(Note: This blog entry is based on the text for For Freedom, originally shared on July 2, 2020. It was the twenty-eighth video for our YouTube Channel, Streams of Living Water (https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCB7KnYS1bpHKaL2OseQWCnw), co-produced with my wife, Rev. Sally Welch.)
The coronavirus pandemic is flaring up
again. We thought we could return to the new normal now, without consequence.
Now it looks like we are likely to be headed
toward higher rates of disease, more death and a return to lock-down. Our son,
who works mostly from home now, shared something he saw online that said,
“Maybe, instead of saying we work from home, we should say we live at
work.” It kind of feels like that
sometimes, right?
We are finding that our new high-speed
internet has a low-powered signal WiFi signal, and I’m starting to realize that
we are pretty much on our own in fixing the issues with it from this point
forward.
On the other hand, human beings have
certainly underperformed in our purpose as people created in God’s image. But,
the good news is that God has not walked away, we are not alone in fixing the
issues.
I don’t know if you can read the words on my
T-shirt, it’s probably mirrored (but we hope to soon have a fix for that,
too.). It says, “Body piercing saved my soul.”
The body of Jesus Christ was pierced to save
us from the consequences of our sin, the thing that separated us from God.
God has set us free from having to prove
ourselves to God by a slavish keeping of religious laws. Instead, God has given
us a living relationship with the living God, that is, faith.
Paul wrote a letter, a great letter, to the
church of Galatia, to the Galatians, when they had been tempted to fall back to
the law, to believing that they could earn their salvation by being good people
under the standards of the law.
After writing about living under the
religious law being like living under slavery, that is, how our labors don’t
benefit us, Paul begins the 5th chapter of this letter by saying:
*Galatians 5:1
“For freedom Christ has set us free. Stand
firm, therefore, and do not submit again to a yoke of slavery.”
We live a new life, lived by power the Holy
Spirit, the ongoing presence of God for good in this world. God has not given
up on us. That is our freedom. We are free from the religious laws as a
standard for our salvation, heaven, but live by faith in Christ. We don’t keep
laws to gain God’s favor; we want to please God out of simple gratitude for
that new life, a living relationship with God, our freedom.
Being free from slavery does not mean that
we can now do whatever we want.
Nikki Gumble is an English Anglican
clergyperson who has written a series of books and resources called Alpha as an
introductory course in Christianity. In one of the videos he talks about taking
his son to a children’s soccer match. The coach/referee hadn’t shown up when
the match was supposed to begin, so he was drafted into service, in spite of
his knowing almost nothing about the rules of soccer.
They sort of marked off boundaries with
kid’s clothing in a park field and his voice had to do for a whistle. Penalties
were not called when they should and were called when they shouldn’t. The
children first became frustrated, and then became injured just as the real
coach/referee arrived. He set up legitimate boundaries, called penalties
accurately, and the kids had a wonderful time.
Nikki Gumble asked, at with point in the day
were the kids more free, under basically anarchy, or with fairly enforced rules?
Freedom from religious laws does not mean we
are set free for anarchy. It means that Christ takes the penalty of not keeping
the law on himself at the cross, for all who accept the living relationship
with the one true living God for which we were created.
It means we do what we do because we want to
live in that relationship. We want to live lives that honor and please God.
We do what we do because we are who we are,
a new creation, children of God. We need the law to tell us that we can’t do it
ourselves, that we need a Savior.
The good news, the gospel, is that we have a
Savior in Jesus Christ.
This weekend, we will be celebration the
freedoms that is often truly said that we take for granted. We celebrate the
birth of our nation which, for all its flaws, has afforded the greatest freedom
and economic opportunity for the greatest number of people of any nation in
history.
We are now at a point in our history when we
are rightly focused on our flaws, we are focused on the unfinished work of
making this the land of the free for all people.
Yet many of us are simply focused on what we
consider the loss of our personal freedom. We are told that we have to stay at
home and that, if we go out we have to wear masks and stay away from people who
are not members of our households. Some have held rallies to protest this abuse
of our personal freedom. I’ve seen the Gadsden Flag, a historical American
flag, or banner, the one with the rattlesnake, coiled and ready to strike, and
the words, “Don’t tread on me” flown at some of these rallies.
Ironically a precursor to this design was
the nation’s first published political cartoon which showed a snake chopped
into 8 pieces, representing the 8 colonies at the time, with the caption Join,
or die. That is, join together for the common good or die separately.
Instead of drawing together as a nation, we
seem to be now hardening our personal defenses.
A colleague posted a rant from a retired
surgeon on Facebook regarding wearing masks recently. It’s worth a read. I just
want to highlight a couple of his remarks.
“OK, here’s my rant about masks:
“I have spent the past 39 years working in
the field of surgery. For a significant part of that time, I have worn a mask.
I have worked with hundreds (probably thousands) of colleagues during those years,
who have also worn masks. Not a single
one of us became ill, passed out or died from lack of oxygen. Not a single one
of us became ill, passed our or died from breathing too much carbon dioxide. Not
a singe one of us became ill, passed our or died from rebreathing little of our own exhaled air. Let’s begin
here by putting those scare tactics to rest!
“(It is true that some people, with advanced
lung diseases, may be so fragile that a mask could make their already-tenuous
breathing more difficult. If your lungs are that bad, you probably shouldn’t be
going out in public at the present time anyway; the consequences if you are
exposed to Covid-19 would likely be devastating.)…”
Here’s a link to the full Facebook post: https://m.facebook.com/story.php?story_fbid=2867491636696787&id=100003079363440
Taking steps to slow the spread of the coronavirus
is not a restriction on our personal freedom any more than speed limits, or anti-assault
laws, or not swimming when the beach is red-flagged are.
We can only be free when necessary
restrictions are placed for the common good. Those who resist such restrictions
ignore the common good in favor of what is just good for them.
We need the law.
The law is a blessing. When it come to the
religious law, the 10 Comments and all their extensions, etc., the problem is
that, not only do we often not want to keep them, we can’t keep to a level that
will justify us before God. The problem is Sin.
What is God’s answer?
*Jeremiah 31:31
That does not mean anarchy. That means that
the law come from within us. It is written not in a book but in our hearts.
We live now in the spirit, not free from the
law, but from the consequences of not keeping it.
The Declaration of Independence, which we
celebrate this weekend, after a brief introduction, says this:
We hold these truths to be self-evident,
that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with
certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit
of Happiness.--That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among
Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed, --That
whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the
Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government,
laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such
form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and
Happiness.
The Safety and happiness of the people, of the common good, are the true
government’s defining concerns.
Happiness, at the time of the writing of this declaration, meant the
ability of the people to pursue what they themselves define as being best for
them, as long as it didn’t hamper the rights of others to pursue their
understanding of happiness, or well-being.
The Christian Church begins with a
declaration of dependence, dependence on a loving a gracious God for all that
is good, including perfection only in the life to come.
Both celebrate forms of freedom, freedom
with responsibility for the common good. People should be able to choose the
way they want to live without obstacles, unless they infringe upon the ability
of other to do the same. The common good the good of all those with individual
freedom, for the sake of the people as a whole. Our rights are inalienable
rights, only because they are from God, and therefore cannot be taken away by
other people. What people grant, people can take away. At the same time, there
are no rights without responsibilities, what we owe to the common good.
Instead, Christ has come to set us free.
We live for others as Jesus died for us.
Sacrificially, and for the sake of God’s people, for the common good we are
freed to serve. “For freedom Christ has set us free. Stand firm, therefore, and
do not submit again to a yoke of slavery”.
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