Sermon on Freedom in Christianity

Freedom is a charged word in our culture. It conjures up a host of images.
As individuals it can mean the ability to choose among a range of alternatives:
what we eat and wear, how we choose our life mate or chose the single life, or more profoundly, how we chose the last days of the end of our life—with all the health care that can be mustered on our behalf or not. Our choices can be meaningful, changing the course of the rest of our life, or they can be trite, affecting us and others for a few minutes.
As individuals in the United States, we take some freedoms for granted, and the founding fathers and mothers of our nation codified them in the Bill of Rights. We get caught up in them occasionally, disagree about what exactly they mean, but generally we don’t think about them unless someone tramples on one of them, or our life changes in a way that restricts our freedom, like having a debilitating illness, car crash, or being abused by another person. And we know people whose choices seem a lot more constricted than ours, such as single moms who sometimes don’t have a lot of resources or options, older adults who can’t get around as well as they used to, young adults, who are often strapped for the resources they need to pursue their studies, move to a job market, get married, or get the living arrangements they would prefer.
And there are whole classes of individuals who historically have been kept from making their own choices. The extreme of this is our country’s history of enslavement of Africans, and the continued prejudice that keeps many African-Americans today from realizing their full potential because their choices have been restricted. More recently Hispanic immigrants, both documented and undocumented, can’t exercise their choices because of the problems of our immigration system and systematic racism as well.
Anti-racism training is required of all seminarians in the Episcopal church now. This training helps us realize that racism can be found whenever our institutions—the church, school, business, government—use their power for or against any race. Prejudice with power is the definition of racism, and this training helps priests in training learn how to recognize when systemic racism underlies our thinking and actions. Martin Luther King pronounced in the 1960s that there was no more segregated place in America than our churches on Sunday morning. I know I have witnessed this segregation in both big cities like Chicago as well as our own bluegrass region, in Episcopal churches both in the north and the south.
How and why our churches have become so single-colored is pretty well known, given the history of racism in our country and the need for people of color to gather with each other to build up their spirits in the face of prejudice in their lives. How to change our churches so that they reflect many colors is the aim of the Union of Black Episcopalians. UBE encourages the involvement of Black people in the life of the Episcopal Church -- mission, stewardship, evangelism, education, liberation, leadership, governance, and politics. Its goal is to eradicate racism within the church, and they are meeting this week in Houston. This is a goal that is not achieved by a single act, but by choosing anti-racism every day.

When Martin Luther King gave his famous I Have a Dream speech at the march on Washington for civil rights, he finished his remarks by quoting the hymn we sang this morning: let freedom ring, and he called out all the places where freedom should ring—naming northern states, southern states. Then he said that as freedom came to all people, both black and white, men and women, Jews, Protestants and Catholics, we would really know the meaning of the words, we would be able to join hands together and sing the words of the Negro spiritual:
Free at last, free at last, thank God almighty, we are free at last.
The powerful images of Martin Luther King come to me today as I hear Paul’s words to the Galatians: for freedom Christ has set us free. 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."
As a woman, the idea of serving others is not new, and I think all women should beware of using this scripture to be slaves of their families in ways that are hurtful to them psychically. But we are called to freedom in Christ, in love, loving our neighbors as ourselves. Our freedom is one of responsibility. We are used to defining freedom as getting our way, but this is not the freedom of Christ. The freedom of Christ lies in knowing and living like we are a forgiven people. Knowing that we are Christ’s own in love, so that we act out that sense of overwhelming love. Like the woman who anointed Jesus’s feet with her tears two weeks ago in our gospel reading, when we really know our freedom comes from being loved just as we are, we cannot do anything else than spill that love out onto others.
Our freedom cannot be divorced from others’ freedom. We cannot be free unless all are free, and this dilemma is central to our Christian awareness. We cannot love some and not others, just as God does not love some and not others. If our love of neighbor is to mirror God’s love for us, our freedom is expansive as well. We are called to love all, we are free and love is for all. This freedom is what Dr. King was talking about —that when we clasp hands together as free, then we all become free to love.
As we approach Independence Day this week, these issues of freedom for all are at the forefront of our minds. How can we make sure that our freedom as Christians to love and serve our neighbor does not get distorted into a kind of restricted freedom, where we love some and not others, because they are not like us in religion or thinking or color. Samuel Taylor Coleridge said more than a century ago that when individuals, or small groups, like a church, or nations become isolated whether as a result of ignorance or arrogance, Oppression or depression, our way of thinking begins to be distorted. As individuals and as a nation we do better when we think about freedom in relation to others.
As Christians, being free happens best when we are in community. This community we know as the church, where we test out our sense of being loved, where we come together to learn how to love our neighbor, to serve our neighbor together. Whether we give donations to the food pantry, provide rides to sick older folks, or scholarships to young adults, we have decided, in our Christian freedom, to choose how to love our neighbor. We love best when we love together and serve together those around us who need to see the love of Christ.
Our nation was built on these principles of Christian freedom, by some of the same founding fathers and mothers who designed how the Episcopal church would work. They wrote both our US and Episcopal constitutions, basing decision making on the principles that all are equal partners in freedom. While our nation has not always used this freedom wisely, for the benefit of others, or loved our neighbors with the sense that we have been blessed by God with goodness, we have tried, through our freedoms, to allow diverse opinions to be heard. In this time of conflict in Iraq, our nation and its leaders especially needs our prayers that our choices in freedom are the ones God would have us make.
In Lift Every Voice and Sing there are many negro spirituals with images of freedom. We will sing one from Abraham Lincoln’s era and the war he presided over, another time in our nation’s history where people had different ideas about what freedom meant. I believe our nation came through the crisis over slavery in a way that showed Christ’s love for all people. But that freedom came at a great cost, as people in the Commonwealth of Kentucky were very much involved, sometimes brother fighting against brother.
The freedom Christ provides us came at a great cost—the cost of the cross. But just as lives were freed from slavery by the resurrection of our nation after the Civil War, our lives are free through Jesus’s resurrection. Freedom in Christ is freedom from slavery to hate, hate of ourselves and of others. We are free to mirror the love of God in Christ, through the love we know in Christ. Just like anti-racism must be worked on every day, our freedom in Christ must be realized over and over again, every day of our lives.