Set Free to Love (Proper 8 Year C; epistle)

Set Free to Love

Homily delivered Fifth Sunday of Pentecost (Proper 8; Year C RCL)
27th June 2010; 8:00 a.m. Said Eucharist
Parish Church of St. John the Baptist, Seattle Washington
Readings: 2 Kings 2:1-2, 6-14; Psalm 77:1-2, 11-20;
or 1 Kings 19:15-16, 19-21; Psalm 16;
Galatians 5:1, 13-25; Luke 9:51-62

For freedom Christ has set us free.  Stand firm, therefore, and do not submit again to a yoke of slavery...     For you were called to freedom, brothers and sisters; only do not use your freedom as an opportunity for self-indulgence, but through love become slaves to one another. For the whole law is summed up in a single commandment, "You shall love your neighbor as yourself." If, however, you bite and devour one another, take care that you are not consumed by one another.
Live by the Spirit, I say, and do not gratify the desires of the flesh. For what the flesh desires is opposed to the Spirit, and what the Spirit desires is opposed to the flesh; for these are opposed to each other, to prevent you from doing what you want. But if you are led by the Spirit, you are not subject to the law. Now the works of the flesh are obvious: fornication, impurity, licentiousness, idolatry, sorcery, enmities, strife, jealousy, anger, quarrels, dissensions, factions, envy, drunkenness, carousing, and things like these. I am warning you, as I warned you before: those who do such things will not inherit the kingdom of God.
By contrast, the fruit of the Spirit is love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, generosity, faithfulness, gentleness, and self-control. There is no law against such things. And those who belong to Christ Jesus have crucified the flesh with its passions and desires. If we live by the Spirit, let us also be guided by the Spirit. (Gal. 5:1, 13-25)

God, take away our hearts of stone
 and give us hearts of flesh. Amen.

In today’s epistle reading from his letter to the Galatians, Paul uses the image of liberation, or setting free from captivity or slavery, to describe what Jesus Christ has done for us. “For freedom Christ has set us free. Stand firm, therefore, and do not submit again to a yoke of slavery.”

He is defending what he calls the “freedom we have in Christ” from co-religionists who argue that those who claim to follow God should follow God’s commandments found in Holy Scripture.   Today I won’t go into the whole sorry story of the Judaizers and their conflict with Paul.   Suffice it to say that Paul’s opponents want his gentile converts to follow the commandments of God as found in the only Bible they or Paul knew, the Hebrew Scriptures.   For them, following God meant following the Law, or at least making the effort.   They have told people Paul has brought into the Church that what he has told them about Christ and living in the Spirit isn’t enough.  They need a fuller view of God’s plans for them, and they need to do more. 

It is an understandable position: how can people claim to join a religion and then flaunt its basic boundary markers?   And how can people claim that they are getting close to God when they are unwilling to submit to the clear rules God has given? 

Clearly, the people in Galatia just want to do the right thing.   The appeal to “do more” and “get with the true program” of the Church is one that is with us in every age.   When our spiritual life gets a bit stale, we feel the need to do something more to get some of the fire back, to recapture the excitement and thrill of when God first spoke to us individually.  Haven’t we all wanted on occasion to be just a little closer to God through some technique or discipline that some religious authority has pointed out to us? 

That’s actually what religion is all about.  The Latin word, “religio” comes from the root “to rebind,” or “to bind tightly.”  It is from the same root where get the word "ligatures."  It also related to the root of the Latin word for Law, “lex, legis” where we also get our word "legislature."  Religion is all about rules, about limiting freedom so that we can be closer to God.  It’s about following rules so we can feel closer to God, right?

To judge from the way the verses were selected for today’s Lectionary, you might think that Paul is arguing a similar position.  Immediately after the phrase “for freedom Christ has set us free; do not then fall back into slavery,” the lectionary skips several verses and then has “only do not use your freedom as an opportunity for self-indulgence . . . ,” and sins like “fornication, impurity, licentiousness, idolatry, sorcery, enmities, strife, jealousy, anger, quarrels, dissensions, factions, envy, drunkenness, carousing, and things like these. . . those who do such things will not inherit the kingdom of God” (Gal. 5:20-21).  

That skip in the Lectionary gives the impression that Paul is arguing against a relapse into the slavery of sinful behavior.    And to be quite honest, it is not a bad impression to have.  Most sin does have the character of addiction or compulsion about it.  If we persist in it, we become enslaved to it.  We lose our free will in regards to it.  That’s just the nature of sin. 

Such experience of slavery is the reason that Twelve Step recovery programs take as their starting point the need for an admission of powerlessness against the addiction, whatever it is.  An addict, whether it be to alcohol, drugs, overeating, sexual compulsions, or vicious behavior, has lost his or her freedom.  Step One, “we admitted we were powerless over (fill in the blank) and that our lives had become unmanageable” is the starting point in recovery. 

But Paul’s argument about freedom and the need to not relapse into slavery is not about relapse into sinful behavior.   It’s about relapse into religion.  It’s about trying to make yourself feel better about yourself by piling on new behavioral standards that we think will make us right before God.   It’s about mistaking rules for God, and mistaking the feeling of closeness to God we get from keeping rules with actually being close to God. 

In the verses the Lectionary skipped over, we find the heart of Paul’s argument.  Let me paraphrase it here generic terms apart from the specifics of the circumcision debate:

Again I declare to everyone who wants to sign up for religious rules, that they then must keep all of the rules, all the time. When you try in this way to prove to yourself, to others, or to God that you’re a good person, you have by that very fact alienated yourself from Christ; you have fallen away from his grace.  But in contrast to this, it is by faith or trusting in God that we Christians eagerly await through the Spirit the righteousness for which we hope. For when it comes to Jesus Christ, keeping rules or breaking them is irrelevant. The only thing that counts is faith expressing itself through love. (Gal. 5: 3-6)

Paul’s argument lies behind much of the theology of Saint Augustine.  It later was a turning point for Martin Luther, and thus became the major point of argument in the Protestant reformation, prompting Rome at one point to formally define that it was St. Peter, and not St. Peter and St. Paul together, who led the Church after Jesus’ death.  As a result of this later way Paul has been used, we often read St. Paul as if “faith” and “belief” are themselves acts of following religious rules, and lose the whole import of Paul’s meaning.

Near the beginning of his letter, he says to the Galatians who have been persuaded by this desire for more, “I am astonished that you are so deserting quickly me, the one who called you by the grace of Christ and are turning to some other gospel—no that’s not right, because what you are turning to is not really a gospel—it’s not ‘good news’—at all” (Gal 1:6-7). 

The tone throughout the letter is shrill.  Like an email written all in capital letters, he is fairly shouting.  (In fact, near the end of the letter, he even takes up the scribe’s pen and says, “SEE HOW LARGE LETTERS I AM WRITING THIS IN,WITH MY OWN HAND?”) 

He is arguing here passionately what he cautiously and rationally develops in the more leisurely letter to the Romans.  He contrasts right conceived as obeying rules (the Law) with right conceived as a loving response to overwhelming and unmerited love (grace).  He says Law condemns while grace approves.  Law hardens hearts while grace brings the Spirit.  Law kills, the Spirit gives life.  Law points out our failings, grace gives us the power to change. 

The freedom Paul talks about is not the absence of compulsion, but rather the ability to do what God wants us to do, and to do what our heart truly desires—our true heart, the heart God intended when he created us. 

He is talking from personal experience, as he notes in the opening of the letter (Gal. 1:11-24; cf. Acts 7:58; 9:1-19).  He had been a deeply religious man who tried to keep all the rules and spent a lot of time arguing about what the rules were.  He persecuted his co-religionists who had gone after the Jesus doctrine because they were too lax when it came to keeping the rules. 

Conversion of St. Paul

But in a wholly unexpected turn of events, Jesus found him, and loved him despite all.  And so he realized that this Jesus had indeed been raised by God from the dead.  In his life, death, and coming forth, he had freed us from the hopelessness of chasing after rules, of finding ourselves addicted, of being unable to be the kind of people we want to be.   He heard stories about Jesus’ deliberately breaking purity laws in order to help others, of deliberately seeking out the sinners, drunks, traitors, and prostitutes.  He heard stories about Jesus saying God’s feast was for all people, not just for law-abiding Jews.  And so he realized that God had acted in a new way, and gone beyond nation, beyond rules of good and bad, beyond religion.    Overwhelmed by the love of the one who had sought him out and changed his heart, he became a messenger to the gentiles he had previously seen as beyond God’s grace.  He preached to them the story of grace, calling it his “good news.”  

So he was very, very upset when some of the people he had shared this grace with started talking about “getting a little extra” into their religious lives by following an added discipline that would set them apart as God’s own.  That is why he writes the letter to the Galatians.

In the process, he ends up turning many images from Hebrew Scriptures on their heads.  For him, a gentile Christian accepting circumcision is a relapse into slavery like that of paganism, not entry into the chosen people once freed by the Exodus (Gal. 5:1).  For him, the slave Hagar in the Abraham story represents the Jewish people while Sarah represents Gentile Christians who have not become Jews (Gal. 4:21-31). 

He says that freedom in Christ is in fact like slavery in one sense.  Because it is based in love, it involves constraints, though these are not reducible to mere rules. "In love, be like slaves to one another," he says (Gal. 5:13). 

Francoise Sagan, author of Bonjour Tristesse

Francoise Sagan, the French novelist, was brutally honest about how love limits freedom in an interview she gave to Le Monde.  She said she was satisfied with the way she had lived her life and had no regrets.  The interviewer said, “ Then you have had the freedom you wanted.”  Sagan replied: “Yes… I was obviously less free when I was in love with someone . . . But one’s not in love all the time.  Apart from that, … I’m free.” 

For Paul, love by definition places constraints on our freedom, and involves risk.  That’s why he says we must be like slaves in our love to each other.  Paul knows that love is risk, and that love is costly.  That is why he argues against not only those who make rules of right and wrong into a god, but also against those who ignore right and wrong when they they make their own wills, passions and drives into a god.

Paul contrasts the disordered works of the self-absorbed with what his calls the “the fruit of the Spirit”: love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness and self-control.  

With a sly smile, he adds, “there are no rules against these things.” 

For St. Paul, it all boils down to this:  Jesus died on the Cross to save us from everything that enslaves us.   The Spirit is his gift that empowers us to actually be the kind of people God wants us to be.  Maybe not right now completely, but enough of a taste so that we have hope for what is in store. 

Let us not heed the siren call of trying to feel better about ourselves by keeping rules.   Let us keep our faith firmly rooted in the Love of Christ as shone on the cross.  We need to respond in gratitude, nailing to his cross our selfishness and persistent desire to find anything other than God to make us feel better about ourselves.

In the name of God,  Amen.