to use the old words—sin and death? Surely, when Paul speaks of Christian freedom, he means freedom in and through the exigencies of daily life—just the kinds of things we've faced this week and will face in the future.

Now, in some ways, it's problematic to bring this matter up today. Since this Sunday is the Sunday closest to July 4, the word freedom will get a heavy work-out this week. It's a word we're going to hear repeatedly over the next few days. Stores and car lots will have freedom sales.  Speeches, editorials and articles will associate freedom with our nation's history, the ideals of the founding fathers, the long struggle for freedom and equality of oppressed people. Political figures will evoke freedom to justify foreign policy measures, while others will use it to oppose and protest these same policies. Some equate freedom with the ability to make our own choices. We are free to choose our doctors, leaders, marriage partners, and brand of clothing.  Freedom of choice is, for many Americans, the essence of freedom. Others, especially those who have suffered oppression and tyranny, cherish freedom as the absence of social, economic, or political oppression. Then, too, many speak of freedom in a psychological sense, as the removal of emotional barriers, the healing of past wounds, the overcoming of a crippling addiction. Sometimes freedom seems to mean the right to do whatever I want and say whatever I want so long as I don't hurt anybody. 

But this morning we're taking a break from the many ways freedom is used in common parlance—important as some of these expressions of freedom are—in order to focus on the kind of freedom for which Christ sets us free.

One day last week, I was standing over Merwin's hospital bed, trying to have a conversation. I say trying because Merwin was so full of tubes and so weak that he could barely talk and much of what he said was difficult to understand. But I managed to here him say, "It's amazing."   "Amazing?" I said.  "God's redemptive love," he continued, "it's a miracle." I'm not sure what prompted Merwin to say such a thing, but his remark, given his circumstances, provides an apt place for us to begin a reflection on Christian freedom.  His remark reminds us that Christian freedom is not something we achieve, not a virtue toward which we aspire. Rather, it is a gift of grace that we receive. It is the discovery that God's love penetrates every condition of life. Merwin's right.  Such freedom, given to us in the mist of life's most severe limitations, is a miracle.

Now this gift of freedom is the miracle that Paul wants the Christians in Galatia to apprehend.  He wants the congregation to embrace the freedom that God has given the world in Jesus Christ. Christ, Paul contends, has opened up for us the life God has always intended for human beings, but which we human beings have been unable to attain. This is where Paul's attitude about the law comes in. While the law describes the life God intends, it is powerless to produce such a life. Because we can't keep the law adequately, we become enslaved to its demands, yoked to its obligations. But God's grace in Jesus Christ frees us from the yoke of the law and sets us in a right relationship with God and with our neighbor—namely, a relationship characterized by love. Thus when Paul says that Christ has set us free, he means that God's grace in Jesus Christ has set us free to love our neighbor as ourselves.

Love for neighbor, in fact, is the substance of what Paul calls life in the Spirit.  In our reading today, Paul juxtaposes life in the Spirit with life in the flesh. What Paul means by flesh is tricky to understand. By flesh he doesn't mean merely the body, our flesh and bone existence.  He's not saying that physical pleasure or comfort is necessarily opposed to the Spirit.  Rather, for Paul gratifying the desires of the flesh is living for oneself—attempting to justify oneself, satisfy oneself apart from God and neighbor. Life lived according to the flesh is a self-centered life rather than neighbor-centered one. The distinction Paul makes between flesh and Spirit is not physical versus non-physical, but selfishness versus selflessness.  In short, Christ has set us free from ourselves in order that we may be for others.  At its root, Christian freedom is paradoxical.  "Through love," Paul writes, 'we become slaves to one another."  Jazz musician Billy Taylor, wrote, "I wish knew how it would feel to be free.  I wish I could break all these chains holding me."  Anxious self-concern, with all its accompanying fears, is the chain that enslaves us.  But Christ sets us free from self-centeredness so that we can center on the needs of others. Such freedom doesn't come all at once. We will continue to struggle with limitations, physical and emotional. We repeatedly fall back into anxious self-concern. But in Christ we're no longer controlled by selfish motives. Instead, we are being led by the Spirit.

Friends, this has been quite a week.  But honestly speaking, nothing happened this week that isn't common to us all. Life continually presents us with joys and sorrows, ups and down, new challenges and painful losses. The good news is that, in and through the events of our lives, we are called to freedom.  We're called to receive God's love and extend love to one another.   "Freedom," sang Janis Joplin, "is just another word..."  But the freedom God gives us in Christ is not just another word.  It's the miracle of God's grace.