Sermon — June 26, 2022
The Rev. Greg Johnston
“For freedom Christ has set us free.” (Gal. 5:1)
In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.
The 2013 PBS special Constitution USA opens with a shot of the NPR news quiz host Peter Sagal riding through the Arizona desert on a Harley-Davidson painted with the American flag. “A guy on a motorcycle,” he narrates in the voiceover, “it’s like freedom personified! Five guys on five motorcycles?” (Here the camera pans to show him riding in formation with four members of the Arizona Leathernecks Motorcycle Club.) “Five times more freedom! It’s a freedom fiesta! But freedom to do… what, exactly?”
“Freedom to do what, exactly?” This is the question Sagal sets out to answer, biking around America to talk with citizens and scholars about the meaning of the United States Constitution. And we can add another question: freedom from what? Because, as one of the bikers astutely points out to Sagal in the bar after their ride, the Constitution isn’t there to protect us from one another. It’s there–he says, drawing a pocket copy out of vest and brandishing it—to protect us from our government. And while I imagine I may disagree with some of his politics, he’s right about that. The Constitution says much more about what we are free from than what we are free for. And the same is true of the national holidays in this season of freedom. Juneteenth commemorates Black Americans’ freedom from enslavement; the Fourth of July celebrates a new nation’s freedom from tyrannical monarchy. But—freedom to do what, exactly?
It’s not a new question, and it’s not limited to American politics. In fact, these are exactly the questions St. Paul addresses in his letter to the Galatians, and which Christians have struggled with for generations since. “For freedom Christ has set us free,” Paul writes. But from what and for what?
Paul is writing to the churches in Galatia, in what’s now the heartland of modern Turkey, at an inflection point in their history. They had received the gospel from Paul, the good news that they—these Gentiles, these non-Jews—can be accepted into the family of God, can be counted part of the chosen people of God, can be reckoned as righteous in God’s sight, not by conversion to Paul’s religion, Judaism, not by adopting the practices of circumcision and kosher food laws and Sabbath observance that define Jewish identity, but through faith in Christ, apart from these works of “The Law.”
But Paul’s letter is not just a cheerful reminder of this good news. It’s a rebuttal to what seems to be an alternate set of teachings by another set of early Christians, people who were, like Paul, Jewish members of the new Christian movement. They seem to be teaching that the Galatians do need to follow the law: that if they’re so excited about this good news of Jesus, the Messiah, the next step into entering his kingdom is to join his people, the Jewish people, and to follow the commandments of Jewish law. Paul is having none of it. This is precisely not the point! Paul has a more universal message in mind: it’s not obedience to Jewish law that makes a person righteous is God’s sight, but faith in Christ, and our Christian freedom is, in a sense, freedom from the obligation to fulfill the Law.
Of course, our problems are different from Paul’s, and “the Law” has been reimagined over time so it applies to more contemporary situations. For the Protestant Reformers, “the Law” was the kind of external, legalistic requirements, the “points systems” the Church had created. Paul’s message of Christian freedom led them into rebellion against some of the demands of the medieval church, exemplified by a historical event with one of my favorite names: “The Affair of the Sausages,” a dinner in 1522 in which Swiss reformers exercised their freedom in Christ by committing what was, to the authorities, a grievous sin: eating sausages at dinner on a Friday in Lent.
“For freedom Christ has set us free!” Freedom to do what? To eat hot dogs on a Friday night.
In our day, the Law is different. It’s not a requirement to obey the Jewish law, the law of Moses, in order to become Christian. It’s not a requirement to obey the Church’s arbitrary rules of fasting and penitence in order to earn God’s forgiveness. It’s the little-l law, less-obvious but more devious, the whole set of expectations and requirements and achievements that tell us that we are not enough: that our home isn’t clean enough, or our kids’ school isn’t “good” enough, or we don’t volunteer or call our mother or meditate enough. The law is good—all these things are good—but the law demands that we do and do and do and do, and we do and do and do and find that we can do no more, and however much we’ve done, it is never enough.
But we have been set free from the demands of the law. We do not have to submit to its yoke. Our worth is not determined by any external measurement than God’s love, by anything at all but our faith in Christ.
We’re set free from the law’s power to judge or condemn. But we’re set free also from the flesh. We are subject to two opposing forces“the flesh” and “the spirit.” “The flesh” is Paul’s phrase for the tendency within us that pulls us into ourselves and away from our neighbors, the source of our jealousy, anger, envy, drunkenness, and more. “The spirit” is what draws us out of ourselves, into the world, with “love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, generosity, faithfulness, gentleness, and self-control.” (5:22-23) “There’s no law,” Paul wryly points out, “against such things.” (5:23) And somehow, mysteriously, Christ’s crucifixion in the flesh has put to death the power of the flesh. God’s sending of the Holy Spirit has strengthened the power of our spirit. The delicate balance between the flesh and the spirit has shifted, so that we can grow and flourish and bear “the fruit of the Spirit.”
“For freedom Christ has set us free.” We are free from the law and free from the flesh. We are free from the external demands and measurements others make of our lives and free from the internal forces that lead us astray. We are free from all those things outside ourselves that distract us from the primary commandment, to love our neighbors as ourselves; and free from all those things within ourselves that prevent us from loving our neighbors as ourselves.
“For freedom Christ has set us free.” But it’s not the freedom of the solo cyclist. It’s the freedom of the motorcycle club. It’s not the freedom to go wherever we want and do whatever we want because God’s going to love us anyway. It’s the freedom to love. It’s the freedom to live together in a community like those Arizona Leathernecks, riding together, watching each other’s backs—in a joyful, peaceful, patient, kind, and loving way, of course. Christ has set us free from the law, from social norms and expectations and even from daily needs, in a way that can sound as shocking to our ears as it did to theirs. (Freedom from burying your father? (Luke 9:60) Freedom from saying farewell to your family? (Luke 9:61) These probably deserve a whole sermon of their own.) And he’s set us free from the worst versions of our own selves, from our jealous and anger and fearful sides, from everything that draws us away from one another and into ourselves.
But human beings aren’t so good at being so radically free. We crave order, structure, leadership. We love to take on the yoke; we need its solid certainty over our shoulders. Paul’s seen it already in the Galatians’ temptation to adopt the customs of the Law for what Paul sees as no benefit at all. And I wonder if this explains the strange paradox in what he writes to the Galatians: “Do not submit again to a yoke of slavery,” he says; then, just a few verses later, “but through love become slaves to one another.” You need to serve something? Okay. If you’re going to enslave yourself to something, don’t make it the law outside you or the flesh within you; make it the people around you. Serve one another, in love, for this is the essence of the law.
Not many of us have ever felt quite so free to love. Not many of us feel that radical freedom from the expectations and judgments of the world, or from our own weak wills. And our unfreedom comes from many different sources. There are at least as many things keeping us in chains as there are people in this room.
So what is it that’s keeping you from love? What is it that stops you from loving your neighbor as yourself? What is it that distracts you, that leads you to try to measure up? What is it that draws you into yourself? And what would it mean to say that Christ had truly taken away the burden of that thing? What would it mean to say that God’s unconditional love for you had actually set you free? What would it mean to say that you were being guided by the Spirit into ever greater love?
What would that “freedom fiesta” look like for you?
Because I have good news: Christ has set you free.
In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.