2 Kings 2:1-2, 6-14; Psalm 77:1-2, 11-20;
Galatians 5:1, 13-25; Saint Luke 9:51-62
Preached by Rev. Lou Scales
237 years ago tomorrow, July 1, 1776, was a hot day in Philadelphia,
and from the description, it was about like it is here today in Augusta. To
make matters worse, a
thunderstorm struck, with lightning and pelting rain. Delegates to the Continental Congress were
meeting in the state house, and a fateful decision was about to be
made. In his award-winning biography of John Adams, David McCullough
describes how Adams, not known as a great orator, rose to speak—how he spoke
logically,
clearly, carefully, and, "looking into the future, saw a new nation,
a new time."
Later, Adams remembered his words: "Objects of the most
stupendous magnitude, measures in which the lives and liberties of millions,
born and unborn, are most
essentially interested, are now before us. We are in the very midst
of revolution, the most complete, unexpected, and remarkable of any in the history
of the world."
Two New Jersey delegates, Frances Hopkinson and the Reverend John
Witherspoon arrived late, after Adams had been speaking for nearly an hour and
was concluding.
Witherspoon --a Presbyterian minister—was the only clergyman there.
He was president of the College of New Jersey, which later became Princeton
University, and he asked if Mr. Adams would mind repeating his address. Adams good-naturedly objected that he wasn’t
much of an orator, but other delegates urged him and Adams began again and
delivered the hour-long speech a second time.
The debate lasted nine hours. A preliminary vote on the matter of
declaring independence from Great Britain was taken, and nine colonies voted in
favor. A motion to adjourn for the night was adopted. The tension at the City Tavern,
where many of the delegates were lodging and where they talked into the night,
increased as word reached Philadelphia of the sighting of a hundred British ships
off New York.
They began again on the morning of July 2, at 9:00a.m. At 10:00 the
storm returned outside. A vote was taken. No colony opposed the motion. The
colonies had declared their independence.
McCullough reflects: "It was John Adams, more than anyone, who made
it happen. Further, he seems to have understood more clearly than any what a
momentous day it was and in the privacy of two long letters to his wife Abigail, he poured out his feelings as did no one else."
Adams wrote to his wife: “The
second day of July 1776 will be the most memorable
epoch in the history of America. I am apt to believe that it will be
celebrated by succeeding generations as the great anniversary festival. It
ought to be commemorated as the Day of Deliverance by solemn acts of devotion
to God Almighty. It ought to be solemnized with pomp and parade, with shows,
games, sports, guns, bells, bonfires and illumination from one end of this
continent to the other from this time forward forever more.” (David McCullough,
John Adams pp. 126-131)
The delegates discussed the matter and refined the document for two
more days. They argued over every word. Then, Thomas Jefferson wrote these
lines: ”We hold these truths to be
self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their
Creator with certain unalienable rights, that among these are life, liberty,
and the pursuit of happiness. That to secure these rights, governments are
instituted among men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the
governed."
I honestly love that story. I love the fact that a minister from Scotland,
albeit a Presbyterian, was there and played an important role and signed the
declaration—actually committing an act of treason against the crown. I love the
references to the Creator, to the will and providence of God, and the
invocation of the idea of freedom as the heart of the whole enterprise. They
voted for a final time on July 4 and lined up and signed it and sent it out for
the world to see and hear. Adams hoped
it would be celebrated with "shows, games, sports, guns, bells, bonfires
and illuminations," and that’s a pretty good description of what will
happen in Columbia and Richmond Counties, and the rest of the nation, for that matter,
this coming Thursday. And Mr. Adams also hoped that it would be commemorated in
solemn acts of devotion to Almighty God, which is what we are doing here this morning.
It is an occasion for people of faith to reflect on the meaning of
freedom, the particular and important meaning that word has for Christians.
Paul, writing to the Christian churches in Galatia (modern Turkey), said,
"For freedom, Christ has set us free.” They were Gentile churches and they
were deeply divided by a disagreement over how to be followers of Jesus Christ,
focusing on the question of freedom. Did they have to obey the Law of Moses? Or
were they free from the law as Paul, their teacher, had said?
Jesus was a Jew. The disciples were Jews. The early church was
Jewish. The first Christians met in synagogues and never thought they would be
anything but Jewish.
Jesus had said that he came to fulfill the law—the Law of Moses, the
foundation of their life as a people, a nation.
The law—613 rules based essentially on the Ten
Commandments—regulated and gave order to all of life. It defined how
life was to be lived with God and in community. It told them what to eat and
not eat, how to
dress, how to relate with neighbors, spouses, children. Its instructions
included how and when to work, how to cook, how to raise children, how to farm.
It included rules about feast days and fasts and sacrifices and offerings and prayers.
Torah—the law, is why Jews survived twenty centuries of exile and persecution.
It is why there is an
Israel today.
The trouble started when our first missionary told the story of
Jesus to non-Jews, Gentiles—or Greeks, as he called them. Paul traveled into
the lands of the Gentiles
and spoke about Jesus so compellingly that something happened that
no one anticipated. Gentiles became believers. Paul baptized them and told them
to stick together. Paul told them they were the church. Paul called them the
body of Christ.
Now by Jewish standards, these Gentile Christians were a motley
crew. They didn’t look or act like God’s kind of people. They ate food that was
unclean according to
Jewish law. They didn’t keep Sabbath, didn’t observe the fasts and
feasts. Those Gentiles looked like sinners. So the Jerusalem church sent teams
of teachers north to
those Gentile enclaves to do some remedial work. Paul, they said,
missed something important. If you want to be true Christians, you have to
abide by the Law of Moses: the dietary restrictions, the feast days, and your men
must be circumcised, just like us, just like the law requires.
When Paul heard about it, he was livid. Paul was a Jew, followed the
law, kept kosher—but for non-Jews to try to become Jews on the way to being
Christian was to miss the whole point. You are loved by God in Jesus Christ, he
said. That love is given to you as a gift you can’t earn, no matter what you
do, no matter how many rules you obey or sacrifices you make. Nor can you put
yourself outside the focus of God’s love. It is grace—the grace of God in Jesus
Christ—that saves us and redeems us and reconciles us and sets us free.
We are free from all the ways people have tried to please God
because God has already shown his pleasure.
We are free to live in joyful gratitude, free to fulfill the real and
original intent of the law—which is love for the neighbor. Paul’s letter to the
Galatians has been called the Magna Carta of Christian freedom.
In Christ, he wrote, there is no Jew or Greek, slave or free, male
or female. For all are one in Christ. And he wrote, "For freedom Christ
has set us free. . . . Do not
submit again to the yoke of slavery." To the good, upstanding, law-abiding people
down in Jerusalem, doing the very best they could to keep all the rules, Paul
must have seemed like a hopeless liberal, preaching grace, telling people that
God loved them no matter what they did or didn’t do. What kind of religion was that?
But Paul’s message doesn’t stop there. There’s more. "Do not submit again to the yoke of
slavery. . . . Become slaves to one another." Now in that statement Paul uttered a very sophisticated
understanding of human nature and what it means to be free. "Do not submit
to the yoke of slavery. . . . Become slaves to one another."
The modern definition of freedom has to do with autonomy,
independence, sovereignty. Webster’s first definition is "the absence of
necessity, coercion, restraint,"
none of which sounds like Paul’s admonition to become slaves to one
another.
In fact, the Christian definition of freedom—because it is freedom
in Christ, defined by Christ—differs fundamentally from the popular, cultural
definition. Freedom in the abstract
sounds like the right to do whatever you please, but that is not it at all.
Christians are free in Jesus Christ from the necessity of earning their salvation;
but because it is Jesus Christ who is doing the defining, love of neighbor,
commitment to the community is the other side of freedom. It is grace and
responsibility.
There is important truth in that idea. Those brave souls who signed
the Declaration of Independence were not thinking about declaring their right
to do whatever they pleased for their own self-realization and gratification. They were declaring independence in order to become
a new nation, and perhaps more than anyone else in history, they knew that freedom from external political
coercion was freedom to serve the common good and that it was going to require
serious sacrifice: people were going to die for it, and fight to defend it, and work very hard
to maintain it. David McCullough wrote, "What in another time and society
might be taken as platitudes about public service, were to John and Abigail
Adams a life-long creed" (p. 29).
It is not about doing what you please—although the culture and the
market economy in which we live sounds sometimes as if that is exactly what it
means. University of
Chicago sociologist Jean Bethke Elshtain, in one of her latest
books, Who Are We?, worries that in our obsession with individual rights, our
insistence on the right of the
individual to do whatever he or she pleases, we are losing a sense
of "social covenant," a sense of obligation to the community, to our
neighbor. She cites an automobile
advertisement that is a virtual invitation to selfishness. The copy reads this
way, "Little
kids are selfish. Impulsive. They don’t make rational decisions.
When they see something they want, they want it now. Little kids have a lot of
fun. Hmmm."
Elshtain urges a rebirth of civil commitment, a rededication to the
common good, a reinvestment in the institutions where the common good is
actually strengthened: In political parties, labor unions, schools, and
churches. And she is not alone. The late
Thomas Merton observed, "I do not find in myself the power to be happy
doing what I like. . . . On the contrary, if I do nothing but what pleases my
fancy, I will be
miserable most of the time. This would not be so if my will had not
been created to use its own freedom in the love of others" (No Man Is an
Island, p. 35).
John Adams hoped that the birth of freedom would be commemorated in
churches. And a fitting way for that hope to be fulfilled is for churches to
remind the world that
freedom—to do whatever one wants to do—is simply license and is
ultimately self-destructive; that real freedom is the liberty to give oneself
fully and generously to others. That’s
the greatest reversal of all. Real freedom is found in the act of serving
another person, an institution, a cause other than you. Real freedom is
discovering you by forgetting you for a change.
Jesus turned a lot of things upside down. You can’t earn your way into
the kingdom. God has already opened the door and invites you to stop groveling
and whining, to stand up and walk in.
You can’t earn God’s love because God has already given it to you.
All you can do is be grateful and try to live up to it. You can’t get in because you’re the right
race, or
gender, or economic class. It’s not a matter of ethnic group,
income, or sexual orientation. In Christ there is no Jew or Greek, no slave or
free, no male or female.
You see, you’re not really free when you do exactly what you want to
do. You are really free when you voluntarily limit your own freedom by being a
servant to others.
The Good News is about grace and it is also about responsibility. Grace leads to freedom, which leads to love.
And unless you get to love, to being a servant, you do not really know the
grace. If your freedom simply allows you to make yourself your own life’s
project, you’re not getting it.
Austrian psychiatrist Viktor Frankl survived the holocaust and later
wrote very movingly about what it was like to be caught in the very antithesis
of freedom, a kind
of absolute imprisonment that would end in death. He wrote: ”We who lived in concentration camps can
remember the men who walked through the huts comforting others, giving away
their last piece of bread. They may have been
few in number, but they offer sufficient proof that everything can
be taken from a man but one thing: the last human freedom—to choose one’s
attitude in any given set
of circumstances, to choose one’s own way.” (A Rumor of Angels, p.
8)
Dear friends, let us commemorate this day, this freedom, in solemn
devotion to Almighty God, and let us give thanks for this land of liberty.Let us be grateful for the amazing grace of God—given to each of us
in Jesus Christ. Let us be grateful for the freedom Our Lord gives—freedom to let go
of frantic efforts to please God, freedom to love God with our heart, mind,
soul and strength; freedom to love one another. For
Christians—for us—the best picture of freedom is Jesus Christ, on a cross: there voluntarily; there because of
self-emptying; there because of love. For
freedom, Christ has set us free. Paul said this to us so many years ago, and
today I remind you of it in the Name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy
Spirit. AMEN.
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