The Slavery of Freedom
“All things are lawful, but not all things are helpful. All things are lawful, but not all things build up. Let no one seek his own good, but the good of his neighbor....So, whether you eat or drink, or whatever you do, do all to the glory of God.”
“For God so loved the world that he gave his only son, that whoever believes in him should not perish but have eternal life.”
March 21, 1982
Oh, Freedom, Oh, Freedom," goes the spiritual, "I'd rather be buried in my grave than be another man's slave, go home to my Lord and be free. Oh Freedom, Oh Freedom, Freedom over me.” My dictionary uses phrases like these to talk about freedom: "the absence of coer- cion or constraint in choice or action...liberty from slavery... from the power of another.”
In his letter to the squabbling church at Corinth, Paul tried to explain the real meaning of freedom in Chapter 8 and 10 like he struggled in Chapter 13 to get the real meaning of love into their thick skulls and hard hearts. Although Paul's portrayal of freedom in Christ has implications for our political and social lives, the liberty of which he speaks is that deep emotional and spiritual freedom that governments cannot give or take away.
With the help of Paul and others, I want to say three things about freedom. One, freedom is freedom from something. Two, being free is freedom for something. Three, personal as well as political freedom bring their own special kind of slavery.
First, Christ brings freedom from what I am calling "neck anxiety". Each of us in our own way tries to save our own neck. There is an internal bondage that seems to be with us from our childhoods. It is a feeling or compulsion that I must do something, be something, appease something to feel okay about myself, to feel acceptable, to feel I have a right to walk the earth and breathe the air. We feel anxious until we prove ourselves.
In the church at Corinth, there were some who stuck rigidly to the religious dietary laws. If you want to be right with God, keep your neck clear with him, then you better be careful that you do not drink or eat anything that is not proper. Paul in Chapter 8 says something shocking to those who tried to earn their way with God by their fasting and teetotalling: “Food will not commend us to God. We are no worse off if we do not eat, and no better off if we do.” Christ has set you free from all that, Paul announces.
At first, anxiety over what one eats or does not eat from a group of first century people seems a million miles away from the heavy duty problems you and I face in this "sophisticated" century. But is anxiety over trying to prove oneself with what one does or does not eat really all that foreign to us trying to prove our status and value by what we wear, what we drive, where we live, who we know, or how much we have? Someone has said, "We spend our lives using money we don't have to buy things we don't need in order to impress people we don't even particularly like. And, friends, that's a slavery all its own.
I have met more than one person in their 30's, 40's, even 50's who have spent their lives in bondage to the expectations they felt their mother or father had for them. Oh, what pain we cause our children, spouses, and loved ones when we communicate to them that our approval of them is dependent upon their jumping through the hoops of achievement we set or them. No one needs a hug to know they are okay with a good report card, but do they know it when their school or life grades are not so good and the shoulders are cold? Neck anxiety, neck worry, is a bondage we inflict on ourselves and inflict on others.
Recently, I saw a movie entitled "The Border". Like life, the film has some rough scenes and language in it. The main character is a guard on the border between Mexico and the US. Played by the actor Jack Nicholson, Charlie is a hard working, modest income kind of guy. At first, he tries to play by the rules with his job of making sure illegal drugs and people without immigration papers do not enter the country. But things at home and on the job run amuck. His well meaning but free spending wife gets him over his head in debt with a new house, furniture, and a backyard swimming pool. Each day, he learns more and more about his fellow border guards who get a cut in some of the profits and payoffs from drugs and people smuggled in the U.S. For a while, he resists the offers to enter into the illegal activities and profits. But finally on the border with his finances, marriage, job and values, he agrees to take part. He witnesses violence and brutality. Off and on he encounters a young Mexican mother who with her baby is trying to get into the country. He helps her get her baby back when it is kidnapped by a black market adoption ring.
At one point he even gives her money to get into the country. In that scene, she moves toward the cot in the shanty where she lives. He realizes that she thinks he expects physical favors in return. To this he says, "Oh, no, I don't want that." She asks him why, then, did he do what he did for her. In a line that seems to be the theme of this movie about the borders we humans live on in our lives between being good and bad, happy and miserable, he says: "I just want to feel good about something.”
Whether it comes out in our trying to be super-religious, or trying to be in style, or meet someone's expectation of us, or just trying to do something with our lives that makes us feel decent, we experience bondage to this neck anxiety.
To this Paul proclaims, it is not what you do but the grace and love of God that makes you loved and loveable and worthwhile. John said: "For God so loved the world you and me that he gave his only son that whoever believes in him should not perish but have eternal life.” And remember that for the New Testament "eternal life" is not just hope for life after death but also hope for a life worth living before death, a life liberated from neck anxiety, a life set free from having to climb the mountain every day of having to justify my existence. God does for us what we cannot do for ourselves.
Second, this freedom of which Paul speaks is not just a freedom from something but also a freedom for something. Besides the people in the Corinthian Church who felt chained to the diet laws, there was another bunch. These folks felt that Christ made them free to do anything they wanted to. Yet, freedom from all holds just to do whatever strikes your fancy is a slavery, too. You become a victim of your impulses, moods, and circumstances blown like a leaf in any direction the wind blows. Paul agrees with someone at Corinth who says "all things are lawful", but he answers, "Not everything is helpful or builds up. Freedom from neck worry brings us the freedom or living our life with joy and living our lives for others.
When I am chained to neck anxiety, trying to work out my status, then even the things I do for others only use those others to advance myself. It's like a guy running down a pier to cave a drowning swimmer looking over his shoulder making sure there are spectators and TV cameras to witness his bravery. Even at our best we are simply using others. I can't enjoy what I have or what I have achieved because tomorrow I have to start all over again to prove my importance.
Theologians and psychologists indicate in their own ways that happiness, joy, meaning in having are only by-products of the giving of oneself to something beyond themself: commitment to God, to the hurts and needs of people around us. People who set their sights on getting what they want when they want it in order to be happy are like a dog chasing his tail. It just is never caught. When Paul talks about the freedom of "seeking the good of our neighbor", he's not talking about something that is just nice to do but something that’s absolutely essential if our lives are going to be more than spitting against the wind.
Have you ever had a toothache? It zaps you! When you have a toothache, there is little energy in you to enjoy sunsets or care how life is for anyone else whether across the dinner table or across the tracks. Once the pain is taken away, however, you are freed not only from it but also freed to enjoy life and others again. This is the freedom from neck anxiety-ache and freedom for loving others that Christ brings. He saves our necks with strength for living and hope for dying so we can be free for life and the people around us.
Third, there is an undeniable slavery that comes with freedom, particularly when we move from emotional spiritual freedom to freedom in society. Being free from powers inside us or around us requires that we live freely and responsibly without blaming others for our predicament or expecting others to make our decisions for us.
In 1941, Erich Fromm wrote a book entitled Escape From Freedom. In this book, Dr. Fromm, a Jewish, German psychologist, tried to explain, I think as much to himself as to others, how the Nazis came to power in Germany and who at the time were still a real menace to the world. In a shocking statement, he says that the Nazis came to power not by a trick or fluke but because "millions...were as eager to surrender their freedom as their fathers were to fight for it; that instead of wanting freedom, they sought ways of escape from it."
Fromm traces the development of the modern free person. It has been only a few centuries-long time to us but just a drop in the bucket for cosmic-God time that humans have been free from church-state powers that practically told each person every move to make. In feudal society of the Middle Ages, one was born to a certain place and profession and one stayed there until death. If you were a peasant, then you did not question why you live in a hut and the lord of the manor lived in a castle. If you were born a child of a shoemaker, you lived and died a shoemaker. But with modern times, humans, Fromm says, were liberated from a religion and society that told them what to think and what to do. With that freedom comes the loneliness and anxiety of having to make one's own decisions. For people nervous about making decisions in a scary world, a Hitler was a welcome escape from "the torture of doubt...and making decisions."
To be free means that we are enslaved to – with God's help to be sure – making our own decisions. To expect someone else or the government to tell us every move to make is a dangerous escape from freedom.
For example, there are bills before a number of state legislatures about taking certain books out of school libraries. lt is expected that the Supreme Court will make a decision on book banning later this year. In some places, black people object to Huckleberry Finnbecause of the character "Nigger Jim". In some places, parents object to books by certain black writers. Sometimes, people want to do away with books with sexual references or strong language. I, like you, really get edgy over my children seeing books with material in them I don't like. I may even utter to myself, I wish they didn't read that, somebody ought to do something. But then I ask myself: what are we doing when we ask for laws that empower the government to tell us what we can and cannot read? What societies in recent history had censorship of books? Who censors the censors? History proves that when we try to escape our responsibility by asking someone or government to make our decisions for us, then freedom is lost. It's scary, but I believe that freedom demands in this case that parents, teachers, churches take the responsibility to help youth make good decisions about the lifestyles they learn about in books and down the street. To ask someone else to make the choice for us or them is an escape.
Freedom brings the passionate, worth-fighting-for slavery to being responsible for our decisions. Freedom does not come nor is it kept easily. Paul not only talked about freedom with the Corinthians but also with the Galatians in Chapter 5:1. I think he is talking about spiritual, emotional, and political freedom when he says: "For freedom Christ has set us free; stand fast therefore, and do not submit again to the yoke of slavery." It's a paradox, like much of life is a paradox: Freedom comes only when we become captive to Christ, captive to the responsible living and loving his way calls for.. It's the slavery that sets us free.
An artist once set out to draw a picture depicting salvation for a Christian. Her first attempt was a bird flying out of the cage: freedom from all that holds us back and down. Not satisfied, she drew a second picture which had a bird flying into the safety of a cage, free at last from the dangers and randomness of outside: freedom for something. Finally, the drew a third scene which completed her statement about freedom and salvation. This time, the bird is perched in the open door of the cage, free to decide when to enter and when to leave. Free at last. Thank, God, free at last. With his help, maybe we won't blow it. Let he or she who has ears to hear, hear. Amen.
Pastoral Prayer
God, you have made us for a freedom that we seldom take in. Most days we feel driven and in bondage to demands coming from inside us and from outside us. We feel driven to prove ourselves, to make the grade, accumulate the cash, find security in an insecure world. Trying to live up to the expectations special people have for us, even unrealistic expectations we have for ourselves, we are like donkeys trying to get a carrot at the end of a stick.
God, for your sake and our sake, just for a moment help us to relax, to take a deep breath. If you can get us to take the risk of being still and quiet for a few minutes, then maybe there is a chance. Maybe, there is a chance that you can dawn on us that what we work so hard to get but never are able to quite get comes as a gift from you that no one can take away from us. We work so hard to be loved, yet you simply love us. We use so much energy making excuses for ourselves, yet you simply forgive us. We rack our brains trying to prove or disprove your existence, yet you simply hold all that is together day in and day out. We scurry around trying to prove our importance with material that will rust, rot, and decay, yet you have made us as one of your unrepeatable creations.
God, free us from our bondage to the carrot and stick. Free us for deep joyful breaths of life. Free us for loving people around us in the way you have loved us: freely. Amen.