Liberty

Scripture: The Second Sunday after Pentecost (Lectionary 9), A.D. 2016 C

Homily:

Grace, mercy and peace to you from God our Father and from our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ. Amen.

  

There’s all the difference in the world between liberty and freedom.

Modern Americans wear freedom like a badge. We use the term so often that it can easily become cliché. Much ink was spilled over the Budweiser corporation’s recent announcement that for the summer they will rename their beer “America.” In response, a Michigan craft brewery declared, with tongue firmly in cheek, that they would release a beer called ‘Murica. When asked what ‘Murica would taste like, the brewers proudly replied, “It tastes like freedom.” And everybody laughed. Because we all know that in America, freedom has no taste. It’s just an empty word used to sell things.

That’s what freedom has become for us in the 21st Century: an excuse to buy stuff. Freedom means doing whatever you want, whenever you feel like it. Feel like a vacation? Take it. Feel like bacon? Eat it. Feel like an iPhone? Buy it. We have an entire society based on the notion that you can have whatever you want, do whatever you want, be whatever you want, limitations be damned. If you don’t have enough money, go into debt. In fact, we want you to. We encourage it. And don’t let little things like reality get in your way. Why, even biology can bend to the whims of supply and demand. Got wrinkles? Buy a cream. Feeling old? There’s a pill. Don’t like your skin? Nip it, tuck it, stitch it back up again.

Freedom today means freedom from restraint, freedom from limits, freedom from consequences—which means, of course, freedom from responsibilities, freedom from meaning or purpose, freedom from the struggles of actually having to live. And if you don’t like me saying stuff like this, you can just flip the channel, block my number, unfriend me from your safe space. It is a free country, after all.

If we were to go back in time to any other era in our history—be it ancient, classical, medieval, or renaissance—any schoolchild would be able to tell us that the false freedoms found in our advertisements—freedom from restraint, freedom from self-control—constitute the most primal and inescapable form of slavery. For indeed, we are slaves to our passions, slaves to our appetites. And while it may be difficult to liberate a man’s body from bondage, how much harder it is to liberate his heart and mind and soul. Such a person doesn’t need any more false freedoms. Such a person needs true liberty.

We read this morning from St Paul’s Epistle to the Galatians, sometimes called the Magna Carta of Christian liberty. In it, St Paul rhapsodizes about the astounding work of Jesus Christ, who in His life, death, and resurrection, has liberated us from our bondage to sin, death, and the devil, and has raised us up to new and eternal life in Him. All this, purely out of mercy; all this, purely out of grace. The chains of our past, the chains of our wickedness, the chains of our mundane and meaningless lives have been shattered. We are free, we are forgiven, and we are loved forever! The Christian has no master, either in Heaven or on earth—not age, not poverty, not illness or death or despair—no master at all save the Lord Jesus Christ, who has bought us with a price and will brook no rival to His claim.

But Paul is astounded that some in the Galatian church have turned from this liberation in Christ Jesus to pursue instead a false gospel, a false freedom, that serves their own egos rather than serve God by serving their neighbors. The liberty granted to us freely in Christ, Paul insists, is none other than the freedom to submit to our neighbor in love. Did you catch that? Because it kind of upends our whole notion of freedom. Liberty is the freedom to submit to our neighbor in love. Freedom to submit! What madness is this? Doesn’t Paul know that submission is the opposite of freedom? I’m free to do what I want! I don’t submit to anyone!

But to his audience this made perfect sense. The philosophers of Paul’s day shared an understanding of the soul—of your inner self—as consisting of three parts: the intellect, the will, and the passions. And they each had a proper role to play. The intellect houses our God-given gift of reason. By it, we can discern goodness and truth and beauty. People today often speak of reason narrowly, as simple logic or empirical inquiry, but true reason is broader than this. With the aid of divine revelation, reason can show us our true place and purpose in this world.

The passions, meanwhile, serve other, but equally good, functions. The passions let us know when we need to eat, drink, or sleep. They tell us our body’s needs. They energize us in times of fight or flight, and strongly inform us when our body is ready to settle down and start a family. And the will, of course, acts as the middle man. The will is our freedom to choose right and wrong. It guides the passions as a carriage driver guides his horses. In a healthy, educated, and liberated soul, the intellect guides the will through the light of reason, and the will then guides the passions accordingly.

Like a car, the soul must have regular care and maintenance. Good habits, called virtues, ensure the proper working order of our inner lives: prudence for the intellect, justice for the will, fortitude and temperance for the passions. Alas, we find ourselves now in a fallen, broken world, a world in which sin has disrupted the proper harmony of our souls. The intellect is left to rust. The will is week and flabby. And unrestrained by fortitude and temperance, our passions run amuck like wild horses, pulling us to and fro, chasing every whim of desire. Today we call this freedom. In any other age it would be recognized as a soul out of control, running headlong into destruction.

True liberty requires virtue. It requires prudence, justice, fortitude, and temperance—in other words, discipline and self-control. Liberation means liberation from possessions, liberation from selfish desire, liberation from endless consumption and fleshly indulgence. This is the liberation given to us in Jesus Christ!

Christ has set you free, Paul says. He has given you everything He has, everything He is. He has made you the children and co-heirs of God. Your past cannot hold you, your sins cannot hold you, death itself cannot hold you! Why then would you waste this liberty by turning to false freedoms? You are free for so much more! You are free now to live for others, free to feed the hungry and clothe the naked and shelter the oppressed and visit the sick. You are free to turn the other cheek and go the extra mile and bear each other’s burdens. You are free to love the unlovable, forgive the unforgivable, and console the inconsolable.

And what are we going to do with this liberty? Buy a bigger flatscreen? Max out another credit card? Christ did not die simply to free us from responsibility, to but free us for a glorious new destiny. He has freed us so that we can free others, so that we can be “little Christs” for a world so desperately in need of liberation. Freedom has come to mean freedom from things. But liberty is a different sort of freedom, an older and truer sort: liberty is not freedom-from but freedom-for, the freedom to live for others, freedom for our neighbors and for those in need.

John Adams once wrote that “our Constitution was made only for a moral and religious people.” He didn’t mean that America was to be a Christian nation. What he meant was that we will only be able to preserve our liberties so long as we understand that freedom comes with great moral and religious responsibility. The Revolution was not fought so that we could become reckless libertines. Those whom we solemnly commemorate on Memorial Day did not die for thick burgers and spring break and America the Beer. They died so that we would know freedom not just without but within: the freedom to be good and noble and virtuous; the freedom to live lives of service for our neighbor to the greater glory of God.

I’m not trying to conflate piety with patriotism. God forbid it, in fact. But Christ lived and died and rose again so that you might have liberty. Our forefathers risked their own lives to ensure that the powers of the state and the whims of the mob would not be allowed to constrain that inheritance. In Christ you are forgiven, you are loved, and you are free. This is a gift of inestimable worth. So let us ask ourselves, dear Christians, tomorrow and on every day thereafter: for whom would God have me use my liberty today?

In the Name of the Father and of the +Son and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.