Galatians 5.1, 13-25
“For freedom Christ has set us free.” That line from today’s second reading is from St Paul’s letter to the church in Galatia, the source of our second reading these last few Sundays. Galatians is a heartfelt defense of God’s grace and how that grace changes our life. In ways that are passionate, at times dramatic, and occasionally shocking, Paul shows us that faith in Jesus Christ gives us life that we wouldn’t otherwise enjoy. And he wants to make sure nothing detracts us from that life. “For freedom Christ has set us free.”
Over and over Paul insists that our standing in God is anchored and assured in Christ and not any of the other ways we might define who we are or who others think we are. In Christ, we are heirs of God, children of God; we who are baptized into Christ are clothed in Christ. And from the very first verses of the first chapter Galatians, Paul lays out the theme that there is nothing today and nothing in our past matters more than who we are in Jesus Christ, “who gave himself for our sins to set us free from the present evil age.” To set us free. “For freedom Christ has set us free.” This declaration of freedom is at the heart of what Christian life is about and what our life of faith is for.
Only what does freedom in Christ look like? In the 18th and 19th centuries this passage from Galatians was a popular text around the Fourth of July. Preachers of a particularly patriotic perspective equated the freedom that Paul talks about with the freedom from the tyranny of George III achieved by the Revolutionary War, never again submitting to a king’s yoke.
It is worth nothing, however, that the assignment of today’s second reading just days from Independence Day is a happy co-incidence of the three-year cycle of readings and not intentional. But it provides an opportunity for us to reflect on freedom. America has always wanted to be a land of the free. And that freedom has been expressed in any number of ways, then and now.
You are probably familiar with a flag from the time of the War of Independence, a yellow flag with a coiled snake ready to strike, the words “Don’t Tread on Me” at the bottom. Some have described that flag, the Gadsden Flag created by independence-minded colonists, as the most popular symbol of the American Revolution. Later, at the time of the Civil War, it became associated with the Confederacy. Now, in recent years, it has reemerged to express individualism and personal liberty, so much so that four states have made it available as a license plate for your car.
This “Don’t Tread on Me” sense of freedom affects how we see the world and our place in it from political rhetoric, to debates about moral issues, and even our personal lives. We want to be able to live spontaneously, be authentic, true to ourselves and not conform to what anybody else says, perhaps what even God says, that might cramp our style and confine us in a narrow conformity. A song from the early 90s sums it up, the Soup Dragons. “I’m free to do what I want any old time.” (This, for what it’s worth, is the first time in 35+ years of preaching that I’ve ever quoted the Soup Dragons; it is likely to be the last. Enjoy the moment! But that song has been on repeat in the soundtrack of my mind all week, so I figured I’d share it with you.)
This ‘Don’t Tread on Me / Free to Do What I Want’ mindset reflects a deep and abiding spirit born of the Revolutionary War. But it is not what Paul is talking about in Galatians. It just isn’t. In the scriptures, the declaration of freedom at the heart of Christian life, “For freedom Christ has set us free,” is a very different revolution, one that brings change to our life and through our life, even if it doesn’t change the world around us. “For 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.”
Paul takes the language of freedom and immediately turns it on its head to the least free status of anyone in the ancient world: slavery. What could he possibly mean? We think of freedom as doing what I want and not having to do what anybody tells me what to do. But in the world of the scriptures, freedom is being free to serve others in love, free to pursue not our own interests but the interests of the Kingdom of God, nurturing the fruits of the Spirit: “love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, generosity, faithfulness, gentleness, and self-control” all for the sake of others. The Spirit is the source of our life, Paul says, and the Spirit directs its course.
And that, at times, means not being free to do what we want in order to serve the well-being of others. Think, for example, of one of the most iconic images of individual freedom: ‘Freedom of the Road.’ This is not just the freedom to get in our car to travel and explore wide open spaces; it also (maybe especially) includes a sense of liberation and escape from the expectations and demands of others so that we can discover our true self. It is Walt Whitman’s poem, ‘The Open Road.’ “Healthy, free, the world before me, the long brown path before me leading wherever I choose.”
Yet ‘Freedom of the Road’ comes with restrictions, It requires you, as a driver, to conform to a whole set of laws that limit your choices so that other drivers can experience freedom, too. Imagine what would happen, for example, if you were downtown and drove south on 10th Street, or north on University, just because you felt free to drive wherever you wanted. Your freedom would conflict with other people’s freedom pretty quickly. If there were no rules, no traffic laws, all of us would be navigating our way through chaos the best we could, hyper-vigilant about what was coming at us or around the corner. That’s not freedom at all; it’s no way to live. Restrictions and laws, at their best, provide a framework for freedom. That is what Paul means today when he talks about the law of love. ‘Do not use your freedom as an opportunity for self-indulgence. You should be free to serve each other in love.’ To accept personal limits and restrictions so that others can enjoy a measure of freedom is truly revolutionary.
As for the desire to live spontaneously, be authentic, true to ourselves and not conform to what anybody else, even God, might say that would cramp our style and enclose us into a narrow conformity, Chad Bird offers this observation: “If I throw a fish onto dry land and say, ‘Now you’re free of those restrictive waters!’ what have I done? Have I liberated the fish? No. I’ve removed it from the only place where it has life. The fish’s freedom is found only in that place where God created it to be. Outside those bounds, the only thing it will experience is death.”
Today Paul gives us an inventory of things outside the life that God has created us for. He calls them ‘works of the flesh,’ everything from impurity to anger to dissensions. If you didn’t recognize yourself at some point in the items he named, you weren’t listening. But more than recognizing our lives on that list, Paul wants us to recognize the source of our life, not just what biology has made us but who God has made us and where God has created us to be. Over and over in Galatians, Paul insists that our life within God is found in Christ. In Christ we are like fish in water—where we belong. Holy Baptism is the outward and visible sign of water and word conveying the invisible grace that makes us who we are in Jesus Christ. As Jesus says of himself at one point in the gospels, “If the Son makes you free, you will be free indeed.”
“For freedom Christ has set us free.” This declaration of freedom from Paul in today’s reading Galatians—freedom at the heart of Christian life—is a gift from Christ. Nothing in the present, nothing in our past, and certainly not the opinions of others, matter more than who we are in Jesus Christ. It is what Christian faith is about and what Christian faith is for. And this freedom is matched by a sense of purpose and direction. Because freedom, if it is of any use, doesn’t exist for its own sake but includes a sense of purpose, not to do what I want but to be free to do what I ought. And so Paul quotes Jesus saying, “For the whole law is summed up in a single commandment, ‘You shall love your neighbor as yourself.’ This law of love seeks the well-being of others and serves them as God would have us serve them. It may constrain us from doing what we want, but like the banks of a river that channel the energy of the water to its end, this life channeled by the work of the Spirit will direct us to the true freedom we share with others in God. “For freedom Christ has set us free.”
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