To Be Free

Acts 16:16-34 (-40)

On Friday my son and I visited with a pastor who works for a ministry in Turkey that helps educate Kurdish girls.  These girls are raised with two primary tracks for their life, either  marriage, at an average age of 14, and often as a mistreated second or third wife, or being handed a weapon and sent to the mountains to join the fighters. This is your freedom, they are told.  This is your salvation.  

But instead, with this ministry, they go to school, they learn a trade, they start a business, and when the marriage proposal or the gun comes, they say No.  The average marriage age for girls involved in this program is now 22.  And they tend to marry men who see them more as partners. They teach their own children to read, they hire friends for their businesses, they strengthen and build their communities. And the church is growing in that place – just like it was in Paul’s day, and in much the same way.  People are having dreams, “I saw a man on a white horse and he said his name was Jesus,” can you tell me more about this Jesus?  What must I do to be saved?  And the reality of God that breaks in and sets people free is embraced and shared and spreads.

What does salvation look like?  What does it mean?   Well-being, deliverance, wholeness… freedom in Christ looks different depending on what you are in bondage to.  And lucky for us we have several examples right here in today’s text.  Everyone in this story is enslaved to something. Everyone is aiming for their own salvation. They are working for their own well-being and security, striving for some semblance of safety and freedom. And yet they are all enslaved. 

The slave girl is the first and most obvious. Doubly enslaved, to a demon and to human masters, she has managed to stay alive by staying useful to others and losing her entire self in the process, mind, body and soul.  This wretched state of false safety gives an illusion life – she belongs to them, she has a role, she is useful in society.  But her humanity is stripped away and tamped down.

And yet, on these days, as she follows around the Jesus-preachers, the demon in her announcing the truth to the world – “These are servants of the most high God who preach a way of salvation!”  Did she know it was possible? Did she long to be free?  And, when, (apparently because Paul got so annoyed), the girl is released from the grasp of the demon, the illusion crumbles.  She is no longer a profitable commodity. She is useless to her owners. Her place in the world is gone. 

This happens to us often, when we are set free from a deep and abiding slavery that has defined us – perhaps it’s addiction to our work and the accolades that come with it. Maybe it’s a story we’ve believed about ourselves for decades that falls apart. Maybe it’s when we stop drinking, or taking the pain pills that we’ve relied on for years, and the feelings we’ve avoided come flooding in and we don’t know what to do with them.  It doesn’t feel like freedom. It feels terrible.  It feels like disorder and disarray, and we wonder if we will survive it.

I wonder if the slave girl survived it. She’d been so enslaved for so long, what was there for her when she was set free?  We might even be tempted to think it was more merciful to let sleeping dogs lie, or in this case, dogs that go barking at your heals all day to keep doing that. At least she had an identity and a purpose in the world. At least she had someone looking after her, even if that person was using and abusing her and disregarding her humanity.  Isn’t that better than having nothing?

This is one of the lies that keep us from being saved.  That freedom is too risky. Too unsafe.  Too unpredictable.  We could die, after all. Better to stay sick, or trapped, if it keeps our head above water. When you are set free the illusions die. The false salvation is exposed for what it was, and things can feel very, very precarious indeed.

The second example of those enslaved is the owners of the slave girl, who have their own path to salvation plotted out. They’ve found their way to make money and stay upwardly mobile in the world. They’ve worked hard to build a business and things are going well for them until their property regains her humanity and then their empire crumbles.  

Turns out it can all be taken away in a second; it was never going to keep them safe or give them long-lasting wholeness or meaning.  They are furious, and they get their revenge.  False accusations against Paul and Silas, seeing them publicly and severely beaten, thrown into the darkest, most secure, most horrific cell in the prison with their legs in chains, that should help them feel better. Did they feel secure now?  Did they reclaim their salvation? How far will you go on this quest? And just out of curiosity, in the pursuit of money and security, how much is enough before you are finally permanently ok?

The jailer is my favorite trapped person.  He’s just doing his job.  It’s a good job, a clear job. Put the prisoners in. Keep them there.  But circumstances beyond his control – that is, an earthquake that, instead of breaking buildings and crushing people, shakes open doors and releases chains – threaten all of that.  By the dim light of the midnight stars he sees the prison door hanging open and it’s all over for him. He has failed at his one task. He will be held responsible for all of them.  The illusion of his own security is gone in an instant.  He’s ready to put a sword through his own chest when a voice calls out from the deep darkness, Don’t do it! We are all still here!

Calling for a light he goes in and is stunned to see the prisoners all there.  

Nothing makes sense anymore. Who is free? Who is enslaved? 

The jailer falls down at Paul and Silas’ feet and begs them, What must I do to be saved?

What must I do to be free like you are? 

The gospel of Jesus Christ turns everything on its head, every time and always. The weak are strong, the poor are rich, the secure are actually as vulnerable as the rest of us. Slandered, beaten and locked up, these are the ones who are free.  No matter what and always, Paul goes on to say in all his letters, in Christ you are free, so live like that is true. 

Every moment, any moment, you can live in God’s reality.

I want that, the jailer said. What must I do to be saved? 

Salvation doesn't mean you instantly have security, the respect of others, money, a job, or a home, or a clear path in front of you. Those are the illusion of salvation. Real salvation often feels like scary unknown.  We’d all like to see a better ending for the slave girl.  But this isn’t her ending.  It’s just the beginning.  And Paul and Silas’ infuriating joy to sing in the darkness while their bodies lay bleeding is the most unfathomable thing, and yet it sweeps up all the other prisoners and the jailer too into this glimpse underneath the game, behind the illusion.  It invites them to be saved as well.

The jailer takes them to his home and bathes their wounds. They baptize him and his entire household.  They share a meal together, and stories about Jesus. And some time before morning Paul and Silas step over the broken rubble to sit back down in their cell, where the magistrates find them and attempt to ‘set them free,’ offering what they think is theirs to bestow.

But Paul and Silas answer, No thanks. You publicly humiliated and beat us; you arrested us in front of the whole town. You are not going to release us in secret!  We are Roman citizens– a fact that having been mentioned the day before may have spared them all of this discomfort – a fact which now reveals the bondage of the magistrates themselves!  

It’s their job to uphold the law, to protect Roman citizens. They have failed at this spectacularly!  Now their own safety is up for grabs, jeopardized by their wielding of their so-called power.  Now their illusion of security and well-being is exposed as well, and they too are on shaky ground.

Groveling, they let Paul and Silas go with a public apology.  And on they go – both preaching and living the way of salvation, just like they had the day before, and the day before that, recognizing that no matter what happens, every moment is an opportunity to live in the freedom of Christ. Every moment is a chance to invite others into that freedom.

I had an odd taste of this freedom last week.  My lease on my car was almost at its end, so I stopped into a car dealership to find out about getting another car.  There is nothing that feels so much like a board game in real life to me as buying a car. The bartering, the posturing, the pretending you’re going to walk out and check the dealership next door, the willingness to wait it out and wear them down… I kind of secretly love it.  

So it was that I found myself sitting across from a man for an unexpected almost four hours. In between numbers and bartering we talked about faith, and dogs, and kids, and death and goals. He was Jewish and married to a Catholic, and at one point he showed me a photo of his Christmas tree.  At lunchtime he invited me to come fill a plate at the employee catered Memorial day lunch and we ate together at his desk as we waited for a finance person to open up.  

And for whatever reason on that day, something happened to me.  I sat there across from him, seeing him, and seeing all the men and women rushing around me playing the game, typing on their computers, or pointing out features on cars, or herding their kids through the showroom.  It was like time slowed down and I was struck by the two layers of reality I was witnessing. The first layer was the game. And I thought to myself, Why, this is all pretend! We’ve made all this up! Clever humans! The rules, the credit scores, the financing, the sales, it’s all pretend. But so is the money, and the jobs, and the transportation and the holiday weekend.  This man in front of me goes home at night to his Catholic wife, and they talk to their grown son in New York on the phone, and before he hangs up he says the words he heard for the first and last time in his whole life sitting at his own dad’s deathbed, I love you, son.  That’s the real. 

This conversation we are having as two human beings eating together, That’s the real.  

The rest is a game. The rest is pretend. And I am playing it, willingly, and, I hope, well. 

But in this moment I can see that it’s all a game just the same.  

This feeling of supernatural clarity between the pretend and the real made me ridiculously content in what normally would have driven me mad with impatience and restlessness.

Oh God! What must I do to be saved? What must I do to be free? What must I do to be awake to the real?

From that desk I was ushered to the finance office, where a pale, balding man in a buttoned suit on an 80 degree day sat surrounded by no fewer than 30 pictures of children under five that, I soon discovered, were all of his one son.  This fact filled me with utter delight.  The doting dad shared that preschool graduation had just happened the day before, and delicious summer now stretched out in front of them.  And I loved him. I felt love for this man. Like the pleasure of chocolate melting sweet in your mouth, I found myself savoring the exquisite purity of his love for his child.  

When my car salesman finally took me to my new car, after orienting me to the details, topping off the gas tank, and taking a photo of me in front of my old car so my daughter could say goodbye to it, he reached out and shook my hand and said, “It was really, really nice to meet you. I don’t say that to everyone. If you ever need anything, even if it isn’t car-related, call me.”

And I think what he was trying to say was that he had glimpsed the real too.  I think he was trying to say that for him the illusion was punctured too, just for a bit, and like me, he had tasted salvation.  The freedom of belonging to God and each other that exists and sustains us at every moment had touched him as well. 

When I drove away, I said aloud to my new dashboard, Well. That was something.  

And I haven’t stopped thinking about it since.

What must I do to be saved?

It’s the question we ask when the illusion crumbles, when the delusion of control, or the façade of security falls apart.  It’s the question we ask when the lies of the world get holes poked in them, when the choices open up and we see there are others.  What must I do to be saved? When we get a peek at what freedom could look like for us, or we see what it looks like when someone else is living it.  When we are ready for something more, something deeper, something real, the question rises up: What must I do to be saved? 

And the answer can seem trite or unsatisfying if it is seen through the lens of the world. If control and working for your own salvation are your thing, the answer is really going to disappoint.

Trust in the Lord Jesus Christ.  That’s it. When the text says “believe” it is not a mind word, a head concept. It’s a heart, gut, being thing - trust, fall back into, lean on. Surrender to this realty. Surrender and trust in this God-person who interrupts the pretend with the real.

The real broke into that town that day, for the slave girl and her owners, the prisoners and the magistrates, the jailer and his household, and the church grew.  And Paul and Silas left there and headed out to the next adventure, to see what might unfold.

Life is this. It’s an adventure. What might unfold?  As people claimed and defined by Jesus Christ, even in the midst of the game, every moment is an opportunity to trust in Jesus. Every encounter may give us a glimpse of the belonging we share in God. Every conversation, every difficult circumstance or life shift, or mundane chore is a moment the real can break in and we can live like we are free because we are.

Church, this is what we will pray over Ava today as she is baptized. That she would grow up trusting more and more that she belongs to Jesus, that her life is safe in God, that she is free – free to be present with others, free to be real in the world, free to struggle, and feel, and cry, and rejoice, free to live and risk and learn and love.  We pray that she will trust in the Lord Jesus Christ for her life and her freedom, and that she will help us trust in the Lord Jesus Christ for our life and freedom, so that in life or in death, in sickness or health, in triumph or despair, we are held in the freedom and wholeness and well-being of the life that transcends death.  

And just as they are available to all of us whenever and every time we need them, the words are right there for her to say, What must I do to be saved? And when she does, we will answer, Trust in the Lord Jesus Christ.  You have been set free.

Amen.

Freedom, well lived

Galatians 5:1, 13-25

Summer is a wild ride when you’re a kid.

You’re used to waking up early, getting dressed right away, packing up your homework from the night before and heading off to eight completely structured hours, with clear expectations, a system of grades and accountability, a sense of progress and strict guidelines.  Evenings are shaped by homework, hockey practice, piano lessons and regimented ritual. 

Then one day in June you wake up and all bets are off.

 The sun rises to 14 glorious wide open and unaccounted-for hours.  What will you do? What wont you do?  Please!  

And at first it is spectacular.

You don’t feel like getting dressed? Then don’t!

You forgot to brush your teeth? So what! 

Inside, outside, games, tv, bikes, neighbors, sprinklers and sidewalk chalk and bare feet and sudden bouts of boredom (who even remembers what that feels like??) It’s an absolute dream come true.

What if you could do whatever you wanted – begs the tantalizing question of summer, all day, every day, for 96 days? (My kids counted it out.) 

Well, easy, it would be AWESOME, my children quickly answered. 

But eat that whole box of popsicles, my friends, one right after another, and after a few days it’s not so awesome.  Something shifts, and you begin craving your veggies and your daily morning announcements. 

What does 5 hours of screen time in a row feel like? Gross, that’s what. 

What happens to your room if you don’t clean it?  Your teeth if you don’t brush them?  Your psyche if you start staying up late but continue waking up early?  It’s not pretty, people.  Pretty soon it’s meltdown city. And not only the parents. Pretty soon, you start to find that you need something more than absolute freedom.

But this year we stumbled onto something surprising in our household.

A few days in, we scraped ourselves off the floor and hung a list on the fridge entitled, “Summer Weekdays.”

Now every day Owen and Maisy have certain things they need to accomplish, such as: read, play, 1 hour of time alone, 1 chore, tidy their room, take a shower – you get the gist. 

And at the end of the list each day are four questions:

Did you remember to:

brush your teeth?

limit screen time?

practice kindness?

take responsibility for your own actions? 

And as soon as that list hit the fridge things changed.  We didn’t tell them when they had to do what, just that by bedtime, they need to have completed the list.  But a spark was lit inside them and they rallied to its light. Stopping in throughout the day, their lists gave them purpose, enough structure to feel human again, but enough freedom to feel unrestricted.  They started paying attention to how they were existing in their body and mind, in their space and relationships, and this compass helped their self-guided days to be much more fun than the 14 straight hours of rudderless freedom had been.

That list is like the law had been for the Israelites.  

Released from soul-crushing slavery in Egypt that dictated every move and prescribed their very being, they are suddenly faced with complete freedom.  And God gave them the law – here is what freedom looks like well spent. Here is how to be in relationship with one another, yourselves, and me as free people.  Given who you really are, here is how you are now free to live.

In this freedom from slavery, where you belong to me, Yahweh says, not to Pharaoh, your worth is not determined by what work I can get out of you or how much you produce, or even how well you obey. 

It is determined by my love, my having made you, my knowing who you were meant to be all along and asking you to live now freely into that identity. 

So, as free people, you won’t steal from each other, because you will all have enough and you will share what you have with each other. You wont harm or kill each other, because you will value one another deeply and work out your differences even when it’s hard, and you will forgive each other and restore right relationship between you.  You wont live in consuming jealousy of each other’s lives, you will live in gratitude for your own life, joyfully contributing your voice and your experiences to the whole, to the benefit of others.  You get the picture.  The law was an incredible gift.  It helped them to be truly free.

And then, gradually, sin - that ravenous instinct toward self-preservation and self-determination, over-against each other and ultimately God as well - crept in, and people began to use the law as some kind of template to personal security with God, a way to get ahead, to manage their own fate and earn a relationship with God that was already theirs.  And for some, the law morphed into a straight up to-do list that got bigger and longer, (because after all, if everyone gets Pokemon cards at the end of the week for doing these things, then shouldn’t I get MORE cards if I do even MORE things?  After all, if we keep the standards too low, ANYBODY could get in, and then how will we know who’s the best)?

And when this sort of thing happens, inevitably competition and jealousy breed, and judgment and self-righteousness grow, and then on the flip side, those who can’t compete give up, and sacrifice their humanity to their desires, which goes something like, Well, I blew it and lost the reward anyway, so what does it matter what I do? I’m going to get in trouble anyway, so what’s even the point?  I’ll do what I want when I want.  Forget your stupid list.  Nobody can tell me what to do. 

And if my behavior hurts you, or myself, if it disconnects me from those around me, or stifles and silences my creativity, contribution and capacity to share, that is of no concern to me, or feels too obscure to even consider.  You said I’m free.  So I’ll do what I want.  Which really means, this all feels impossible and I give up.

And then that nasty drive for self-preservation also breeds gaping division.  We tear each other down to prove our points, we label and dismiss one another, summing up others with snap judgments and easy assumptions.  We make others less than human in an effort to have our own humanity upheld.

STOP!!! Paul screams into this chaos. Stop it right now!

Who do you think you are? You are freed for freedom in Christ. Freed!  Freed to live as real humans, as image-bearer of the Divine! Freed to live for each other, to live in the love you were created for to begin with! 

This is our fourth installment in Paul’s mad letter to the church in Galatia, where a group of original Christians, that is, Jewish Christians, had arrived among the new baby gentile Christians and brought their refrigerator list with them, the extended version, no less.  And while this list had clearly been meaningful for them, it was nothing less than a barrier to God for the Galatians, who had come to Jesus with completely different versions of slavery, and different abuses of freedom, and a different experience of salvation altogether. The paradigm didn’t translate, and the list they brought became lifeless shackles. The Galatians’ fridge needed some different reminders hung up.

Here’s the thing: The temptation to either avoid or to abuse our freedom, to live as slaves to our own quest for self-preservation, is so deeply ingrained, in our very dna, that we feel the pull all the time.  It’s a battle, Paul says. Like a war within ourselves.  Literally his words are, Don’t make self-indulgence your “base of operations.” Don’t let your identity rest in the quest to satisfy yourself.  Instead live from the freedom you have been given.

We’ve seen what happens when the law is distorted by sin’s self-preservation, separating us from God and each other in a kind of burdensome slavery, now Paul shows us what happens when freedom itself is distorted by sin’s self-preservation, separating us from God and each other in a kind of trapped slavery.

And here it might be helpful to turn to a different translation – a modern paraphrase.

 It is obvious what kind of life develops out of trying to get your own way all the time: repetitive, loveless, cheap sex; a rotten accumulation of mental and emotional garbage; frenzied and joyless grabs for happiness; the worship of possessions and power; cults of personality; paranoid loneliness; cutthroat competition; all-consuming-yet-never-satisfied wants; a brutal temper; an impotence to love or be loved; divided homes and divided lives; small-minded and lopsided pursuits; the vicious habit of depersonalizing everyone into a rival; uncontrolled and uncontrollable addictions; ugly parodies of community. I could go on.

And then Paul describes true freedom, living as we were meant to live, in a list we’ve written in sharpie and hung up in grapes, apples and oranges in Sunday school rooms throughout the decades, aka, the fruit of the Spirit, which could sound something like this:

 But what happens when we live God’s way? The Spirit brings gifts into our lives, much the same way that fruit appears in an orchard—things like affection for others, exuberance about life, serenity. We develop a willingness to stick with things, a sense of compassion in the heart, and a conviction that a basic holiness permeates things and people. We find ourselves involved in loyal commitments, not needing to force our way in life, able to marshal and direct our energies wisely.   (The Message)

Here’s the thing: lists of rules on our fridge, if they were simply imposed on our kids arbitrarily with absolute obedience demanded, would produce nothing but fighting, bribing and shaming our kids, trapping them in meaningless drudgery.  

And, wow, if our kids were told their acceptance in our love was dependent on their ability to perfectly follow all the rules we’d hung up there, it would change how they saw us, and themselves, and their life in our home and connection with each other.  The list would become a crushing weight, and they would become slaves to their own ongoing attempts to earn our love.  Or they would throw in the towel and live wild, feral lives.

So how would we live if we believed God loves us? How would we live if the list we were given was an invitation to remember who we are and how freedom looks when it’s lived out with each other fully and joyfully?

This life is holy. This life is a gift. 

These people around you? They are amazing. 

Each one different, each one knowing something you don’t, bringing something into the world that you can’t. You need these people.  And they need you.  When you let yourself live by the Spirit that calls you to your true self, in true relationship with God in the bond opened up by Christ, you will find a different kind of living pouring forth. 

From time to time You will find Love. 

Your heart will well up and overflow onto others, the desire to reach out and know them, to be known, will guide you.  Instead of drawing back and buttoning down the hatches of your soul, you will find yourself extending toward others. 

And honey, there will be joy! Delight in life, and gratitude and awe at the sleeping child whose lashes rest on her warm cheek, and the bursting of the sweet ripe berry in your mouth, and the shock of deep color in the single petal of the spectacular flower in your quiet garden, and body shaking laughter, deep and hard. 

And you may taste Peace, sensing now and then beyond the fear and the chaos, underneath the manic frenzy, that deep cool place where you and your God dwell in simple silence.  That brief pause, when everything else doesn’t matter because you know you are going to be ok.  And between us as well, despite conflict and tension, underneath it all, it’s going to be ok. 

Patience will grace you, and occasionally you’ll find yourself seeing through the furious temper tantrum and the maddening whining to the tired little soul splayed out at your feet, or past the traffic jam to the precious stranger in the car beside you, somewhere important to be, a life of her own she is living, or under the volatile conflict into the longing to be heard and to hear, to be seen and to see, that is pulsing within each of you. 

You can live Kindness, not niceness presumed by affection, or politeness earned by status.  Simply My humanity sees your humanity and I choose to meet you. I can help with that, let me get the door, I brought you this, I thought of you, how have you been, my friend?

And risk Generosity –you don’t need to horde and hide, to scavenge and scrimp.  You are valuable to me, your needs are my needs. We can share what we have and care for one another.

Faithfulness is now a possibility, I will keep my commitments, you will keep yours. We can be taken at our word; we can be consistent and trustworthy.

And Gentleness opens up between us, life is hard and we can tread lightly in each other’s fragile places and handle one another with tenderness.  

And you can breathe the clean, fresh air of Self-control, that you can choose to participate in a way that upholds your being and respects the being of others, and this can characterize our life together.

This is the freedom for which Christ has freed us.  

And since we live by the Spirit, and this is what that looks like, let’s not keep this picture of freedom as an idea in our heads or a sentiment in our hearts, Paul implores, let’s work it out in the details of our unique and varied lives, as we are bound together in Christ.  

Let’s practice it, and check in with ourselves throughout the day, and let it be our compass, to guide us in this glorious, holy, gift of a life.

Amen.