Westworth United Church

Westworth United Church                                                      June 27, 2010.

Rev. J. Clark Saunders                                                      Galatians 5:1, 13-25

True Freedom

            It was the word that the Scottish hero, Sir William Wallace, cried out when he is being executed at the end of Mel Gibson’s film, Braveheart.  In 1948 it was a theme that was highlighted in the United Nations’ Declaration of Human Rights.  It used to be the thing that people could aim to achieve by age 55.  According to George W. Bush it is the thing for which terrorists hate America.  And in his letter to the Galatians, it is the elusive and ambiguous and paradoxical subject that the Apostle Paul decides to explore.  What is it?  It is freedom.

            “For freedom Christ has set us free,” Paul says.  An odd and puzzling thing for him to say, surely.  Or on the other hand, should we say that Paul’s statement is self-evident.  “For freedom Christ has set us free.”  Well, what else could we be set free for, if not freedom.

            But Paul, I think is pointing to the fact that often, when people think they are getting freedom, they are actually getting something else.  People who imagine that they are being set free from slavery are actually exchanging one kind of slavery for another.  People who rejoice when the yoke of oppression is lifted from them may find that another kind of oppression rushes in to take its place.

            Certainly we’ve seen the truth of that in the political realm. 

• No one would question that the abolition of slavery at the end of the American Civil War was a good thing.  But many African-Americans then entered an era for which they were ill-prepared.  Slavery was gone, but poverty and racism were not. 
• Some rejoiced when the French Revolution abolished a corrupt regime.  But what did it give way to?  First the chaos of the Reign of Terror and then a dictator named Napoleon. 
• The people of eastern Europe who longed for the defeat of Nazi Germany found that at the end of the war an Iron Curtain had descended, and they were on the wrong side of it. 
• Decades later, a year or two after the Soviet system itself had collapsed, a young Russian was asked what things had been like in the old Soviet Union.  “Oh,” he said, “they were terrible.”  And now, in this new era of freedom?  “Oh, now,” he said, “things are really terrible.”

            When we think of how people’s hopes for freedom and a better life are often dashed, when we remember how we so often end up simply exchanging one kind of tyranny for another, Paul’s words don’t sound so self-evident or mysterious or incomprehensible.  Don’t forget, he is telling his readers, “For freedom Christ has set us free.”  So don’t just settle for another kind of bondage.

            But there is another paradox here.  If we – like Paul’s friends in Galatia – want to make sure that we don’t fall victim to a different kind of oppression, neither should we imagine that freedom means license.  A freedom that is not balanced by responsibility, a freedom that is just another word for license leads to chaos.  It is true in the social and political world.  And it is true in the world of faith. 

            Anyone who imagines that a new life in Christ, a life in which we are loved and forgiven by God, is a life in which we are free to do anything we like, has missed the point.  Jesus did not give his life so that we could live a life without consequences.  The Christian life is not one that presumes on the unlimited grace of God and imagines that no change is required in our thinking, in our priorities, in our behaviour.  When Paul says that Jesus has set us free for freedom he does not mean that we have been set free for license or self-indulgence.  In the end that would lead to chaos, and when you think about it chaos is just another kind of oppression.

            Well, if that is not what Paul means, what does he mean?  Well, I find it interesting that he speaks in terms of what we are set free for.  Often, it seems to me, we think only in terms of what we are set free from.  The ancient Israelites were set free from bondage in Egypt.  The American colonies were set free from British rule.  A woman who suffers from domestic violence might escape her situation and be set free from a destructive relationship.  An alcoholic might join AA and be set free from the demon of alcohol addiction.

            But being set free from something is only half the story.  Speaking of demons, Jesus once said that when an unclean spirit is cast out of someone it goes around looking for some of its demon friends so they can all return and take up residence again.  That’s what can happen if a person is delivered of an evil spirit but left empty.  A person needs to fill that empty space with something positive as a defence against being re-occupied by a whole host of demons.

            Now the imagery in Jesus’ teaching may reflect a first-century world view.  But what if we take it to mean this:  It is not enough to long to be set free from something.  We have to think about what we want to be set free for.  If we don’t think beyond the moment of our deliverance, if we don’t think about how we will create a better life and a better world, we will soon find ourselves in a situation that is no better than the one we have escaped. 

• If we are oppressed by worry and anxiety over something and that particular situation is resolved, we will soon find some other anxiety rushing in to take its place – or we will if we haven’t thought about how to deal with our anxieties. 
• A people who throw off the yoke of oppression may spend a day or two dancing in the streets, but if they have not thought about how to put a just society in its place they will soon find themselves oppressed by a new ruler.  The names will have changed but the situation will not.  
• As individuals or as a society we may be able to crawl out of some economic debacle, but if we do not address its underlying causes, if we do not do something about the greed that lies at the heart of it, there will be nothing to prevent it from happening again. 
• We may imagine that the good life for us is one in which we shed all responsibilities and live for ourselves alone.  But we will find that such a life is empty and meaningless unless we fill our time and use our energy in a way that demonstrates the truth that in Jesus’ service is perfect freedom.

            Paul wants his readers to know that our ideas about freedom are often misguided and simplistic.  Freedom can be elusive.  And it is certainly paradoxical.  It demands that we think carefully about what we have been set free for in Christ.  Paul, of course, has his own answer to that question.  “For you were called to freedom, brothers and sisters,” he says, ‘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 neighbour as yourself”’.

            Whatever you have been set free from, whatever you still need to be set free from, the thing God intends you to be set free for is to love.  If our essential freedom is the freedom to choose our master, let us choose love.  Let it be the quality that rules in our hearts and in our lives.