Sermon for the 4th Sunday in Lent
“ Cast out the bondwoman and her son: for the son of the bondwoman shall not be heir with the son of the freewoman. So then, brethren, we are not children of the bondwoman, but of the free. ”
FEBRUARY, just over last Friday, was Black History Month and many of us saw or heard about African Americans who, despite humble or humiliating circumstances, triumphed and contributed something great to our nation, to our culture, to general knowledge, and faith in being human. We don't spend enough time in understanding what slavery is, or what it does to people.
A slave is one who is owned by another. Most African Americans are descendants of those who were once America's slaves, emancipated by our bloodiest war. That freedom has been hard to obtain even after Appomattox. That freedom is hard for any of us to find, and to hold onto.
For we don't understand bondage or freedom. Our culture has almost entirely forgotten the lessons of our forefathers and how someone must earn the ability and right to self-governance. We seem unable to grasp why it is presently so difficult for the nation of Iraq to be born in the aftermath of Saddam Hossein. We need to see some biblical examples, perhaps, in order to fully grasp this dynamic.
Abraham's children traveled to Egypt to be safe from a world-wide famine, to be near Joseph who could feed them. They never went back to their home, and their descendants grew and prospered, enough to worry a later Egyptian king. He took his military might and forced them into labor camps and bondage. Slavery in Egypt was hard, the Israelites couldn't direct their own lives, and the burdens grew as did the Pharaoh's ambitions for newer and more glorious cities. They chafed for relief from their hardship. Pharaoh even conspired to kill all the Jewish male babies.
In time, Moses grew up in Pharaoh's home, a Jewish baby saved from the river by Pharaoh's own daughter. At forty years of age, this free man saw Egyptians abusing his own people and murdered one, becoming a fugitive. He spent forty more years in exile. God called Moses at the burning bush and led him back to Egypt to free the people through miraculous signs of judgment against Egypt. When the tenth plague of death came, the Egyptians drove the Jews out of their land. Cut off by the waters of the Red Sea, these former slaves found themselves free in a desert.
So they began to complain. “Where's the water? Where's the food? Weren't there graves in Egypt—why did we have to come out here to die?” The moment Moses' back was turned; they made a golden calf to worship instead of the God who had brought them out bondage into freedom. What were these people showing us? What does their behavior mean?
Is freedom just doing whatever you want to do? Is it having nobody to give you orders, raise expectations of you, and make you answerable, accountable for your actions, your character? Is freedom an absence of authority, or is it a presence of something else? Is bondage just being forced to work, having limits on how you live your life, being paid nothing for your contribution? Are bondage and freedom only about obedience? If they is, we have it entirely backward. A Collect in the Morning Prayer office opens thus:
“O God, who art the author of peace and lover of concord, in knowledge of whom standeth our eternal life, whose service is perfect freedom…” Perfect freedom comes from serving God. Now how can that be? It sounds to our ears like bondage again, because there's somebody telling what we have to do, Somebody really big and powerful. We don't understand ourselves, how we are made, what we need to live and have fulfilling lives. We need to give ourselves to something. There is a place in every human soul that longs for mastery—not to master another, but to have a master.
Life presents a number of problems to us. What do I eat? Where can I sleep? How am I to spend my time? What must I do to be safe? I ask these questions every day and the answers are at hand. My home, my wife, my bed, my occupation: give definition to the borders of my existence, provide comfort and acceptability to me, while they define the limits I must decide I will live by. I could choose to eat just fried chicken, sleep in motels, ride a Harley and tote an AK47 but that' s not me. I could be an outlaw, but outlaws don't stay free forever. A news flash says that 1% of our nation is behind bars today. That's the tip of an iceberg that calls itself “freedom,” but is slavery worse than any American Negro ever experienced.
St. Paul wrote: “Do not let sin reign in your mortal body that you should obey its lusts, and do not go on presenting the members of your body to sin as instruments of unrighteousness; but present yourselves to God as those alive from the dead, and your members as instruments of righteousness to God. For sin shall not be master over you... Do you not know that when you present yourselves to someone as slaves for obedience, you are slaves of the one whom you obey, either of sin resulting in death, or of obedience resulting in righteousness? I am speaking in human terms because of the weakness of your flesh. For just as you presented your members as slaves to impurity and to lawlessness, resulting in further lawlessness, so now present your members as slaves to righteousness, resulting in sanctification.” Romans 6:12-19 St. Peter denounced the treason of some who called Christians back to their former lives of sin, “promising them freedom while they themselves are slaves of corruption; for by what a man is overcome, by this he is enslaved.” 2 Peter 2:19
These apostles understood. Bondage is giving mastery to sin. It is inevitable that a man who decides to live by his own lights, as his own master, will become a slave to his own sin. Inevitable, because we are sinful by nature. We need someone who will lead us out of this trap. We need only give ourselves to the right Master, whose we really are, and He can lead us home. St. Peter enjoins us to: “Act as free men, and do not use your freedom as a covering for evil, but use it as bondslaves of God.” 1 Peter 2:16
Israel's test of many centuries was to remember the freedom they'd gained when God gave to them His law of life. Every time they rebelled, they lost their freedom again. He said, through Jeremiah: “For long ago I broke your yoke And tore off your bonds; But you said, ‘I will not serve!' For on every high hill And under every green tree You have lain down as a harlot.” Jeremiah 2:20 Finally, in that prophet's day, they were enslaved again in a foreign land, Babylon, today's Iraq. Never again would a Jewish state be without a foreign empire demanding tribute. They'd had freedom for a while, but the sinfulness of the people ever longed for the service of foreign gods, the sins of neighboring pagans, to return to their former bondage.
Every time we give ourselves to sin, we lose our freedom. Every time we give ourselves to God, we gain it back again. The early church didn't feel it quite so urgent to end the system of human slavery, of people being sold as possessions of others, for one reason that they knew that these slaves, if they were Christians, were actually truly free. They were told to serve their masters well, so the master himself might become a slave of Jesus and thereby live. In time, of course, it would be Christians who ended slavery as we knew it in America and England.
Such slavery still exists in other lands, and is as odious as it was here. The people of Iraq today are baffled by their freedom, and some—mostly outsiders—object to their being free, self-governing citizens of the land once ruled by the iron fist of a dictator. Dictators have one thing to say for themselves. They give direction to the people. They keep order. Some people, many people, sadly would prefer to be told what to do, to live as slaves.
The most difficult concept for Jews who had become early Christians was that they needn't continue in the entire Jewish law. Around the writings of Moses an entire body of civil, religious and criminal law had grown, enforcing what the scribes thought was the will of God in every aspect of life. Today's more rigid forms of Islam are much this way. The thoughtless bondage to empty ritual obedience, to man's law, ended with the Cross of Jesus Christ. Christians lived a new freedom that Jews didn't understand. Righteousness was now found in Him , and living for Him and under Him was freedom: freedom from sin, freedom to serve God.
We who think we're free have a hard time getting this. But try this: sell your TV and don't buy another. Give up your car and take the bus. Sell your home and be ready to move where God sends you. Turn off the computer and leave it off. Do these suggestions scare you? Do you feel fear? Do your debts and their encumbrances on how you live your life make such freedom impossible? How much does the bank own your time and work and paycheck? We think we're free. But we have unpaid bills and needs that must be addressed, don't we? We have itches that must be scratched. Our bondage is pretty , and it's comfortable . Set the Red Sea between our comfortable lives and this sudden desert called freedom and we might long to return to our flesh pots and old slavery. See how it's done?
What you give yourself to controls you. It doesn't have to be called “master” for it to own you. We are owned by someone, no matter who we are. “It may be the devil, or it might be the Lord, but you're going to have to serve somebody.” Bob Dylan St. Paul wrote to these early Jewish Christians: “Y ou that desire to be under the law, don't you hear the law? Abraham had two sons, one by a slave girl, the other by a freewoman. But Ishmael, who was born of the slave girl was after the flesh; Isaac, of the freewoman, was by God's promise. These are like the two Covenants—that of Moses and that of Christ; of Mount Sinai, which becomes bondage, like Hagar, in bondage with her children, and Jerusalem which is free. We are children of promise. He that was born after the flesh persecuted him that was born after the Spirit, as it is now. So, cast out the slave girl and her son: for slaves will not be heirs with the son of the freewoman.” What is he talking about?
St. Paul would be the last person on earth to tell you to live any way you please. He made long lists of sins to avoid and godly behaviors that mark the Christian life. His son of the freewoman is not his own master. He is the son of promise. The promise was God's, and God did His part. The promise of God was ultimately fulfilled when Jesus, God's own Son, freely gave Himself in obedience to His Father's will and became the sacrifice for all human disobedience and sin. His death set us free—not free from God, but free from our bondage to guilt, to shame, to evil habits, to the accusation of Satan. We were set free so that the part of us that seeks and needs a master might be mastered at last by God, our maker.
And He doesn't master us by forcing us, but by empowering us to do His will. He walks along with us, tells us how we're doing, impresses us with the way He is leading us, and rewards us when we stay on the path. When we stray, He leads us back, and forgives us so long as we repent, and return to the path and want to keep to it. We learn to love this God who leads us, because He is so kindly a master, and He gives us ourselves.
For in the end, what we are becoming as slaves to righteousness and prisoners of Christ, as Paul titles himself, is finally, fully human . A human being is rare upon this heavily populated earth, amid its 6 billion people. A human being, as God created him or her to be, is one soul fully in God—a person just like Jesus—and that is where we are all headed, if we believe He is God's Son.
Bondage, freedom, how little we know; but know this: the service of God is perfect freedom. Keep that saying, and be free.
PFH+