Sunday, Sept. 24 - 16th Sunday after Pentecost
Randy Doss refused to confess. The Athens, Alabama, man went to his home two weeks ago and got into a discussion about religion with his sister, Tammie Lee Doss, and her friend Donna Leigh Bianca. When they couldn’t bring him round to their point of view on things, things got ugly. The women got two pistols and held Randy at gunpoint for hours, trying to get him to confess to wronging Tammie Lee when they were children. When he still wouldn’t confess, Tammie Lee fired a round into the ceiling, and Donna Leigh blocked the door to prevent Randy from leaving. We don’t know if they were just playing games, said Sgt. Trevor Harris, but it is ridiculous for men and women in their 40s to be playing games like this. No kidding. [AP story, Sept. 8. 2006.]
We looked last week at how Baptists have been freedom fighters from the start. Our movement has long been known for opposing all forms of religious coercion (although you can hardly tell that by observing some Baptists today). It doesn’t take a Baptist, though, to know that gunpoint coercion doesn’t bring genuine repentance or spiritual transformation. But neither does it take having a double name and being from Alabama to think it does. We still have people of faith today—whether Christians or Muslims or whatever—who think they can compel others against their will to worship or believe as they. It’s astonishing that we do not have a worldwide consensus on this point in history yet, but then again, we are still debating in Washington whether we should use the ultimate form of coercion—torture—to get information from terrorists that will make us safer. Our preoccupation with our own safety overlooks the matter of what becomes of us when we, who on Christian principles tell Muslims they need to renounce violence and commit to religious liberty, turn to violent coercion to achieve our personal or national goals.
For freedom Christ has set you free, says St. Paul at the first of Galatians 5. Stand firm, therefore, and do not submit again to a yoke of slavery. Do not become the oppressor in fighting oppression. And do not let anyone come between you and God.
Which means we must resist all attempts by others to coerce faith in the public square or to use undue political influence ourselves to advance the cause of Christ. It also means that we must not violate the conscience of any individual in the church by imposing creeds or practices that would undermine the true liberty of a person before God. God wants free worshipers and nothing else, said George W. Truett. Baptists need to reaffirm that again and again, and not presume to take the place of the Holy Spirit in bringing about conversion of any kind.
But that brings us to a more subtle point. Baptists have been freedom fighters against any and every form of external tyranny; but the time has come and is long past for us to fight just as hard against every form of internal tyranny. We have fought against religious mastery, but we must learn to fight for spiritual mastery. It’s not enough for Baptists to celebrate our legacy as advocates for religious liberty; we must strive for spiritual liberty. Freedom from is one thing; freedom for is another. Freedom from oppression creates the specter of true freedom, but something more is needed if we are to experience true freedom.
Some of us have lately sent our kids off to college. Unless you are a helicopter parent, still hovering over the head of your kid by calling to wake him up for class or e-mailing her teacher to explain why she should be given special consideration, your child is now tasting one form of freedom. That freedom from parental oversight can be intoxicating. Sometimes literally intoxicating, don’t you know?! Finally they get to make their own decisions. Finally they get to go to bed when they want and eat what and when they want. Finally they get to sleep in on Sunday instead of getting up for church. And hopefully it doesn’t take four years for them to learn that freedom like that doesn’t make you free.
Someone or something will always rule you. Bob Dylan sang, You’ve got to serve somebody. Servitude and freedom are not mortal enemies, if the service, the slavery even, the obedience, is toward God and no one else. And old prayer phrases it well, speaking of God, in whose service is perfect freedom. Frederick Buechner points out that obeying the mastery of our basest desires like drink, sex, power, revenge, or whatever makes us a slave to them without hope of any real freedom. It leaves us the freedom of an animal to take what we want when we want it but not the freedom to be a true human being. To be free, says he, is to obey Love himself, who above all else wishes us well, … [leaving] us the freedom to be the best and gladdest that we have it in us to become. [Wishful Thinking (Harper & Row, 1972), p. 30.]
It’s more than just saying that you are going to serve the Lord and not the devil. It’s more than a one-time conversion event. Christianity is a life, and a life has to be lived. Living this life means adopting certain habits or practices that get ingrained in such a way that other habits and practices cannot compete with them. We become what we do, in other words.
We don’t want to live according to the desires of the flesh, as the Apostle puts it. We want to be guided by the Spirit of God and show evidence thereby of the fruit of the Spirit appearing in our lives. But how does that come to be in our lives? How do we master the flesh in order for the spirit to flourish?
This is where we have to quit being naïve about the whole idea of freedom. We are truly free when the things of God—the things of good—have become second nature to us. For that to happen, transformation of our nature has to take place.
Reinhold Niebuhr was the most widely and highly regarded theologian of the 20th century. He once pointed to the grace of a figure skater—how she seems to glide across the ice with the greatest of ease. It looks effortless. But the effort it takes to master the skill and to train her body to look effortless and thus graceful is great. It requires countless hours of practice, doing things that train her in such a way that she doesn’t have to think before she does them.
Oftentimes people of exceptional skill don’t really know how they do things. We think of them as gifted. But most of the time the reason they forget how they came to do what they do is that they have so internalized the habits of excellence that they don’t consciously think of them any more. And yet if you look at world-class singers or instrumentalists, say, they still practice the scales. They still run through drills that keep their voices or hands in good working order in order that they can perform freely.
This is true for most things in life, and always true of the Christian life. There are no Christian prodigies. All Christians are made more than born, even if being born again begins the life of the Spirit for us.
We have been blessed this weekend to have among us Robert Benson. He has shared with many of you these past three days things he has learned in pursuit of a genuine life in Christ. He began his own journey by being struck by words by the writer Nikos Kazantzakis: “Learn to obey. Only he who obeys a rhythm superior to his own is free.” [From The Saviors of God: Spiritual Exercises, reprinted in A Guide to Prayer for Ministers and Other Servants (Upper Room), p. 115.] And this is just what the Apostle tells us in Galatians about being guided by the Spirit of God within us and not using our freedom as a license to do what we want. We need to obey the rhythm of God that is superior to our rhythm.
And when we do this, when we learn to follow the dictates of Christ—the spiritual Master himself who lives within us—only then will we discover things that were not ours to know on our own. We will tame desires that deceive us by promising the freedom of open range but that only lead us back to the corral. And oddly enough, when we discipline ourselves properly, we will find ourselves riding free like the wind with joy unimaginable. We will have crucified the flesh with its passions and desires, as Paul puts it, and will know the mystery we were created to enjoy. We will sense the fruit of the Spirit ripening in us. Things like love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, generosity, faithfulness, gentleness, and self-control. These are not fruits, by the way, that we can pick and choose among as to whether we want them or not. These are the fruit—singular—that God grows in us whether we like it or not!
But let’s get more specific still about what is going on here. Paul summarizes what he means by saying that when this is true of us, we will be loving our neighbor as ourselves—the essence of the whole law of God. Then we will not be satisfying the works of the flesh, which all boil down to gratifying ME at the expense of YOU! Let us not become conceited, he says, competing against one another, envying one another.
The heart of sin is the heart turned in on itself. Instead of being open to God and others, it feeds on God and others. This kind of greed that lies at the center of us causes us to devour others in order to fill ourselves up. It’s willing to sacrifice relationships for the sake of winning.
I was talking to a friend recently who was lamenting that business attitude in a former colleague. Although the man is exceedingly wealthy, every deal has to end up with him feeling like he got the better of it, and all the better if you feel like the loser!
If you cannot celebrate the success of someone else, you are not guided by the Spirit but by the flesh. And this is no freedom at all, as God means it for us. The final freedom God wants to build into us is a freedom that makes room for our neighbor. Any and every spiritual discipline, whether worship or prayer or meditation or silent reflection or Bible reading or fasting or whatever is designed to accomplish this hospitality of the heart toward God and others. To be so guided by the Spirit is to be free to be with and for others in love.
It’s an old picture of the difference between heaven and hell that started in Greek mythology and has been taken into Christian theology. The details vary in the telling, but it goes like this: In hell there is a great banquet table with sumptuous foods laid out, but everyone is starving to death because there is a splint connected to every arm at the elbow, preventing it from bending. Everyone does in the next life only what each has learned to do in this one—feed oneself. None is ever satisfied.
In heaven there is a great banquet table with sumptuous foods laid out. The same splints are affixed to the arms of the saints, but they enjoy the feast of heaven because they are doing in the next life what they learned to do in this one—feed each other. Everyone is always satisfied.
The freedom that is spiritual mastery comes only through practice. And practice makes perfect. Tell me how your practice is going, and I’ll tell you how free you are.
under the chosen Sunday to hear audio of sermon (mp3 format) (beginning March 11, 2007).
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