The Amazing Old (and New) Testament: For Freedom
A theme running through both testaments of our Bible? “By a strong hand the Lord delivered us from slavery” (Exodus 13:3) – and “For freedom Christ has set us free; do not submit again to the yoke of slavery” (Galatians 5:1).
I love July 4 – but theologically I often sink into a funk. This grand day gets ridiculously debased, and in a culture where Jesus gets pinned on to the ugliest versions of patriotism. I put out a flag, but my wife informs me people will read that as a statement I’m for one party not the other. What? Pondering the flag’s many misuses: did you know the U.S. flag code stipulates that the flag is not to be worn, should not be draped over a car or truck, or used on any disposable items? Bikinis and beer mugs just don’t seem very respectful to me.
Freedom of religion was a cardinal principle for the Founding Fathers – and no matter how much we try to rewrite history, the simple facts are that some of them were quite pious, and others took snide views of Christianity, Church and the clergy. But how loony is freedom of religion when it is trivialized into I will worship God any way I want to! instead of asking How would God wish to be worshipped? Or freedom of religion becomes I’ll just stay home and go swimming or sleep in or drive to the beach on Sunday. Just check the Church attendance registers for the Sunday closest to July 4 each year… Pathetic attendance, and many of the no-shows are the very people who trumpet the piety of the Founding Fathers and wistfully yearn for the day when America was “one nation under God.”
I grieve for Jesus, as I am sure he is more appalled than I am at the mean-spirited, divisive, absurdly angry expressions of Christianity out there. Jesus never said, “I came that you might get mad, that America might be great, and so that people who aren’t doing so well might just try harder and get over it or go away.”
When did the beautiful nation the Founding Fathers (who were highly educated, philosophically wise, and respectful people) conceived become a battleground of ideologies, ignorance in constant combat with ignorance? When did apathy, laziness and vapid partying become our dominant moods?
Freedom: we assume we are free by nature, and we’d best protect our freedom from any who would take it away. So how interesting is it, then, that in the history of Christianity, one of the most ferocious debates has been over whether we are actually free or not? St. Augustine argued with Pelagius and won, as did Martin Luther over Erasmus: you may feel free, but you are not free at all. Rifling through the pages of Scripture, and thinking deeply about their own lives, they realized that freedom is not something you indelibly have; it is not at all an unalienable right. Your will, the part of you that decides, feels and acts, is shackled. We are creatures of habits, driven by compulsions, hooked on sin. We are addicts, if you will. Like Paul, we discover that “the good I wish to do I cannot do” (Romans 7). Peer deeply into your soul and you notice a kind of combat being waged, and you cannot simply “just say no.” Paul understood we are not free; we need to be set free by God.
God’s first massive miracle (after creating everything, of course!) was rescuing thousands of slaves from the iron grip of Egypt’s mightiest pharaoh ever, Ramesses II. But God didn’t let them loose and say “Go have fun! Go do as you wish now!” No, God led them directly to Mt. Sinai and gifted them with hundreds of laws to guide them in how to be free, in how to be the people God would use to rescue the rest of the world.
Paul wrote to his newly converted friends in Galatia and picked up on this freedom theme. “Christ has set you free” (Galatians 5:1) – not to do as you wish, to be entirely unconstrained, to be your own boss, but to be Christ’s person, set free to be a diligent, dutiful, obedient servant of Christ. Frederick Buechner was spot on: “We have freedom to the degree that the master whom we obey grants it to us in return for our obedience.”
Paul’s Galatian friends had just recently experienced being liberated from a cruel, hard world of Roman subservience, and crushing religious requirements that only oppressed – all by the grace of Christ. The danger? “Do not submit again to slavery” (Galatians 5:2). How easy to slide back into the monotonous ways of the world where we thoughtlessly obey the whims of the advertisers, the chatter of neighbors, or the mandates of political ideology – or the self-indulgent habits of my own body and mind. Christ sets us free to be not theirs but his, not led around by the nose by forces that don’t and can’t love us, but led gently and lovingly by the One who loved us enough to give his very life for us.