Proper 8C (30 June – 1 July 2007)

Galatians 5:1, 13-25

Pr. George L. Murphy

St. Paul’s Episcopal Church, Akron OH

FREEDOM

Paul’s Letter to the Galatians is your get out of jail free card. It will spring you from the prison in which most religions, including some versions of Christianity, want to keep you. Not surprisingly, the practitioners of those religions think that having a get out of jail free card is dangerous – it threatens their neat systems of religious rules and regulations. So for almost two thousand years people have been trying to defuse this charge that can blow the doors off the prison. But they haven’t succeeded – we can still hear Paul’s message. “For freedom Christ has set us free. Stand firm, therefore, and do not submit again to a yoke of slavery.”

That’s the thrust of this whole letter. We are forgiven, we are saved, we are put in a right relationship with God, given new life and empowered, entirely by God’s free gift in Jesus Christ. As new men and women we are freed from the accusations and control of the Law – from all systems of religious rules and regulations. We are saved freely, and we are saved in order to be free and to live as free people. “You were called to freedom, brothers and sisters.” And it’s not just Paul who says that. In the Gospel of John Jesus says, “If the Son makes you free, you will be free indeed.”

One way that people try to blunt Paul’s argument and herd us back into jail is to focus on the details of the situation Paul was dealing with in Galatia back in the first century. That makes the letter ancient history and therefore safe.

What had happened was that after the people in Galatia had heard the gospel from Paul and believed it, some other Jewish Christians came along and told them that they needed something more. Faith in Christ was fine, but if they wanted to be full-fledged first class Christians, they had to obey the Old Testament Law of Moses. They had to submit to all the regulations in torah about circumcision, and what foods they could and couldn’t eat, and Sabbath observance and all the other Mosaic dos and don’ts and ceremonies.

If we just focus on that historical setting then the whole discussion in Galatians doesn’t seem to be very relevant for us. After all, nobody’s trying to keep us from eating pork or working on Saturdays, so what’s the point? And now here come the friendly jailers. “Of course you don’t have to be subject to those old laws,” they say. “What you have to obey is these laws – a new and improved Christian set of dos and don’ts.” And if we’re not careful we’ll soon hear the doors of our cells clang shut again.

So – go to churches across the spectrum today, conservative and liberal, Protestant and Catholic. You can hear lots of rules – “Perform this ritual, not that one. Don’t practice birth control, do oppose the death penalty. Don’t drink, do tithe. Don’t believe evolution, do believe the Millennium Development Goals.” It’s religion as usual, just about anywhere you go.

Understand that I’m not taking a stance right now on the issues I just mentioned. The point isn’t whether or not some of those rules may be helpful but that none of them defines our status before God. We aren’t saved by tithing or not tithing, drinking or not drinking. We are saved by Jesus Christ, by his death and resurrection, period. That is the gospel, and Paul says at the beginning of this letter, “Even if we or an angel from heaven should proclaim to you a gospel contrary to what we proclaimed to you, let that one be accursed!” Paul doesn’t mess around. The gospel of Jesus Christ is not any law – not any set of rules that says you’ll be rewarded if you do something and punished if we don’t. The gospel is a gift.

“But – what about the Ten Commandments?” (This is the jailer again.) “Surely Christians have to obey the Ten Commandments!” We have to be a little careful here. Even as Christians we sin. As Luther put it, the Christian is at the same time justified and sinner. That’s reality, and the Ten Commandments have the important function of reminding us of it. If we ever start thinking that we’re so moral and pious that we no longer need God’s mercy and forgiveness, the Law will remind us of our situation. Just use the Commandments as a checklist. Is God first in my life all the time? Do I love my neighbor as myself? If we’re honest with ourselves, the answers will generally be no. The law tells us that we’ve got a sin problem and shows us our need for Christ.

In addition, we live in a society of imperfect people like ourselves, many of whom don’t even care about their relationship with God. The Ten Commandments or some set of rules like them help to maintain some degree of peace and justice among people. That’s another important function of the law.

But the Ten Commandments don’t define our relationship with God. When Paul says that are freed from the Law’s condemnation he means the whole Law, Ten Commandments and all. We are free because Christ has freed us.

We are not just liberated from something. That’s an all too common idea of freedom – no rules, we can do anything we want. If you start down that road you’re likely to find yourself in bondage again. If a person’s idea of freedom is being able to indulge without restraint in sex, drugs or the pursuit of wealth and power, that person will soon be in bondage to sex, drugs and the pursuit of wealth and power. Those are examples of what Paul calls “the works of the flesh,” the ways people function when they’re alienated God.

Christ has liberated us for something. We are free to be what God always intended women and men to be. We can be fully human, the image and likeness of God.

And we know what it means to be fully human because Jesus is fully human. He is the human, the genuine image of God who shows us and lives out for us the kind of life God wants us to have. The death of Jesus sets us free and the life of Jesus shows us what we are free for. His life shows us the unlimited possibilities for our lives.

It’s interesting that in the life of Jesus we don’t see a lot of the things that people associate with freedom in this country today. We don’t hear Jesus talking about having the freedom to make as much money as he can and ignoring the needs of people who aren’t as smart, or as skillful, or as industrious, or as lucky, as he is. We don’t hear him proclaiming his absolute right to say or do anything he pleases, no matter how much it may offend or injure other people. Being fully human means living as part of the human community and being concerned for its welfare.

Instead, Jesus goes out of his way to be available for other people. He heals the sick when they need to be healed, not just at his convenience When people talk to him, he listens. He doesn’t turn away notorious breakers of the religious rules. He is so free that he can serve others.

Paul takes his meaning of freedom from Jesus when he says that through love we are to serve one another, and that we are to bear one another’s burdens. We are not controlled by a code of laws, but as free people are called to be members of the new humanity which begins with Jesus, the Body of Christ.

Around the Fourth of July we hear a lot of rhetoric about freedom, some of it good and some not so good. The message we are to hear first of all, and in terms of which we should judge all other messages, is Jesus Christ – and Jesus means freedom.