Rev. Tom Sorenson, Pastor
June 27, 2004

Scripture:

Let us pray: May the words of my mouth and the meditations of all of our hearts be acceptable in your sight, O God, our strength and our redeemer. Amen.

Last week I told you that the Christian faith is about freedom and not about law and rigid rules. I told you that in Christ we are freed from law and rules. I quoted to you St. Augustine's famous summation of how to live a Christian life: "Love, and do what you will." Now, I've made my point about Christian freedom around here before, from the pulpit and, if anything even more forcefully in the Sunday morning adult education forum; and I've gotten from some of you a common and perfectly understandable reaction: If God doesn't require us to follow sets of rules, like the Ten Commandments for example, then there's no reason for us not to do whatever we want. We can live the life of a libertine if we like, and there will be no negative consequences. So why not do it? Now recall that at the end of last week's sermon if said: Just a minute! Not so fast! Freedom is not license; and I said that if you wanted to hear more about that to come back next week. Well, we're back next week, so I guess I'd better say some more about what it means to say that freedom is not license.

Just now I called the response to Paul's message of freedom in Christ that we must be free to do whatever we want a common and perfectly understandable reaction to that message. It is so common, it is such an understandable human response to the declaration of freedom in Christ, that pretty clearly Paul had to deal with it himself almost 2,000 years ago. We see him doing that in this morning's reading from Galatians, Chapter 5. Paul begins that chapter by repeating his proclamation of Christian freedom: "For freedom Christ has set us free Stand firm, therefore, and do not submit again to a yoke of slavery." Galatians 5:1 "For freedom Christ has set us free." In other words, when we say that in Christ, you're free, we really mean it! You aren't freed from one kind of bondage so you can be subject to another kind. You are freed so you can be free! So be free! Really!

Then, in the next verses in our reading, Paul gets to the "but." At verse 13 (right after he has said, in a verse the lectionary leaves out, that he wishes that those who tell the Galatians that they must obey the law would castrate themselves) Paul says: "Do not use your freedom as an opportunity for self-indulgence." Why is he saying that? Paul's letters are for the most part not theoretical pieces written in a vacuum but practical responses to real issues in the life of a particular congregation. Paul is saying don't think freedom authorizes self-indulgence because some people were hearing his message that way. Or his opponents, whom he wishes would castrate themselves, were telling the people that that was what Paul's message amounted to. Someone in mid-first century Galatia (a Greek region of Asia Minor at the time) was hearing that message exactly the same way that some of you do in early twenty-first century America. That' s why Paul has to address it here, and thank God that he did.

Paul says we are freed for freedom but not for indulgence. Then things get confusing because Paul says we are "through love [to] become slaves of one another." Wait a minute! He just said at verse 1 "do not submit again to a yoke of slavery." Then at verse 13 he says submit to a yoke of slavery by becoming slaves of one another. What kind of sense does that make? Why is this guy so obviously contradicting himself?

Well, let me suggest to you that he's not actually contradicting himself, hard as that may be to see at first glance. He has not said become slaves of a new law. He says become slaves of one another, that is serve one another, through love. Not by obedience to some law or code of rules, but through love, out of love, as an action taken in love. It isn't law, it's love.

When I was in Portland this last week I went to Powell's. For the uninitiated, Powell's is a huge book store in Portland. It's an amazing place. It is Mecca for book lovers across the Pacific Northwest. There I found a little book by a fine Canadian theologian named Douglas John Hall. Hall has a big three volume work that is essentially a systematic theology that was very important to me fifteen years ago or so when I first began seriously to study theology. It still is. You probably don't know it, but you hear a lot of Hall in my preaching and teaching. The little book of his that I found last week at Powell's is called Why Christian?, and in it Hall addresses the issue we're struggling with this morning. He makes my point, and Paul's, about Christianity not being about adherence to rigid legal codes. He expresses this notion as Jesus', and the Bible's, rejection of moralism as the goal of the Christian life.

Then Hall takes up our issue today in language that may be helpful. God's love, he says, frees us from the demands of legalistic moralism; but that does not mean that Christianity is an "anything goes" faith. Quite the contrary. God's love, Hall says, "comes with strings attached." He explains:

Following [Jesus] is not less rigorous than the moralities [that is, the laws] from which he delivers us; it is more rigorous, because its essence is loving as one has been loved. Really to love is far more demanding than just 'doing good deeds....' For most of us...it means that we have to stop loving ourselves so much, putting ourselves first... , and [that] won't be learned without suffering. ¹

Hall doesn't cite Galatians here, but he could. He says that God's love frees us from legalism, from obedience to external moral laws. Paul says the same thing. Hall says that God's freeing love calls us to love in return. Paul says the same thing in our passage from Galatians when he says that we are, through love, to serve one another. Paul adds as the reason why we are to serve one another through love the statement "For the whole law is summed up in a single commandment, 'You shall love your neighbor as yourself.'" Galatians 5:14

Herein lie the central dynamic of the truly Christian life and the real reason while Christian freedom is not permission for licentiousness. God loves us. God loves us unconditionally just as we are, quite apart from anything we have done to earn that love. We haven't earned it, but God gives it anyway. That freely given, unwarranted grace of God has no pre-conditions. We don't have to do anything first in order to receive it.

Neither do we have to do anything afterward in order to keep on receiving it; but here's the surprising thing. God's love on one level demands nothing of us; but if we truly understand that love, if we "get it" about that love, if we feel it in the marrow of our bones and in the deepest reaches of our souls, we will know that it commands nothing but asks everything. As Hall puts it, it demands that we love as we have been loved. When we truly understand God's love for us it grasps our hearts and moves them to love in return.

Love what? you may ask. Well, Paul gives us half of the answer when he quotes half of the Great Commandment.. He quotes love your neighbor as yourself but rather oddly leaves out the love God part. We get the whole answer when we read the whole Great Commandment: "You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, with all your mind, and with all your strength." And in the part Paul quotes: "You shall love your neighbor as yourself." Mark 12:30-31 God's love moves us to love first of all the God who first loves us. We love God for who God is; and, as the First letter of John says, God is love. 1 John 4:8

Beyond that, God's love moves us to love what God loves. That's what the second part of the Great Commandment, "love your neighbor as yourself," is all about. God loves us, so we are called to love our neighbor as ourselves. Love ourselves, that is, to accept and love ourselves as God accepts and loves us, totally and unconditionally. There's no place in God's love for self-hatred or self-condemnation. But of course, God doesn't love only us. God loves everyone. Absolutely everyone without exception. God doesn't love just Christians. God certainly doesn't love just Americans. And God most certainly doesn't love just people who look, talk, and think like us. God loves everyone. We are told to love our neighbor, and everyone is our neighbor.

God's love is free, and it frees us. We are free to do nothing in response; but if we do nothing in response it means that we don't really get it about God's love. For Freedom Christ has set us free, and God's love does not call us to a new kind of bondage, to a new kind of law. But God's love makes demands. Those demands aren't external but are internal to God's love itself. Love demands love. Living in God's love demands that we live out of God's love for all humanity, for all creation.

So, we are free. We are subject to no law. We are subject to love, and law is not love. I'm a lawyer. Trust me on this one. Love does not command, but it demands. Love does not compel from without, it impels from within. God's love for us calls for a response from us, the response of love of God, self, and neighbor. For freedom Christ has set us free means that for love Christ has set us free. Thanks be to God. Amen.

¹ Hall, Douglas John, Why Christian?, Fortress Press, Minneapolis, 1998, pp. 30-31.