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Text:
Galatians 3:23-29
W 5th
Sunday after Pentecost Born
Free and Equal In the name of him who set us free, dear brothers and
sisters in Christ: Today we commemorate
our nation’s independence – as well we should, celebrating with hearts grateful
to God the freedoms, privileges, and rights that he has granted to as citizens
of this blessed land. Historically
speaking, our nation’s independence means a lot to us, and it’s more than
simply freedom from foreign oppression and unjust laws and taxes. What American liberty from European control
meant was that we could move forward with an entirely different concept of
human government. It made possible the
great American experiment with democracy, where there would be no nobles who
ruled by right of birth … no landed aristocracy that held the majority of men,
the “commoners”, in perpetual hereditary servitude. Instead, at its foundation, it would be taken
as self-evident that all men are created equal, and that each person is endowed
by the Creator with the inalienable rights of life, liberty, and the pursuit of
happiness. It was a radically new
concept – or rather, the concept wasn’t so new; but those who held the power
had never given it a chance to work.
American Independence made the dream possible. And that’s what today’s observance is really
all about: the opportunity to put into
practice the idea that all people are born free and equal, as well as the good
things that have resulted from putting that idea into practice. And so as a nation we’ll celebrate, as has
become the custom for most, with a long weekend, with backyard barbeques, and,
of course, with countless community fireworks displays across the country. And in deference perhaps to the spirit of
1776, many celebrants will even keep the rebellion alive as youngsters (and
frequently oldsters) display their own private fireworks, the vast majority of
which are illegal either to own or to set alight. But hey, it just wouldn’t be the 4th of
July without all those brilliant flashes and loud bangs. Fireworks are the Fourth of
July tradition – they have been ever since we began celebrating
Independence Day; but I wonder how many of us think of them as anything more
than something pretty and fun to watch.
Imagine what it must have been like, say, 200 years ago when they
celebrated the fourth. Back then all
those flashes and bangs would have reminded the watchers of the fury of the
long and bitter war they endured to win their liberty; when the rockets red
glare and bombs bursting in air were fired in anger. The blasts of those “fireworks” rained
fragments of hot metal on patriots and oppressors that tore flesh and killed
and maimed men. And in every little
church such as our own, there would be a brass plaque somewhere on the wall
that named the husbands and sons who would never come home from that War of
Independence; and seated in the pews where you are there would be men without
arms, without legs, and missing eyes, bearing silent testimony to the fierce
conflict, and all those years of suffering and deprivation. Such people would have watched Fourth of July
fireworks with … I don’t know, greater respect, perhaps. It certainly would have been more to them
than a loud and expensive light show.
Their celebrations would have been at the same time more solemn and more
heartfelt because they knew first hand the oppression of living under foreign
domination, the relief of the freedom they’d won, and the terrible price they
had to pay to purchase it. It’s probably safe to say that we in
our time have lost most of their sense of reverence and joy in celebrating the
4th of July. We were born free and equal – we’ve never known
it any other way, and so we pretty much take it for granted. Today, it’s primarily immigrants to this
country who are able to really appreciate the value of the freedom and equality
we’ve always known. I can remember about
twenty five years ago, during the Cold War, a Soviet fighter pilot took an
enormous risk and defected with his jet plane, which just happened to be the
latest high-tech model that our folks were itching to get their hands on for
analysis. Anyway, they brought this
pilot to the Washington DC area for “debriefing”, and during some off time they
took him to a few nearby shops and malls to get some clothes and other things
for him. As he looked around, he
couldn’t believe the way that typical Americans lived. It was nothing like what he’d been taught to
expect back in the “Soviet workers’ paradise”.
So he figured that they had taken him to some kind of artificial world
they had created to deceive people such as himself – a sort of amusement park,
as it were, set up to fool would be defectors and spies into thinking that the
whole country was as free and prosperous as what he was seeing. When he expressed his suspicions, the people
in charge said, “Okay, fine. Take him
wherever he wants to go.” So they drove
around for nearly a hundred miles, him telling them where to turn, until at
last he realized that’s just the way we live here – that the whole country was,
at least from his perspective and what he was used to, like Disney’s magic
kingdom. At that point he began to
understand what it meant to be free. Or again, perhaps some of you were present last fall when we
had as our guest a man who is a refugee from Sudan. He’s currently studying to become a Lutheran
pastor and serving as vicar to a whole community of Sudanese refugees in the
Des Moines area. The stories he told of
what is happening in his country were horrific:
forced conversions to Islam – those who refused had hands or legs cut
off, attacks in the middle of the night by raiders armed with machetes and
rifles, the government approved confiscation of property, livestock, and goods,
and then living in squalor in wretched refugee camps. It’s people like these who have their rebirth
of freedom and equality in this country later in life who really understand
what celebrating the 4th of July is all about. And the same is often true in a
spiritual sense. I’ve noticed that many
of the strongest advocates of Christianity in general and Lutheranism in
particular are those who came to it later in life, and specifically from some
other form of spirituality that stressed the law and all the things a person
had to do to obey God and live righteously.
Right now some of the best and most articulate authors our Synod has
writing books about Lutheran theology for its publishing house are
converts. And they’re passionate about
what they do precisely because they are able to say, “I’ve been out there and
know the slavery of being told week after week about all the things I have to
do to be a good Christian, and about all the happy attitudes and emotions I was
supposed to have while doing them – but didn’t.
Now I truly know what it means to be free in the Gospel of Jesus
Christ.” These authors write to invite
people similarly bound up in legalistic religious systems to the freedom they
have found, as well as to tell us who were born into this faith what a precious
treasure we possess and all too often take for granted. And in so doing, they are following
in the footsteps of some other prolific Christian writers who wrote fervently –
tenaciously even – to preserve and promote the Gospel. I’m thinking of St. Paul who wrote most of the
New Testament, and Martin Luther who … well, he wrote a lot of stuff. These two men had a lot in common. Both were highly trained in the Scriptures;
they were doctors of theology. With
respect to their theology, both had been brought up and trained in a highly
legalistic way of understanding the Scriptures – it was all about the do’s and
don’ts of pleasing God and earning the right to eternal life. And both of these men strived mightily to
achieve the blessed life their legalistic way of understanding the Scriptures
imposed upon them. The big difference
was that Luther was absolutely wretched because he found that no matter how
hard he tried, he was failing to live up to the perfection that God demanded –
the law was too heavy a burden for him, whereas Paul was so blinded by the lie
of legalism that he hypocritically imagined he was doing just fine. He was like a brainwashed prisoner who
learned to love his prison cell because it gave him a sense of security. He was under the oppressive bondage of Law
and loving it. You may recall that the
Lord had to physically knock him into the dirt and blind him so that he could
begin to see the truth. But once he did,
once he knew the freedom of the Gospel, he became the church’s most ardent
advocate. He was determined to take freedom
of Christ to a world in slavery – and having tasted that freedom himself, he
was even more determined never again to go back under the Law. That’s why he wrote his letter to
the churches of Galatia, part of which we heard as this morning’s epistle. In it he explained that the law has a
purpose: “it was put in charge”, he
says, “to lead us to Christ”. The word
he uses there for being in charge describes a stern schoolmaster. Imagine a guy standing there watching over to
a child being forced to memorize a long, less-than-interesting lesson, and
every time the hand or eye wonders a bit—whack!
with the pointer. (Maybe some of
you have personal recollections of such things.) The law held us in such a prison, Paul
writes, that we might learn its lesson, namely, that it can’t be fulfilled by
sinners such as ourselves. No matter how
hard we try, and how many times the schoolmaster hits us, we’re still not going
to be perfect and therefore we cannot save ourselves from hell. Once you’ve learned that lesson, the Law has
done its work. When you see that you cannot fulfill the law, the
Scriptures point you to the One who fulfilled the Law for you: Jesus Christ.
His perfect obedience, his sacrificial death to pay the penalty of your
sin, and his resurrection to life are all yours not by doing, but by
believing and trusting in what he did.
When you get to that point, you’ve graduated. You don’t have to sit in the classroom and
let that guy keep hitting you. That’s
what some of the Galatians wanted to do.
Having come to faith Christ, they put their faith in him on the
backburner and kept struggling for their own personal perfection under the
Law. Paul wrote to warn them against
such foolishness. Having come to the
freedom of the Gospel, don’t allow yourselves to be placed back under the Law’s
bondage again. Of course, the reason there was a
Reformation was precisely because the medieval church failed to heed Paul’s
warning. It had become a spiritual
prison again. And while there were many
who, like Paul before his conversion, were deceived into thinking that their
prison was just dandy, there were others like Luther who were driven to godly
despair by the schoolmaster’s constant beatings. Not surprisingly, it was by reading what St.
Paul wrote that Luther rediscovered the truth that had been suppressed for so
long. And once he did, once he was set
free by faith in Christ, he became another champion of the cause, savoring the
freedom he’d come to know all the more exactly because he had known the cruel
oppression that came before it. And all of this should throw up some red flags
for us. Those who do not value their
freedom are those who are most in danger of losing it. We who were born into this nation as free and
equal citizens don’t really appreciate what we’ve got. The oppression of foreign domination is
something we’ve never known; the fierce struggle for freedom too distant a
memory. And if our national independence
won nearly 230 years ago seems remote, how much more remote is the hard fought
victory for our salvation that took place on a cross outside Jerusalem 2000
years ago, or the fight to reclaim the freedom that victory achieved 500 years
ago? How can we who were born into our
Christian freedom and have always taken it for granted learn to cherish it as
much as those who come to it later in life? The answer lies first in recognizing
the fact that we weren’t born free. Not
one of us was. Oh, we were born equal all right: equally under the Law’s condemnation. The Scriptures tell us plainly that we were
all conceived and born in sin and under the wrath of God. And like Paul before his conversion, we
didn’t even know it. How could we? For most of us, we were merely infants. But just as the Lord supernaturally
intervened to call Paul to faith by the power of the Holy Spirit and give him a
new birth of freedom, Christ came to set us free in the washing of rebirth in
Holy Baptism. Through the water and the
Word he introduced us to the risen Savior and made us trust in him. More than that, what Paul writes in this
morning’s epistle is that in Baptism we were clothed in Christ; that is, placed
inside him by God’s power. What that
means is that when God looks at you, he doesn’t see your sins. Instead he sees his Son Jesus Christ and his
sinless perfection. There’s actually more to it than
that. Paul elsewhere writes that your
putting on Christ in Baptism means that what happened to him also happened to
you. That is to say that his suffering
becomes your suffering, his death becomes your death, his burial is yours, and
so is his resurrection. What that means
is that your Baptism brings the battle won for your freedom into the present –
into your life. Say it another way: it makes you a veteran of the war for
independence. For you, it wasn’t just a
battle fought 2000 years ago – it happened to you in Christ. Your Baptism places you in Christ on the
cross when he atoned for the sins of the world.
It’s precisely that truth that sets you free from the bondage of the
Law, and allows you to be reborn in Christ, a free and equal citizen of the
kingdom of God. That’s why too that Luther taught
Christians to make the sign of the cross on themselves at the mention of the
Trinitarian invocation: in the name of
the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit. That’s the name into which we were baptized
according to Christ’s instruction and so became God’s children and heirs. What Luther suggested was that at the mention
of God’s name, we should remember our Baptisms in a tangible way in order to
bring the battle on the cross that earned our freedom to the present once again
– and to apply the truth of that battle won, the forgiveness and freedom it
achieved to the present – not like a
firework that is only a representation and echo of a war fought long ago, but
rather the cross of Christ applied to me, to you, in the here and now. It’s a way to keep in mind the precious
freedom that God has given to us in his Son as well as its frightful cost. And please don’t misunderstand me. Whether or not you make the sign of the cross
on yourself is not important. What is
important is remembering your Baptism and the grace and faith God gives you
every day that keeps you his child and heir in time and in eternity. My friends, just as national freedom is a
treasure that constantly needs to be defended from enemies foreign and domestic
that seek to take it away, so also the apathy and negligence of our sinful
nature within, and the cunning schemes of the devil and world from without seek
to rob us of the victory we have in Christ.
So may we, by God’s grace, and by constantly bringing the victory he won
for us into the present by his Word, by body and blood given for us, and by the
remembrance of our baptismal rebirths, remain always free and equal in Jesus
Christ. In his holy name. Amen. Soli Deo Gloria! |
