Therefore, do not let sin exercise dominion in your mortal bodies, to make you obey their passions. No longer present your members to sin as instruments of wickedness, but present yourselves to God as those who have been brought from death to life, and present your members to God as instruments of righteousness. For sin will have no dominion over you, since you are not under law but under grace. What then? Should we sin because we are not under law but under grace? By no means! Do you not know that if you present yourselves to anyone as obedient slaves, you are slaves of the one whom you obey, either of sin, which leads to death, or of obedience, which leads to righteousness? But thanks be to God that you, having once been slaves of sin, have become obedient from the heart to the form of teaching to which you were entrusted, and that you, having been set free from sin, have become slaves of righteousness. I am speaking in human terms because of your natural limitations. For just as you once presented your members as slaves to impurity and to greater and greater iniquity, so now present your members as slaves to righteousness for sanctification. When you were slaves of sin, you were free in regard to righteousness. So what advantage did you then get from the things of which you now are ashamed? The end of those things is death. But now that you have been freed from sin and enslaved to God, the advantage you get is sanctification. The end is eternal life. For the wages of sin is death, but the free gift of God is eternal life in Christ Jesus our Lord.
(Romans 6:12-25)
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Pretty much everyone, I suspect, is familiar with Sigmund Freud. He was an Austrian neurologist and is considered the creator of what we now call psycho-analysis. A lot of his ideas have been discarded over the years, and psycho-analysis is increasingly in decline in medical and psychological circles, and a lot of Freud’s work is increasingly the subject of debate. Having said that, there are most certainly some things that Freud got right. One thing he seemed to understand well I included in today’s bulletin: “Most people do not really want freedom, because freedom involves responsibility, and most people are frightened of responsibility.” And that’s really what I want to explore with you a little bit today - the relationship between freedom and responsibility. It seemed an appropriate time to do that. It is, of course, Canada Day weekend. We’ve celebrated the 150th “birthday” of the country we call home, and today is the first day of Canada’s 151st year. Canadians are quietly proud of our country - and, while we’re certainly not perfect and have our share of problems and issues to deal with - I think that we should be. We’re particularly proud of the freedom that we claim as our own; freedoms guaranteed by our laws and our constitution. In the same way, Christians delight in the freedom we find in the gospel; freedoms held out to us in the Scriptures and by God’s grace. But in both cases I sometimes wonder if we don’t take that freedom for granted - and even abuse it - by being unwilling to accept the responsibilities that inevitably must accompany freedom. We see that in simple ways. We celebrate our political freedom, but as time goes on fewer and fewer Canadians tend to vote; we celebrate our spiritual freedom, but as time goes on fewer and fewer Christians tend to go to church. In both ways we see increasing numbers of people isolating themselves from the wider communities of which they are a part, and whose freedoms they passionately claim for themselves. That’s a problem. Because freedom without responsibility simply doesn’t work. And, ultimately, Freud was right: if we fear accepting our responsibilities (either as Canadians or as Christians) then we risk surrendering our freedom. I’m going to be reflecting primarily on Christian freedom, of course, but it might be worth keeping our Canadian freedoms in mind as well.
If God in Christ has set us free, then the obvious question for us to ask is: free for what? Freedom to what end? There must be a point to our freedom because freedom without responsibility is meaningless at best and at worst it’s an invitation to anarchy. Is freedom simply the right to do whatever happens to strike our fancy at any particular time? To simply do whatever I want to do whenever I want to do it? Is that all that it means? Did Canadian soldiers die in time of war so that I could do whatever I want? Did Christ die on the cross so that I could do whatever I want? That’s ridiculous of course - except that some people do seem to take that attitude. Freedom becomes license. And if we start to believe in license rather than freedom then we must believe that God doesn’t care how we live or what we do. Rather than “love the Lord your God” and “love your neighbour as yourself,” Christian faith might as well be summed up not by the words of Jesus but by the words of Bobby McFerrin - “Don’t worry. Be happy.” But there’s more to it than that. There has to be. And there is.
In today’s passage, Paul asks “Should we sin because we are not under law but under grace?” And he answers his own question: “By no means!” In Paul’s mind anyone who thought that freedom meant license had completely misunderstood the very nature of divine grace. Paul saw freedom not as our right to do whatever we wanted to do, but as our opportunity to do what God calls us to do. “Having once been slaves of sin,” he wrote, we “have become slaves of righteousness.” Slaves belong to and do the bidding of those who have possession of them. We - God’s people - belong to God and we do the bidding of the God to whom we belong.
In this passage from Romans, Paul used the word “slavery” several times. In Paul’s world, of course, the concept of slavery would have been well understood, since slavery was one of the cornerstones of the social structure of the Roman Empire. In slavery, you belong to another. Your time is never your own, it’s always your master’s. You never do your own will, but rather you always do the will of your master. Paul’s readers would have understood all that. Perhaps in Canada in 2017 some of us have difficulty understanding it. We just know that slavery is bad, and we take pride that it doesn’t exist here anymore. The British Empire abolished slavery in 1803. Slavery hasn’t existed anywhere in the western world since Brazil abolished it in 1871. Or has it? There have always been vestiges of slavery left over - vestiges that continue to have consequences in society today: there was segregation in the US South, there was apartheid in South Africa; there’s been the destruction of native culture in Canada; there’s exploitation of workers by large corporation; there’s the trafficking of women and children. All are or were forms of what you might call quasi-slavery; all still impact our world. And yet, for all that, Paul can still take the image of slavery and turn it into a positive. Paul would look at those things I’ve just mentioned and say that they’re examples of people being in slavery to “the sinful nature.” But there’s also that thing called slavery “to righteousness.” That slavery, ironically, gives us freedom. In fact, you could say that we can’t have real freedom until we’re slaves to righteousness, because being a slave to righteousness is what gives us freedom with responsibility; it’s what frees us from the fear of responsibility that Freud spoke of.
So freedom - properly defined in Christian terms then (and I’d argue that this has a wider application to our national life together) - means serving righteousness rather than sin. Let go of this idea of “sin” as being just all those bad things we do. I’m not saying that we don’t do bad things sometimes (we all do) but really, when you boil it down, “sin” means making the conscious and deliberate choice to live for myself rather than for God; to live for myself rather than for others. That’s how Jesus understood the law, after all: “love the Lord your God … and love your neighbour as yourself.”
The Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. once said, “the truth will set you free, as Jesus said. But first it will make you very angry.” Ultimately anger - in the righteous sense rather than the out of control emotional sense - is what moves us to accept the responsibilities that are attached to the freedom Christ won for us. That sort of anger comes from seeing the plight of others - whether systemic injustice or racism or endemic poverty or corruption - and it causes us to respond in righteousness - with a righteous anger that leads to righteous action. That's what it means to be in slavery to righteousness. It doesn't mean to give up freedom but to be free to serve God and to serve God by serving others. In that way we live as both faithful Christians and as good citizens.
We're celebrating Canada and the freedom that Canada gives us this weekend. But every day we celebrate Christ and the freedom he's won for us. Both types of freedom carry with them responsibilities. May we accept them, and may we honour both our country and - more importantly - our God.
Amen
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