Freedom

Delivered at Our Redeemer’s Lutheran Church, Proper NL 1-04/Pentecost 16
Text: Ex. 14.10-14, 21-29; Mt 2.13-15

What do you think of when you think of freedom? What is so great about being free?

As Americans, we have a fascination with freedom. Our history is full of people yearning to be free—free from religious oppression, free from political tyranny, free from poverty or the status quo or limited opportunities. Our collective longing for freedom is still visible today; many of our contemporary debates can be understood in terms of opposing views of freedoms. For example, there are many in our country who long to be free from gun violence, and many others who wish to remain free from restrictive gun laws.

Almost universally, whenever we think about being free, we think of it in terms of “freedom from;” we want to be free from restrictions or impositions to live the way we want to live. This is why we sometimes have a hard time understanding the story of Moses and the Exodus of the Israelites from Egypt.

Our story today begins after Moses and Israel have left Egypt, and when they are only a few days on their journey, Pharaoh sends out his army to either destroy them or bring them back. The Hebrews are so afraid of the advancing Egyptian army that they actually begin complaining to Moses about freeing them. The same people who had been crying out to God from their slavery for generations, aching to be free, now ask Moses, “Why did you bring us out here to die? We told you back in Egypt—didn’t we tell you?—we told you that it would be better to live in slavery to the Egyptians than to die in the wilderness!” To American ears, this sounds absolutely backwards: better to live as slaves than to die free?! We would be more likely to agree with Patrick Henry: “Give me liberty, or give me death!”

To us, nothing is more important than freedom; and in this story, God seems to agree. God is so anxious to free these people that God actually brings them through the sea, parting the waters so they can walk on dry land, and destroying the army behind them. God is—pardon the expression—hell bent on freeing these people; not just because they cried out to God for deliverance, but because God made a promise to Abraham and Sarah that their descendants would inhabit the land of Canaan. God renewed that promise to Jacob in the reading we heard on Wednesday, telling him that, when the time was right, God would bring Jacob’s descendants out of Egypt back to the land God had given to Abraham.

It is this promise that drives God to free these people. Now the time is right for God to fulfill the promises made and return them to the land God has given them. What is truly ironic is that now that God is acting, the people don’t want it! Now, they would rather be slaves because at least they know that they will be fed. They would rather have slavery because, when it comes right down to it, some things are more important than liberty. It is better to be alive and to have food security than to be able to determine your own choices in life. While we look back and realize that this Exodus from Egypt is God’s blessing on the people of Israel, they didn’t see it that way. If they had their own way, they would have stayed.

For several weeks now, we’ve been talking about how God doesn’t bless us for our own benefit. God didn’t make the promises God made to Abraham and Jacob and Joseph for their sakes. God’s promises and God’s blessings are for the benefit of the whole world. The freedom of Israel is God’s blessing not just to the Israelites, but to humanity. The freedom God promises is not the kind of freedom we imagine, where we are at liberty to do whatever it is we feel like or to determine our own futures. The freedom God promises is not “freedom from,” but “freedom for.”

Next week, we will read about God’s giving of the Law. Laws necessarily infringe on our freedom; we them because it is necessary to reign in our individual freedoms for the good of the community. The following week, we will hear the people of Israel swear before Joshua that they will serve the Lord, who delivered them from Egypt. In many ways, these people will have no more freedom from authority or servitude than they had in Egypt. They will, however, be freed for the work of God, what Jesus often called the “kingdom of heaven.”

This is the kind of freedom with which God blesses us. Martin Luther famously wrote in his essay on The Freedom of a Christian, “A Christian is a perfectly free lord of all, subject to none… [and] a Christian is a perfectly dutiful servant of all, subject to all.” In Christ, we have been freed from that which holds us back. As Christians, our relationship with God is not dependent upon our obedience to God’s laws or to any other laws of religious or secular authority. We are no longer bound by the power of sin or the power of death. Yet, as Christians, we are also bound to serve God. At our baptism, we are given responsibilities; we are dedicated to God’s work. Our lives are given to the service of God’s kingdom, and we are made subjects and servants of all, just like our lord Jesus who came not to be served, but to serve.

The whole point of God’s kingdom and God’s blessing that we receive in our baptism, is that while freedom from is a great thing, God doesn’t care about any of that. God doesn’t free us so that we can have the luxury of choosing where to live or who to marry or which way to vote. God frees us from the worry that, by failing to properly live up to God’s laws, we might damage our relationship with God and lose God’s love or forgiveness. God frees us for service to our neighbors, the world, and God’s kingdom.

This “freedom for” is how God is blessing the world through us. By freeing us for the work of God in the world—by freeing us to love recklessly, to serve fearlessly, to fail extravagantly, and to try again tenaciously—God is at work in us to bring about the kingdom of heaven on earth. That is why God freed the Israelites. That is why God drug through the sea and across the wilderness—kicking and screaming at times—to freedom and the land that God had promised their ancestors. God had work for them to do, so God freed them for that work.

When they passed through the water of the Red Sea, at that moment they were freed. Before the crossing, they were fugitive slaves, pursued by angry masters; but on the other side, they were free people. In journeying through the waters, they left behind the slavery of Egypt and came out the other side freed for the work of God, freed to live lives of service to the world.

The same thing happens to us in baptism: God calls us through death into life. In the world we are enslaved by death in the powers of the world that constrain us and the sin that binds us. In baptism, God calls us through the waters, and we come out the other side freed from all those things, freed for the work of serving God in the world. Sin, death, consumerism, political partisanship, even our undying need for freedom itself no longer have any hold on us. Instead, we are given a sign of God’s love for us, a reminder that our primary identity is not as a consumer or a constituent or a data point, but as a child of God, and an agent of God’s kingdom.

We continue to tell this story of the Red Sea crossing because it reminds us that God’s freedom is not for us alone, it is for all creation. We can use that freedom to justify our inaction and our judgement on the sinners of the world, but this story reminds us that this is not the thing for which God has freed us. God has freed us so that the world might be blessed through us. God has freed us for action, for forgiveness, for service; God has freed us for the love of the world.