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.

Get Busy Livin’, or Get Busy Dyin.’

Delivered at Shepherd of the Hills Lutheran Church, Swift Falls, MN. Pentecost 6/Proper 8C.
Texts: Gal 5.1, 13-25; Lk 9.51-62

“For freedom Christ has set us free. Stand firm, therefore, and do not submit again to a yoke of slavery.” Freedom is on our minds this week. Not only do we have Paul’s admonition in Galatians, but this week we also celebrate our Independence Day, the day when we became a free country. This week we will remember and celebrate all the freedoms we enjoy as Americans and all the men and women who gave of themselves so that we might maintain those freedoms.

To us, freedom most often means power. It is the power to overcome those who oppose us, the power to stand up for ourselves and not to be forced to submit to the power of others. It is this kind of freedom that we celebrate: our freedom from the British, our freedom to rule ourselves, our freedom to live our lives as we please without too much interference from the government or other people.

In the same way, Paul writes that we are free. Where once God’s people were subject to the laws of Torah, now we are free from obligation to those laws. The promise of Christ is ours, regardless of how we follow or do not follow the laws of Moses. And yet, the Galatians to whom he is writing have begun to give up the freedom and submit themselves once again to the law.

The Galatians are not alone, however. Even though we exercise our freedom as Christians to eat pork and wear cotton-poly blend and plant many different types of vegetables in the same garden plot, we do the same thing. We take the warnings, the advice, and the admonition of Paul and Peter and James and John and turn them into laws that we can follow, a way to prove to ourselves and to everyone else and perhaps even to God that we are “righteous” people.

If we have been freed from the law, why should we want to go back to slavery to a set of rules, whether from the Torah or from Paul’s letters? The simple fact of the matter is that too much freedom is scary. If we are completely on our own, we are afraid that we won’t know what to do, that we won’t do it right. We want some sort of guidelines for how to be God’s people in the world—and that is what Jesus and Paul and James and Peter and all the rest have given us: guidelines! But we idolize those guidelines and submit ourselves to those rules instead of to God.

You remember the movie The Shawshank Redemption? Andy Dufresne is wrongly imprisoned for murdering his wife and her lover, and in Shawshank Prison he meets Red, a man locked up for murder for most of his life. While they are there, another prisoner, Brooks, is released on parole, but he’s been “institutionalized;” he can’t function on the outside. As much as he wanted to be free from prison, the lack of rules, the lack of structure, the loss of his identity and his community when he left was too much, and he ultimately commits suicide.

Back inside the prison, Andy dreams of freedom and Red resigns himself to a life of incarceration. Red knows he is an institutionalized man, that like Brooks, he wouldn’t make it on the outside. He realizes that he needs the prison, that he can’t live without it. Andy eventually escapes, and Red is left behind. He is happy for Andy, and longs to be free like him, but he dares not hope that he ever will be, in part because he fears he will not survive it.

Like Red, we have lived our whole lives with rules and regulations and guidelines and ordinances. We long for freedom, but at the same time we fear it because we are, in a sense, institutionalized.

Red is eventually granted parole and works at the same job Brooks had when he was paroled. He’s free, but he still lives in lingo, in world between incarceration and freedom. He can’t even go to the bathroom without asking permission because he “can’t squeeze a drop without say-so.” He’s out of prison, but he’s still not free. It isn’t until he remembers what Andy said to him before he left that he truly leaves the prison behind. He realizes that he has a choice: “get busy livin’ or get busy dyin’.” It’s Andy, with his vision of hope and a future in Mexico, that gives Red something to live for again, something to help him “get busy livin’.”

Luther writes in his “Treatise on Christian Liberty” that “A Christian is a perfectly free lord of all, subject to none.” Like the Galatians, we have the promise of Christ through grace, and nothing can take that away. We are free from coercion or compulsion when it comes to our salvation. No person can take it away from us, and God has promised not to. We are utterly free; but free for what? As Red discovered, freedom by itself can be a dangerous thing. Now that we don’t have to do anything to earn God’s favor or ensure our salvation, what do we do? The Church must get busy livin’ or get busy dyin’.

“A Christian is a perfectly free lord of all, subject to none.” Luther immediately follows this statement by writing, “A Christian is a perfectly dutiful servant of all, subject to all.” Christ has shown us, Paul has told us, Luther has reminded us that the way we as Christians get busy livin’ is to give our lives in service to the world. We have not been freed ‘just because;’ as Paul tells us “For freedom Christ has set you free.”

We were created in love by God to be free. God then gave us the law to protect us, to guide us, and ultimately to remind us that free as we are, we are nothing without God. Christ freed us from bondage to the law so that we might use our freedom to make others free as well, to be living signs to the world of a God who loves and cares for people and promises life rather than obligations and restrictions.

We are called to lives of Christian service not out of obligation, or bribery or compulsion—we are free—but out of love. As free Christians, we have the option of living out the same love in our own lives toward others that God has given to us. This week, we will remember men and women, civilians and soldiers, who sacrificed for their country. Some made the ultimate sacrifice. They did this not out of compulsion or for personal gain, but because they believed in what our country stands for, because they cared about their fellow citizens. For this same reason, we offer our lives in service, we make our own sacrifices for nation and neighbor, but the kingdom which we serve is the kingdom of God. We recognize that our neighbors are not just those close to us, but our brothers and sisters across the world: the immigrant, the lonely, the oppressed, the poor.

We do need to be careful of the temptation to fall back into slavery of the law. We live in an age of “5 simple steps to get your life back on track,” but when it comes to God there are no steps to take, no rules to obey, no guidelines to follow that can make us “good enough.” Instead, God has promised us the kingdom and sealed that promise with the waters of baptism. It is a promise that is assured: we are free. The question we must answer for ourselves is how our freedom is showing God’s love and serving God’s purpose in the world.

“For freedom Christ has set us free.” Just as we have been freed, God is working to free the whole world from the power of sin and evil. As God’s free people, we may do whatever we like—drink or don’t drink; come to church or don’t; care for our neighbors or ignore them—but whatever we do, we remember that we have been freed from obligation to the law in order to live for Christ. Whatever we do, we do it in order to best love and serve God and neighbor. This is the fulfillment of the law. In the words of Andy Dufresne, “It’s time to get busy livin’, or get busy dyin’.”

Ecclesia Semper Reformanda Est

Delivered at Our Redeemer’s Lutheran Church, Benson, MN. Reformation Day.
Texts: Jer 31.31-34; Rom 3.19-28; Jn 8.31-36

495 years ago this coming Wednesday, an Augustinian monk posted 95 complaints against the church on the door of a cathedral. That monk’s name was Martin Luther, and the uproar that followed the posting of his 95 theses, an uproar that we have come to call the Reformation, is what we celebrate today. We remember this event because in spite of all the anger, the violence and war, the doubt and fear and the irreparable division of the Church which resulted from Luther’s action on that day, the whole Church—both Catholic and Protestant—was renewed by it. He reminded us who we are, why we are doing what we do, and who is in charge.

The unofficial motto of the Reformation is Eccelsia semper reformanda est, “The Church is always to be reformed.” It is a reminder to us that if we should ever cease to reform ourselves and our actions as the Church, we risk falling away from the gospel to serve ourselves instead of God.

That storm that Luther touched off did spawn some terrible consequences. Many of his colleagues were threatened by the Church, and Luther himself was excommunicated. Peasants rose up in a revolt which was violently quelled by the nobility, and thousands of innocent lives were lost. The worst of the turmoil lasted about 15 years, but there have been many heated arguments and bloody wars over religion since then, and the dust has never quite settled. Even today, there is tension within the one holy catholic and apostolic Church because of what happened nearly 500 years ago, but most of us would agree that all Christians are better off for it.

The lesson we have learned from the Reformation is that sometimes renewal comes at great cost. In order to grow into what God is calling us to be, we need to kick up some dust, stir up some trouble, sometimes even do some damage. Renewal is a process which is seldom easy or enjoyable, but which is necessary for us to thrive. Because of this, ecclesia semper reformanda est; the Church is always to be reformed.

This is the same idea Jesus had in mind 1500 years earlier when he addressed those Jews who were following him. He told them that as long as they committed sin, they were slaves to sin, but that the truth he came to reveal would set them free. We may read this story as an indictment of Judaism or a challenge to those people following Jesus at that time, but Jesus speaks those same words to us today: “As long as you commit sin, you are slaves to sin. Ecclesia semper reformanda est.”

Our congregation is enslaved to sin. Not sins, things like lying to your mother or shoplifting or betraying a friend, but sin—the brokenness of the human condition. We are enslaved to a history of conflicts and ideas that holds us back from living in the fullness of God’s abundant life. We have shackled ourselves to what has been in the past, and those chains often keep us from being able to move into God’s preferred and promised future.

Here’s one example: as I have had a number of conversations about the possibility of a contemporary worship service here at Our Redeemer’s, I have encountered a lot of hope, a lot of passion and enthusiasm, and a lot of creative ideas for the future vitality of this congregation, but I have also seen people holding on desperately to a vision of the way things used to be, people struggling to reclaim what has been lost. I have also observed a lot of vague, unfocused bitterness towards “those people,” the imagined enemies who didn’t like what we once had for various reasons.

I don’t bring this up to cast blame or make excuses, but to point out how tightly we as a congregation have been holding onto the past. This is not just happening around the conversation of a contemporary service, but around  conversations about nearly everything we do here. Our ties to the past, both positive and negative, help us to learn and grow from experience, but they can also stunt our growth and prevent us from living into God’s invitation to do ministry in the present.

Unlike those descendants of Abraham addressed by Jesus who do not see the reality of their own slavery, we are painfully aware of the conflict and the history which has harmed us. The good news for us is that this pain and conflict is not our identity. We are not Our Redeemer’s Lutheran Church, conflicted congregation. We are not Our Redeemer’s Lutheran Church, wounded community. The truth which Christ brings has set us free from our past and our pain and whatever holds us back from God’s mission. Freed in Christ, we are Our Redeemer’s Lutheran Church, children of God and Church of God. By the grace of God, we are dead to sin and alive in Christ, always to be reformed.

We see a small part of that ongoing reformation today as we witness our young people affirm their baptisms. These are our daughters and sons, our brothers and sisters, members of this body of Christ and workers with us in God’s kingdom. Whatever lies ahead of us, we cannot live into God’s reality without these young people and all of our children and youth. They have heard over and over again that they are the future of the Church, but that’s not true: they are the present of the Church. These young women and men are as much a part of this congregation as any one of us, and we need their insight, their talents and skills, their experience to help us move forward and experience the abundant life to which Christ invites us.

Ecclesia semper reformanda est: the Church is always to be reformed. We will never get back what we have lost, we will never be able to go back to where we were. The Our Redeemer’s Lutheran Church of 1956 is gone forever. We will never return to the Our Redeemer’s Lutheran Church of 1993. As long as we hold these goals in our minds, we will continue to struggle and fail.

Thankfully, Christ’s love and truth has freed us from that fate. In Christ, we are freed from the Our Redeemer’s Lutheran Church of the past to live and learn and try and fail and ultimately become the Our Redeemer’s Lutheran Church of 2017, of 2049, of 2164. We have great potential, and not because we are so wonderful or great, but because God is wonderful and great in us. God has gifted us with talented, passionate, enthusiastic, creative and experienced people. God has brought us all together as one community of people, old and young, male and female, progressive and conservative, all of us together freed in Christ to experience abundant life through this truth: the love of God has set us free from where we’ve been to encounter and explore where God calls us to be.

With this truth, Christ has set us free, but that freedom is not without a purpose. In Christ, we have been freed to serve, freed to be God’s people, freed to accomplish God’s mission. Now that we are free, God has much work yet to do, because ecclesia semper reformanda est. Now that we are free, who will we serve?

Fly, Ducks, Fly!

Audio of “Fly, Ducks, Fly!” recorded during worship. (12:46)
Delivered at Evangelical Lutheran Church, Mt. Horeb, WI. Reformation Day.
Texts: Jer 31.31-34; Rom 3.19-28; John 8.31-36

Every Sunday at the duck pond, the ducks all gather together at duck church. Every Sunday, the duck preacher ascends the pulpit and cries out, “Ducks! You have wings! You can fly, ducks! You can soar through the heavens and break the bonds of gravity. You have the ability to take wing and float through the air! Fly, ducks! Fly, for you have wings!” After the service, the ducks file past the duck preacher and tell him how inspired and uplifted they are by his words, and they all waddle home.

It’s a bit ridiculous, isn’t it? To spend so much time hearing about their ability to fly and the great gift of their wings, and to then waddle slowly home. But we are very much like those ducks. We come here today, and much as we do every week, we hear Christ speak these words to us: “If you continue in my word, you are truly my disciples, and you will know the truth, and the truth will make you free!” and we respond, “Yes Lord! I know the truth, and I am free. Thank you, Lord, for freeing me!” and we go home and continue our lives in captivity.

We claim this wonderful freedom in Christ, but where is it? If we are free, how does this freedom affect our lives? What difference does it make to the world that we are free? How does that freedom affect how we treat the bank teller, the woman on the street begging for change, the man who stole your wallet? What does that freedom mean to you?

Luther writes in his Treatise on Christian Liberty that “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.” These two contradictory statements are both true, he claims, because our faith in God and God’s promise of life and salvation frees us from fear of punishment, from obligation to the law, from the need to earn God’s grace, and from guilt and shame for our failings. God has given us wings. Of course, those wings are no good to anyone unless we fly. God’s freedom allows us to fly, allows us to serve, it gives us the power to continue in Christ’s word and truly be his disciples, to know the Truth that God’s commandments are not given to lead us to righteousness, to make us better people, or to make up for the sins we commit, but instead are an open invitation from God to take part in God’s continuing work of creation and participate in God’s redeeming this broken world.

500 years ago, the Church obscured this Truth. It held God’s promise ransom, used it to bribe and blackmail God’s free and justified children into good works and worship attendance and giving money. We observe Reformation Day in celebration of God’s work to liberate the Church and God’s promise from that captivity through the work of servants like Martin Luther. But the reason we continue to celebrate Reformation Day now, the reason we have bothered to change our paraments from green to red, is to remind ourselves that the Church is always in need of reformation. Just as God’s love invited men and women like Martin Luther to work for reformation then, God’s love continues to invite us into God’s work of reforming God’s Church.

Too often, people come to churches looking for the very freedom we proclaim, but they see the preacher exhorting the ducks to fly, and the ducks waddling home. Church to us is worship on Saturday or Sunday, giving our offering in our envelopes, singing our hymns and doing our volunteer projects around the building. The problem is that our service stops there. Too often our Christian liberty and love does not extend beyond these walls. We are afraid to go out and get our hands dirty, afraid to fly. It is that fear, fear of failure, fear of going outside our comfort zone, fear of the world that holds us captive and keeps us waddling on the ground. It is that fear that stops us from freely serving and loving God’s people.

If we are ever to explain freedom in Christ to the world, if we are to have any hope of being able to show people the magnitude of God’s promise, then we must live it. If we are to convince the ducks that they too have wings, then we must fly. This is what it means to be a perfectly dutiful servant of all, subject to all. Free from any obligation or duty, we voluntarily and joyfully go out to share this good news with the world that they too might experience God’s freeing promise. In Christ, we are free from holding grudges, free from cynicism, free from suspicion of people asking for help, free from “what will the neighbors think.” God’s promise frees us to screw up, to give generously to thieves, to hang out with outcasts, to visit the lonely and depressed, to break bread with hookers and swindlers. God frees us to love dangerously. It’s like this poem* I saw recently: “I slept, I and dreamt that life was joy; I woke and I saw that life was service; I served, and I found that service is joy!” No matter what we do or don’t do, we can’t lose. Having given us wings, God is inviting us to fly.

This is dangerous. It’s much safer on the ground. Jesus himself says that we will suffer for this. People will take advantage of us, they will harm us, they might even kill us. The world does not understand free grace; it understands, “there’s no such thing as a free lunch.” And so, we stand to lose everything: our dignity, our money, our time, our comfort, but in the words of the hymn†, “were they to take our house / goods, honor, child, or spouse, / though life be wrenched away, / they cannot win the day. The Kingdom’s ours forever!” Whatever we may lose, even our lives, cannot compare to what we have already gained in Christ. This is what it means to be a perfectly free lord of all, subject to none.

Martin Luther lost much to proclaim this good news. Though it meant excommunication from the Church, the loss of his friends, the loss of liberty, even a death sentence hanging over his head, his faith in God and his Christian liberty compelled him to preach on. Where he could have sat back, rested on his knowledge of God’s promise and kept silent, instead he spoke and wrote and preached, boldly proclaiming, “Here I stand, I cannot do otherwise!”

If we really trust that God is in control, then we know that God can even redeem hardship and suffering and bend it to God’s will. We know this because of how God took the shame and failure of the cross and turned it into a God’s greatest  victory. We seek joy and happiness in our own comfort and desires, but God can turn even our suffering into joy.

If we claim to believe that God has set us free, then let us exercise that freedom and rely on God’s goodness. If we claim to believe in God’s goodness, then let us exercise that goodness and rely on God’s promise. If we claim to believe that we have wings, then let us fly. I am here today to tell you, Ducks, that you have wings. You have wings, Ducks! Fly!

*Poem by Rabindranath Tagore
†Words to “A Mighty Fortress Is Our God,” text tr. hymnal version, Lutheran Book of Worship (1978)