“Christ Behind You, Liberty Before You”
Christ has set us free
Sermon Preached by
The Rev. Dr. Andrew Stirling
Sunday, January 11, 2004
Text: Galatians 5:1-11
When warm mist descends on cold, snowy roads, it makes for a very treacherous drive. Such was the case last Saturday when I witnessed a horrendous crash on two of Ottawa's best- known streets: Baseline Road and Fisher. I realized I had arrived literally seconds after the most enormous collision among a number of cars. Such was the force of the collision that the pole that held up the traffic lights was bent over and a lamppost was collapsed. One of the cars had almost been cut in half from the force of the collision.
Within moments an ambulance arrived; seconds later a police car and then a police van. Picking up the carnage on the road in order that traffic could flow were street workers on behalf of the city. It was evident from the force of the collision and the sheer enormity of the way the pieces of the cars were spread across the road that this was pretty serious. It was.
People were put in ambulances and immediately driven away. But one person was taken out of his car, handcuffed and taken to the back of a police van, right next to my car. I could see through the mesh the look in this man's eyes - they were glazed from shock and fear. It was obvious that this was one of the people responsible for the collision.
As I was fortunate enough to be able to drive away from the carnage, I couldn't help but think how this one moment, this instant in time would affect the lives of many people for days, months and years to come. For those who were injured, and I don't know the extent of those injuries, clearly there would be months, maybe even years to live with the disabilities caused by the accident. For the man incarcerated in the back of that police van, who knows what toll his actions would take on the rest of his life. One solitary, single moment in time was going to affect the futures of many different people.
I thought about how one moment in time can enslave people. That's why when I heard this morning's passage from the Book of Galatians I must admit I was somewhat incredulous and bemused. The apostle Paul makes this extreme statement: “It is for freedom that Christ set us free.” Now, I look with incredulity on a text like this, because it seems to suggest what all evidence proves otherwise. In fact, that as human beings our existence lives within the constraints of many different things.
As I was watching civil servants going about their business in Ottawa last Monday morning after the holidays, I couldn't help but think how oppressed they looked. Here they are, going to do the work of the government, all the time on the basis of regulations and restrictions and laws that determine and constrain what they can do. They are going to work as free people but only in one sense; their freedom would soon be curtailed. They are living within constraints.
Or, I think of people dependent on the benevolence of their employer in order that they can live a meaningful life and exercise a meaningful career. I think of those in the marketplace who are dealing with the lash of competition that continually forces them to work and constrains them through the obligations of the marketplace and the demands of others.
Indeed, if we are absolutely honest, all of us to some extent (even though we are entering this new year and beginning a new passage in our time) are constrained or enslaved by things in the past. It might be problems with our families that we are carrying with us. It might be ill health. It might be grief. It might be something that we have done, like that man driving, that we regret. One moment in time that we carry with us. When Paul says it is for freedom that Christ has set us free, those words seem absurd in a world that so often lives enslaved.
Indeed, if we were really honest, who among us if asked: “Are you free?” could answer in the affirmative with any degree of integrity? I really wonder. We all to some extent live under the power of constraints. We all have things that bind our lives. We do not just enter a new year with a clean slate. On the contrary, we carry the past with us and, as we move into a new year, we very often forget the message of Christmas. We forget the glorious message we have heard of peace on earth and love and fellowship among people and the power and grace of God. These things often seem like distant memories as we once again become enslaved by the things in life that demand our allegiance.
I ask the question again: Are we free? Are Paul's words real and meaningful? Well, Helmut Golwitzer, a famous German theologian whom I have read often over the last few years, suggests that as human beings we have two pasts. We have the past of the world that we live in, the past of our former lives, the past of the traditions that have been passed along, the past of the constraints of our humanity passed from one generation to another, all of which build to collectively enslave us. We have that human past that all of us feel and experience. This the past that enslaves us.
There is also another past, according to Golwitzer, a past based on divine history. A past based on what God has done on our behalf. Nowhere is this seen more clearly than in our passage from Galatians. (Now, I'm sure that both our readers must have really been thanking me for giving them this passage to begin a new year. All this about circumcision and enemies of God sounds so bleak and dreadful upon initial reading, doesn't it? Couldn't I have found something a little more joyful and a little more obvious for us to take with us and help us live our spiritual lives daily?)
Contrary to what you may think, this is a very important passage. The apostle Paul is talking about the fact that by being born under the law he is under the traditions and constraints of his Jewish background. Paul has now reached a moment where he believes that he and indeed the whole world has been set free from some of those constraints. By the grace and the coming of Jesus Christ, by the cross and the resurrection of Jesus, many of the things that constrained him no longer have a hold on him. You see, circumcision was ultimately a sign of God's selection of the people of Israel. It was a symbol to set them apart. It had a necessary purpose but Paul now believed that God's coming through Jesus Christ freed people to enter into a convenantal relationship with God through faith in His Son. There was no longer a need for circumcision because freedom came through Christ.
For the mission of the apostle Paul, his ministry to the Gentile world, this was absolutely critical. There were some in the church in Galatia who claimed that you needed to be circumcised to be a Christian. You needed to go back to the law to be a faithful servant of Jesus Christ. Paul was making a case that that was not to happen, that Christians are free and it is for freedom that Christ freed us. Therefore, only through faith in Jesus Christ that we are made righteous in God's eyes, that we belong, that we become people of the covenant. The Gentiles remain Gentiles, but they are children of God by virtue of what Jesus has done on their behalf. It was absolutely essential to Paul's whole understanding of what Christ had done and the power of the Christian faith amongst both Jews and Gentiles. This was the supremacy of Christ's gift of Himself for us.
The sense of freedom that Paul has is the freedom from the bondage of the law. It is the freedom to be himself before God, not by virtue of anything that he has done or had done to himself, but by virtue of Christ and His overwhelming grace. He made the point: “It is for freedom that we have been set free.” Let us not then revert back to an enslavement but live as free people. Because of what Christ has done; we are free.
Now, many people might be saying, do we bring that freedom with us into the future? Does it mean that we are liberated from everything around us? The answer is both no and yes. Clearly it is no because it is very obvious that the world does need to pursue freedom and liberty.
On Friday I attended a meeting of the Rotary Club of Toronto at which Stephen Lewis spoke about the devastating impact of AIDS in Africa, and his work on that issue. He said little that was new in terms of the information we were given, but what resounded with me and impressed me was that because of the enslavement of so much of the continent of Africa to this disease, much of the world actually lives in bondage. We share an obligation. We share a concern. We share the passion for people who even though they are thousands of miles away, are nonetheless human being and as long as they live under the constraints of this disease, the world itself is not free.
Archibald MacLeish, in The Ghost of Thomas Jefferson wrote these words on the bicentennial of the United States of America in 1976: “We are as great as our belief in human liberty, no greater and our belief in human liberty is only ours when it is larger than ourselves.” In other words, there is a recognition that none of us are really free if others are living in captivity. None of us can say that we are totally and completely free if others are living under the constraints of bondage.
No one put this more eloquently than Nelson Mandela. In his book, The Long Walk to Freedom, are words we all need to hear:
I was not born with a hunger to be free, I was born free. Free in every way that I could know. Free to run in the fields near my mother's hut. Free to swim in the clear stream that ran through my village. It was only when I began to learn that my boyhood freedom had already been taken from me that I began to hunger for it. And I saw that it was not just my freedom that was curtailed but the freedom of everyone who looked like I did. That is when I joined the African National Congress and that is when the hunger for my own freedom became the still greater hunger for the freedom of my people. This hunger became a hunger for the freedom of all people white and black, for I knew as well as I knew anything that the oppressor must be liberated just as surely as the oppressed. A man who takes away another man's freedom is a prisoner of hatred. I am not truly free if I am taking away someone else's freedom, just as surely as I am not free when my freedom is taken from me. The oppressed and the oppressor alike are robbed of their humanity.
In other words, my friends, when one part of the world lives with a lack of liberty it is as if the rest of us are similarly enslaved. That is the common human heritage that we have - that is the bond that we all share. We are really, if the truth were known, not born free. There are things that enslave us that are beyond our own abilities to comprehend. By virtue of our humanity we are enslaved.
But there is a yes. And the yes is based on the fact that our future can be lived freely if we are willing to open ourselves to what Christ has done on our behalf.
There is a story told about a wonderful old tradition in Bavarian households. If you have been invited to dinner and knock on someone's door, you cannot enter the home until the host has welcomed you and formally invited you to the table. When you get there you say something like this: “Ich bin so frei,” “I take this liberty.”
In other words, having been offered hospitality, you take it. Having had an invitation, you seize it. Christ is really an invitation - an invitation that says in this life you have no need to be constrained by your fears, for He is with you. You have no need to hold onto your bitterness for He has said, “Away with it.” You have no need to hold onto your sin, for He has removed it. You have no need to hold onto your traditions, for He has liberated you from them. You have no need to be at war with your neighbour, for He has reconciled you. It is His work. He has it. He has borne it. You are free. What you need to say is: “Ich bin so frei,” “I take this liberty.” The liberty is there. We actually have that freedom if we are but willing to seize it, if we are but willing in faith to take it for ourselves. The freedom is already there, waiting for us to take it.
I read a delightful story in a magazine some time ago about a horticulturist. One of the things that irritated her most was ordering seeds from a seed catalogue because on the front of the packages are all these gorgeous picture of flowers in full bloom. It annoys her when she sees this because she is convinced that each flower has been paid $50 to appear in this picture, because she is never able to duplicate what is on the package. She commented: “I have realized that being a gardener means not that you are growing flowers but that you are burying seeds.” That's what it's about.
It's not just in the glamorous or lovely experience of being free that we find our freedom. It is in something deeper. It is not that we can say we are free because we experience this liberty in everything. We are free by virtue of what Christ has done with us, and just like burying seed we wait for the freedom to arise, once we have decided that these are the seeds that we are willing to plant.
My friends, as Christians we are indeed free. While we may not completely experience the freedom of this world and the total liberty that it gives us, we are nonetheless to live as if we are free by virtue of what Christ has done on our behalf. And so we ask one last question - the most important question of all: For what are we free?
If you look back at the history of the Bible, from the very beginning, from Adam and Eve it seems there was enmity and division. In the story of Cain and Abel we see the conflict that quickly ensues because of the sin of humanity. We see that sin manifest itself in divisions over the decades and the centuries that follow. Divisions between people chosen by God and those who were not. People who lived faithfully by the covenant and those who did not. People who were pious and people who were not. People who were holy and people who were not. People who lived in freedom and those who lived in bondage. It seems that the world was radically divided and separated along different lines.
There was wisdom in God's decision to keep the people of Israel separate. There was a time when there was a need for symbols of this separation. To keep them away from others, to maintain the covenant and the strong association God had with His chosen people - of course that was necessary. The problem lies in the fact that when we come to Jesus Christ we see a different turn in the road. We see Jesus bringing Jew and Gentile together, slave and free together, male and female together.
The problem is that so many live as if this Christ has not done this. We still make arbitrary distinctions between each other and enforce the conflicts of the world on the basis of traditions that are long past. When we do that we cause enmity among people. Very often our piety itself can be a constraining and enslaving thing. It can set us apart from others. We see others somehow as weaker or poorer than ourselves, and in creating distinctions among one another our enmities grow our separation continues and our isolation is compounded. My friends, the world is enslaved by precisely that kind of fear of the other.
This last week I went into a government building that I'd gone into to visit a friend many times before. But this time, I felt that I was being taken through almost a mysterious process where they knew everything about me, from my very thoughts, the colour of my eyes, to who my grandmother's grandmother was - such was the level of security. I understood, I didn't mind, five different checks to get into this building - because of fear.
The world lives in slavery to that fear. We're in a day and age where that fear grasps us and so I say to myself as a Christian, “What do we have to say to this world that lives in so much bondage of fear and of the other?” It says it is for freedom that Christ has set us free. We have to live as free people. We must not be bound by our past. We cannot be bound by our relationships and who we can see and who we can know and who we can trust. We will not live in fear because Christ has already set us free and as free people we need to be open to the other and not anxious about ourselves, but live with one another in a covenant and a bond of love as Christ has loved us and the world.
There's a very beautiful moment in the play, Death of a Salesman, when Willy is out with his wife and son. Things have been going very badly for Willy. He's becoming bitter and angry because he hasn't had a job. He's upset and hurt. He's at his lowest. His son and wife move aside and leave Willy alone in his misery. The son is getting fed up with his father being so negative and depressed. The mother says to him these words: “Son, be kind to your father, for he is just like a little boat looking for a harbour.”
My friends, I think God is looking at this world right now and I think we're like little boats being tossed and turned with fear, never sure what tomorrow will bring. I think in the midst of that we are in search of a harbour and the only real harbour for a world living in the bondage of fear is God. And the only antidote to fear is faith. The power that makes this possible is grace. More than anything else in this new year, I want you to live free as Christians. I want you to take the shackles of the world and say: “Away with them!” Because through Christ I am free and I'm going to live that way, and may the world live that way too. Amen.
This is a verbatim transcription of the original sermon.