"The Price and Possibilities of Freedom"
Rev. Dr. David E. Gray
Bradley Hills Presbyterian Church
July 4, 2010
Galatians 5: 13-14
On the 4th of July, I’d like us to look at the principle of freedom that has flowed as a virtue throughout American history. And I’d like us to consider how our understanding of our limits can make that freedom even more special.
In our second lesson for this morning, we hear one of the key statements that God has revealed to us about freedom. Reading now from the fifth chapter of Paul’s letter to the Galatians.
I have loved watching the World Cup soccer tournament the past few weeks. I’m sure many of you have too. Friday and yesterday had terrific games.
For the U.S.A., it has been a mixed few weeks. First, we had America’s triumphant tying of Great Britain, one of the world’s traditional soccer powers, when the ball bounced out of the keeper’s hands. A “keeper” is what they call the goalie in soccer. It is short for “goalkeeper” and their function is to make sure nothing gets past them. To make sure nothing gets lost into the goal. The British keeper lost the ball and so England and the U.S. tied, which amounted to a U.S. victory. America’s June 23 victory against Algeria was a triumph, but when the U.S. played Ghana, that country’s keeper was too strong and the U.S. lost.
I did feel particularly bad for North Korea’s soccer team. North Korea fielded a team this Cup for the first time since 1966, but because it is not a free country and its citizens aren’t allowed to leave North Korea as they like, the government hired a group of actors to sit in the bleachers and root for the North Korean team. It was a reminder to me of how fortunate we are to live in a free country.
Watching the American team play made me feel patriotic, a common emotion on July fourth. On Independence Day, we honor those who sacrificed for the freedom of America. We give thanks for our freedoms to assemble and speak and own property and worship.
As you might have read in yesterday’s Washington Post, this week the Library of Congress discovered for the first time that in his writing of the Declaration of Independence in 1776, Thomas Jefferson had had “trouble breaking free from monarchial rule” and at first used the word “subjects” when referring the Americans, and then erased the word and replaced it with “citizens” which he used throughout the document. Jefferson was probably so used to using the term “subjects” that it took even him a while to get used to thinking of himself as a free American citizen.
Since the founding of our nation, there has been a tension between our desire for freedom and expression and the physical, legal and spiritual limits that Americans live with.
As Thomas Jefferson penned it, the Declaration of Independence defines freedom and liberty as “unobstructed action according to our will within limits drawn around us by the equal rights of others.” The original understanding of American freedom is about human action within limits.
For many Americans, freedom is about individual expression. Since our founding as a nation there has been a broad march towards recognizing more and more individual rights within American policy.
Rights to individual expression were key reasons why colonists wanted to leave the imperial control of England in the first place. A major debate during the Constitutional convention in the late 1780’s was over whether or not to have a Bill of Rights to ensure individual freedoms.
But for early Americans even to come together to form a government in the first place, the founders had to limit a portion of their liberty for the common good. The writing and signing of the Declaration of Independence may have been the birth of a nation, but it was not the formation of a final government. After the American Revolutionary War ended in 1783, the early colonies were held together by Articles of Confederation. There was fierce debate in the colonies between those who favored state and local authority and those who favored the creation of a stronger federal government. Our national arguments today about the proper size and role of the federal government and the taxes we are prepared to pay to support it are not new, but have been consistent throughout American history. We saw those arguments made this week during the Supreme Court confirmation hearings of Elena Kagan.
We give thanks for our freedom as Americans, but in our social contract we limit our freedoms for the good of the whole. One role of government is to make sure that one person’s exercise of freedom doesn’t infringe on another’s. We have speed limits and laws against stealing for example.
Government cannot be everywhere at once to police the excesses of freedom. Nor do we want it to be. One purpose of limited government in a republic and the reason the colonists wanted their own nation, was to get away from an overly prescriptive government.
Throughout our history, the American experiment with freedom has occurred within a religious context. Like the Psalmist we heard from in our first lesson, most of the founders trusted the God of Israel. Most were religious people. They prayed frequently and one Presbyterian minister, John Witherspoon, was an original signer of the Declaration.
Immanuel Kant once wrote that the “enlightened human was one who trusted in one’s ownself rather than any authority.” But the Founders looked to the authority of God. They believed, as we will sing shortly in My Country ‘Tis of Thee, that God as the “author (and giver) of liberty.” The Declaration of Independence begins with the statement “we hold these truths to be self evident that all men (people) are created equal, endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights, among them life and liberty….
For the Founders, the gift of liberty was not generated by people, but given by God.
For freedom to work in America, people must take responsibility to use our freedom wisely. One role of the church in a free society is to try and equip free people to use freedoms wisely.
We live as Christians as free people within limits. The Apostle Paul believed that freedom is to be used for loving and serving, rather than for self-indulgence.
Paul wrote that the people should “become slaves to one another.” What in the world can Paul mean here? Paul is saying that people have responsibilities to each other and must look to live within limits. That we can actually express ourselves more fully within reasonable limits than we can without them, because they allow us to go deeper. And so we should not fear limits.
I love how Pastor Tim Keller writes about freedom. He writes that “freedom cannot be defined in strictly negative terms, as the absence of confinement and constraint. Instead, confinement and constraint are a means to liberation.”
Take soccer, for example. These World Cup players I have been watching have spent a lot of time practicing soccer. If you are going to be a really good soccer player, you have to practice, a lot. As a child that probably means coming home from school and practicing soccer rather than say playing the violin each day. Practicing that much puts some constraints on a person’s freedom and time. I was reading an article the other day arguing that the reason Russia or Canada don’t have strong soccer teams like some other, smaller countries is that they love hockey and, according to the article, putting ice skates on four year olds impairs their ability to do well in running sports like soccer over time. However, some of these children will practice a lot and grow to be very successful in hockey. Those who practice soccer each day after school trade the freedom to do some things with their time for a freedom to accomplish other things.
Keller argues that the freedom that works best for all creatures is what he calls “liberating restrictions.” That is freedom that fits within “our nature and capabilities.” So for example, a fish is only free when it is restricted and limited to water. For a fish, having the freedom to sit on the grass in your yard is not really freedom.
The freedom to drink alcohol is not freedom for an alcoholic. Humans are bound by forces like gravity and our human condition thrives when we recognize and respect our liberating restrictions.
As Keller concludes, freedom is “not about the absence of limitations and constraints but about finding the right ones, those that fit our nature and liberate us.”
In our spiritual lives, there is value to “liberating restrictions.” Paul suggests that we become slaves to each other, not to be in bondage, but to fulfill the great commandment to love our neighbors as ourselves.
Paul says we should become slaves to each other not in spite of the things such restrictions make impossible. But because of the freedom that such restrictions make possible.
A life that celebrates the freedom to do whatever we want for its own sake will ultimately make us feel empty.
When we read the Bible, worship together at church and find ways to serve others, we connect to God, to each other and to our spiritual core that gives life meaning. When we accept our limits and stop seeking freedom for its own sake, we begin to realize that we don't keep our selves going. Rather God keeps us. We are not free of everyone else. We are under God like everyone else. That’s why we sing in God Bless America that we go “through the night with the light from above.” And that can help us realize, not our independence, but our interdependence with other people.
Shane Claiborne wrote in the Huffington Post last Friday that rather than celebrating a strict Independence Day, we should be willing to celebrate an Inter-dependence Day. He writes, "We are taught to celebrate independence. But independence and individualism have come at a great price. In the wealthy and industrialized countries we have become the richest people in the world, but we also have some of the highest rates of loneliness, depression, and suicide. We are rich, sad, and lonely. We are living into patterns that not only leave much of the world hungry for bread and starved for justice but also leave us longing for the good life and for meaning and purpose beyond ourselves. It's a beautiful thing to realize that we need each other and that we are not alone in the world. This year, let's celebrate Interdependence Day -- recognizing the fact that we are part of a global neighborhood."
And Paul reminds us of the commandment to love our neighbors as ourselves.
Thomas Merton would have agreed. He wrote, “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."
Paul says that the reason we are to become slaves to one another is for love. Keller writes that the most liberating restriction of all is love. In love, whether for a friend or a romantic love, we have to “lose some independence in order to gain greater intimacy.”
If you want the freedoms where you don’t worry about who will be home in the evening, or who you can call on the phone when you are disappointed, you must limit your freedom in many ways.
Every married couple knows that. You cannot make all your decisions totally independently of your spouse and have it all work.
When I’m doing counseling for couples before weddings, we talk about the importance of permanence when it comes to vows. Often at weddings, couples are asked to “forsake all others” in order to gain the freedoms that come from intimacy.
We become our best selves in love, and that kind of relationship requires service and selflessness. And this must be the case for both parties in the relationship. It doesn’t work if just one person does all the giving and sacrificing.
In an imbalanced relationship, things will become exploitative and the relationship will become oppressive and distorted. This is the case for individuals and couples as well as for governments and nations.
The World Cup is taking place in South Africa and the announcers mentioned Nelson Mandela’s 92nd birthday later this month.
Mandela knew a lot about freedom and oppression from his own experience being imprisoned for 27 years but then also leading South Africa towards reconciliation as its President. Mandela wrote about balance in relationships in his autobiography, Long Road to Freedom, arguing that oppressors cannot be free as long as they are exploiting others. Mandela wrote,
“During my imprisonment, I knew as well as I know anything that an oppressor must be liberated just as surely as the oppressed. A man who takes away another man’s freedom is a prisoner of hatred; he is locked behind the bars of prejudice and narrow-mindedness. I am not truly free if I am taking away someone else’s freedom.”
The Apostle Paul wrote about relationships of submission because those mirror our relationship with God. While our relationship with God might seem to be unequal as God has the sovereign power, Keller points out that in Christ, God limited Godself for us, became vulnerable and died on the cross.
We are to submit to one another in love for that is what God has done. Henri Nouwen put it this way, “the great mystery of God’s compassion is that in that compassion, and by entering with us into the condition of a slave, God has been revealed to us. Becoming a servant is not an exception to Godhood. Self-emptying and humiliation are not a step away from God’s true nature. Rather, in the emptied and humbled Christ, we encounter God. We see who God really is, we come to know true divinity. Precisely because God is God, the divinity of God can be revealed in the form of a servant. In servanthood, God does not become disfigured, God does not take on something alien. God does not act against or in spite of Gods divine self. On the contrary, it is in this servanthood that God is revealed to us. …God does not want to be known except through servanthood and that, therefore, is God’s self-revelation.”
Claiborne concludes his essay on Friday suggesting some things we might consider to celebrate inter-dependence day. Among them we should:
1) Track down old teachers and mentors. Let them know the influence they have had in your life.
2) Babysit for someone for free, especially someone that might really need a night off and not be able to afford a sitter.
3) Attempt to repair something that is broken. Appreciate the people who repair things for you on a regular basis.
4) Spend the Fourth of July baking cookies or bread. Give them away to the person who delivers your mail or picks up your trash the next time you see him or her.
5) Gather some neighbors, and plant a tree in your neighborhood together.
6) Hold a knowledge exchange where you gather friends or neighbors to share skills or something they are learning.
7) Become a pen-pal with someone in prison.
8) Leave a random tip for someone cleaning the streets or the public restroom.
9) Go down a line of parked cars and pay for the meters that are expired. Leave a little note of niceness.
10) Mow your neighbor's grass.
11) Ask the next person who asks you for change to join you for dinner.
12) Go without food for one day to remember the two billion people who live on less than a dollar a day.
These actions will add limits to your life. But these limits will help you recognize your inter-dependence with the world. And there is real freedom in that.
The price of real freedom is recognizing your limits. But recognizing your limits can open up new possibilities for greater freedom.
Through the right constrains, we can find freedom.
Through a relationship of mutuality, we can find freedom.
Through love, we can find freedom.
Through God, we meet the author of freedom.
Through the Holy Spirit, we connect to freedom in the here and now.
Through Christ, we can discover ourselves by forgetting ourselves.
Because one thing that the Apostle Paul felt strongly about was that we cannot earn our way to freedom. If we clench tightly to the posts of life, focused on a goal of impressing God and the world, we will never be free.
But we don’t have to. God is our keeper. As the Psalmist says, God will “keep you from evil, God will keep your soul.” God is the keeper that will not let you go. God will not drop the ball or miss the mark. Because God loves you, you are freed from having to earn your place in God’s heart. You already have it.
We live in God’s world. A world with liberating restraints that we do well to embrace.
We live in America, a country where men and women struggled and sacrificed and died and celebrated, so that their descendents would be free to worship God and to live life in freedom.
We live free from having to make ourselves the primary focus of our lives so we can make our goal the love and service that Paul wrote about.
Thomas Jefferson and John Adams were two of the great Founders of the nation as you know. They were also bitter rivals. Leaders of rival parties. Opposing candidates for the Presidency. Competitors for leadership of the new nation.
Yet when it came to writing the Declaration of Independence, the two men came together. They each suggested that the other write it. Jefferson, with his gift of prose, ended up writing much of the Declaration and Adams with his gift of rhetoric ended up defending the Declaration in speech.
There was something about freedom, sweet invaluable freedom, that brought the two rivals together around this document of independence, whose principles we celebrate on July 4.
Adams and Jefferson retired from politics, both having been President, and then they developed a correspondence that lasted throughout their lives. On July 4, 1826, both John Adams and Thomas Jefferson died, just a few hours part. Their lives were brought together by the principles of freedom enshrined in a document they both signed 50 years to the day of their mutual death.
They believed in and wrote about freedom as “action according to our will within limits.”
But many years before, the Apostle Paul would also write about freedom.
He wrote: “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.’” God keeps our lives so that we can be free to live life and love each other. And thank God, God does. Amen.
