The Direction of Freedom

Transcription

1 George A. Mason 6 th Sunday after Pentecost Wilshire Baptist Church 26 June 2016 Dallas, Texas The Direction of Freedom Galatians 5:1, 13-25; Luke 9:51-62 For freedom Christ has set us free. With Independence Day weekend upon us soon, we ll be hearing a lot about freedom. However, those seven short words from Galatians have become a virtual motto for Baptists since our beginnings. In fact, freedom by itself is the one word that could stand in for the name Baptist. Many of us just returned from the annual General Assembly meeting of the Cooperative Baptist Fellowship. It was held in Greensboro, N.C., this year. We celebrated our silver anniversary 25 years of CBF. Hard to believe for those of us who were there at its creation. A book of brief commemorating this milestone essays has been published. I contributed a chapter that talked about how freedom has been our watchword from the start. Yet we have come to a richer and riper understanding of what freedom means during our quarter of a century of life together. At the start, freedom meant for us liberation from slavery to a way of being Christian that had been infected with legalism. Fundamentalism had stormed the gates of every agency and institution of the Southern Baptist Convention. Fundamentalist leaders knew exactly what every true Baptist should believe and how every true Baptist should behave, and they weren t shy about saying so. They required allegiance to their brand of believing and behaving, or Baptists like us were no longer welcome in that branch of the family of faith. They claimed they believed the Bible and that those who disagreed with them about certain things didn t just disagree with them; they and those who didn t, don t you know?! disagreed with God. To give you a sampling of what was going on back then, here are some of the things we disagreed about: women, divorce, pastoral authority and religious liberty, to name just a few. And amazingly, these are still some of our disagreements. They say that wives have

2 to submit to their husbands authority over them; women are not permitted to teach men in adult Sunday school; a church cannot ordain a woman to ministry, call a woman to be its pastor, or even allow a woman to preach from the pulpit. Divorced persons are automatically disqualified from leadership in the church; the pastor is the ruler of the church, and each member submits to God s authority by submitting to his authority; and finally, the separation of church and state really applies only to the state not interfering with the church, whereas the church is free to politic as much as it wants to and still retain its tax-free status. Many of us couldn t abide by these interpretations of our Baptist faith, and we didn t agree that this point of view put us at odds with God. We believed that it was an example in our time of how we were in danger of giving up the freedom for which Christ had set us free. We could not allow ourselves to be enslaved to certain leaders and their teaching. The Apostle Paul made it clear that this was not the direction of freedom. Stand firm, therefore, he says, and do not submit again to a yoke of slavery. In Galatians 5, Paul is addressing a similar circumstance. Gentiles had come to faith in Jesus and were thereby freed from slavery to idolatry and to ridiculous notions of how the gods of nature controlled their lives. The gospel allowed them to see their great worth and dignity as beloved children of the one and only true God who loved them listen to me now just the way they were. The grace was unconditional. There was no deal to be made by which they had to do something first. God wanted nothing from them except their love in return, and their turn toward their neighbor in love. Period. Then along came the Judaizers, and the music changed. At this point in the story, if it were a TV movie or a motion picture, the musical score would let us know that something foul was entering the picture. Judaizers said it was great to know that Gentiles had accepted their acceptance in Jesus Christ, but rules are rules. They just can t go changing what the Bible says to suit themselves. They couldn t pick and choose what they liked and didn t like. So if Gentiles were going to be accepted among the people of God, they would have to be circumcised and also change their eating habits by keeping kosher. They would have to become Jewish converts in order to be 2

3 Christians. They would have to follow all of the laws of Moses; otherwise they couldn t know the salvation of Christ. Mark Wingfield captured this contemporary Judaizing spirit in the church with this immortal phrase in a column about transgender persons: We say come as you are, but we really mean come as we are. Paul said a long and loud NO to that. Being Christian sets us free from putting anything else before grace. Likewise, Cooperative Baptists first understanding of freedom was freedom from slavery to a legalistic and restrictive way of understanding our faith. Freedom meant freedom from a fundamentalism that told everyone what they had to believe and how they had to behave in order to be in fellowship with Christ and his church. This is the first move of freedom. We are welcomed by God as beloved children of God, not because of what we do or even because of who we are in ourselves. We are welcomed because of who God is. And Christ is the one who liberates us from slavery to rules and laws and traditions that squeeze the life out of us. This is what the preacher King Duncan calls the tyranny of bad religion. Religion is not a cage to keep us in so that we will do no wrong; it is a way of life that changes us from within so that we can do what s right. Radio commentator Paul Harvey once told about a group of scientists who were determined to teach a chimpanzee to write. For fourteen years, the scientists labored diligently and patiently with this chimpanzee, providing things in its cage to enable it to form certain syllables. Finally, the day arrived when it seemed that the chimpanzee was actually going to construct a sentence from the symbols it had been learning. The word went out, and other scientists crowded into the room and gathered around the cage. The scientists could hardly contain themselves as they pressed around the cage to read the history-making sentence. Here is what the chimpanzee had written: Let me out! 1 1 King Duncan, Freedom, 3

4 When you come to faith in Christ, you should first get the feeling that you ve been let out of a cage of sorts. You are no longer imprisoned by the dehumanizing powers of those whose human judgments hold power over you. But you are not just freed from dependency to others, making you an independent self with no obligations to others. That is a kind of freedom that our society often celebrates, but it ends in a slavery to self. Paul went on to say that we should not use our freedom as an opportunity for self-indulgence. Dependency can be external or internal. Freedom from the tyranny of sin is also a part of freedom. Christ has not set us free simply to gratify our selfish instincts. The list of sins of the flesh that we read in our text is about self-indulgence with no thought about their impact on others. And those very things actually end up undermining our ability to love ourselves as God loves us. They take hold of us and won t let us go. We are not truly free until we are able not to do what will hurt us and others. Christ s freedom works within us to give us the courage and the strength to be whom God has made us to be. It s interesting to note that while the works of the flesh are plural, the fruit of the Spirit is singular. Paul lists all these ways in which we gratify ourselves, and in doing so we tear ourselves apart. But he doesn t consider love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, generosity, faithfulness, gentleness and self-control to be nine things; they are all one fruit of the Spirit. They are not fruits; they are fruit. All of these things characterize the freedom of life in the Spirit. I love the line that follows this list of the fruit of the Spirit: There is no law against such things. That s because such things spring from a freedom that transcends law. They come from love, and they all focus on loving others. Independence can be only another kind of dependence. Independence from the rule of others can turn into a dependence on the rule of self. And that is not the direction of true freedom. Paul says that the whole law is summarized in this single commandment: You shall love your neighbor as yourself. So here s a handy rule: If your religion somehow drives people away from you or 4

5 drives you away from people, you d better check to see if you have left Jesus out of your religion. Said another way, if your freedom is used to deny or diminish the freedom of someone else, you d better check to see whether it s authentic Christianity. If we are loving our neighbor as ourselves, freedom is neither dependence nor independence; it is interdependence: I need you and you need me. Martin Luther King, Jr., said: Justice denied anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere. We could paraphrase him this way: freedom denied anywhere is a threat to freedom everywhere. I am only as free as you are, because our lives are tied together in the body of Christ. This means, in the end, that my freedom depends upon your freedom, and your freedom depends upon mine. I can t conceive of my life as being my own because, as Paul says, Those who belong to Christ have crucified selfish desires. We live now by the Spirit and are guided by the Spirit. And that Spirit does not engage in competition in which there are winners and losers, but rather we live for each other. This is why our language has changed over the years in CBF. Instead of only talking about freedom, we have come to talk about being free and faithful Baptists. We care about freedom from legalism and freedom from sin and self, but our focus now is on what we do with our freedom. And the answer is that we use it rightly. We use it to advocate freedom for others. We use it to love and serve our neighbors here and abroad. We care most about freedom for and with others. This is why missions has always been and always will be at the center of Cooperative Baptist life. Ed Freeman was presented with the Medal of Honor in 2009 by President George W. Bush for his heroism during the Vietnam War. Ed was a helicopter pilot during a particularly fierce battle. Troops on the ground were running out of ammunition and many were injured and believed they were facing the day of their death. The machinegun fire of the enemy was so devastating that the medicalevacuation helicopters were told to stand down. Ed Freeman couldn t live with his own personal safety while his dying and injured brothers were trapped by the Viet Cong. He flew by himself into the midst of the battle 14 times, taking heavy fire but rescuing dozens of men who would otherwise have died. When those abandoned men heard the 5

6 sound of those rotary blades overhead, they heard in their whirling a song of salvation and freedom. 2 I tell you, unless we are standing for and serving with those who do not yet know the full freedom of faith in Christ or welcome in the body of Christ, we ourselves are not yet free. The direction of freedom is found in the face of your neighbor