“For Freedom, Christ Has Set You Free”

by

Rev. Samuel Alexander

Preached at Old First Presbyterian Church

San Francisco, California

December 29, 2002

Sermon 340

New Testament Readings:           

Luke 2:22-40 

(Luke 2:22-40 NRSV)  When the time came for their purification according to the law of Moses, they brought him up to Jerusalem to present him to the Lord {23} (as it is written in the law of the Lord, "Every firstborn male shall be designated as holy to the Lord"), {24} and they offered a sacrifice according to what is stated in the law of the Lord, "a pair of turtledoves or two young pigeons." {25} Now there was a man in Jerusalem whose name was Simeon; this man was righteous and devout, looking forward to the consolation of Israel, and the Holy Spirit rested on him. {26} It had been revealed to him by the Holy Spirit that he would not see death before he had seen the Lord's Messiah. {27} Guided by the Spirit, Simeon came into the temple; and when the parents brought in the child Jesus, to do for him what was customary under the law, {28} Simeon took him in his arms and praised God, saying, {29} "Master, now you are dismissing your servant in peace, according to your word; {30} for my eyes have seen your salvation, {31} which you have prepared in the presence of all peoples, {32} a light for revelation to the Gentiles and for glory to your people Israel." {33} And the child's father and mother were amazed at what was being said about him. {34} Then Simeon blessed them and said to his mother Mary, "This child is destined for the falling and the rising of many in Israel, and to be a sign that will be opposed {35} so that the inner thoughts of many will be revealed--and a sword will pierce your own soul too." {36} There was also a prophet, Anna the daughter of Phanuel, of the tribe of Asher. She was of a great age, having lived with her husband seven years after her marriage, {37} then as a widow to the age of eighty-four. She never left the temple but worshiped there with fasting and prayer night and day. {38} At that moment she came, and began to praise God and to speak about the child to all who were looking for the redemption of Jerusalem. {39} When they had finished everything required by the law of the Lord, they returned to Galilee, to their own town of Nazareth. {40} The child grew and became strong, filled with wisdom; and the favor of God was upon him.

                                           Galatians 4:1-7, 31-5:1

{1} My point is this: heirs, as long as they are minors, are no better than slaves, though they are the owners of all the property; {2} but they remain under guardians and trustees until the date set by the father. {3} So with us; while we were minors, we were enslaved to the elemental spirits of the world. {4} But when the fullness of time had come, God sent his Son, born of a woman, born under the law, {5} in order to redeem those who were under the law, so that we might receive adoption as children. {6} And because you are children, God has sent the Spirit of his Son into our hearts, crying, "Abba! Father!" {7} So you are no longer a slave but a child, and if a child then also an heir, through God.

{4:31} So then, friends, we are children, not of the slave but of the free woman.{5:1} For freedom Christ has set us free. Stand firm, therefore, and do not submit again to a yoke of slavery.

Let us pray:

“Spirit of God, it is still Christmas.  Katherine is right.  The whole world does not know.  We ask that you let your word and your hope speak forth from this pulpit this day, and from this pulpit into each and every one of our hearts that we may speak the word of Christmas hope to everyone around us.  In Christ’s name we pray, Amen.”

I am always interested when I hear people complaining about the apostle Paul.  It comes up a lot.  I guess that if I asked for a show of hands, there would be a peppering of hands all around the congregation.  We could probably do without the apostle Paul, or at least without his reputation.  Many people see him as one who represents an oppressive, repressive, moral, structured religion that damaged us at some point in our lives.  It’s the apostle Paul, with all his opinions about what is right and what is wrong.  I talk to a lot of visitors, a lot of new folks that come into our church, and very often people say they feel comfortable here at Old First because we don’t preach that kind of repressive, moralistic structured kind of religion.  It has moved me to say sometimes that I think Old First is a hospital for those who have been wounded by Christianity some time in their past. 

The interesting thing is that Paul is working very hard in the letter to the Galatians to undermine repressive, moralistic religious structures.  The gospel that Paul proclaims allows people to be free, to become healed from the damage that religious structures have at one time done to them. So his words are twisted.  That is not too terribly surprising because religion in the hands of human beings always manages to get twisted.  Our impulses get twisted and strained so that it controls us and controls the people around us.  Kings have been doing it for centuries.

The Old Testament:-  Do you ever wonder where those stories came from?  A great many of those stories came and were created because there were kings who wanted to justify their existence religiously, so they had scribes write stories for them.  It is a miracle that God can speak through such things, and yet God does.  In Revelation we have appearing the beast of the land and the beast of the sea. The beast of the sea represents the Emperor with crowns and jewels, while the beast of the land is that servant of religion that serves the emperor and keeps his power going.  The beast of the land and the beast of the sea are hurled into the lake of burning sulfur to suffer forever, which gives you some sense of what the author of the Revelation of John thinks about oppressive, moralistic, religious structures that control our lives. 

But it’s not just in the Bible.  Jane Austin also seems to think about religious structures that are oppressive, social structures that keep us bound up and unavailable to God’s hopeful and loving Spirit.  Barbara and I and Matthew and our friend, Jana, for six hours this weekend watched the BBC’s production of Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austin.  It was a wonderful experience.  We haven’t done it in at least a year, and sometimes I think it ought to be done once a year. But Austin is wrestling with Paul’s themes, and that is why I bring her up.  I would like to talk a little bit about Pride and Prejudice because she is wrestling with those themes.  She is wrestling with a structure and a hierarchy that seems to keep people pressed in instead of liberating them, and yet she sees some value in that structure as well.  Her novel is set late in the 18^th century, and it is about a society that has a whole hierarchy of people.  You have the servants, the lowly workers, so to speak. Above them you have the trades people, and above them you have clergy people and lawyers.  These last seem to be on a par.  The clergy people and the lawyers -- they are the people who were the second or third sons of wealthy folk.  It is what you do if you don’t have a real inheritance.  You become a lawyer, or you become a preacher.  Above that there are gentlemen and gentlewomen who don’t seem to do anything much except run the estate, whatever that means, and they have a hierarchy of their own.  People who have great wealth can be married to people who have great wealth, but if you are a couple of ranks down, well, that just won’t do.  It’s  a structure that provides society some stability, and yet on the other hand provides very few opportunities.  So we watched Pride and Prejudice.

The Preacher named Mr. Collins had to be the most amusing character in the whole movie.  He represented religion for Jane Austin in this book, represented religion, for religion supports the structures and the status quo.  Mr. Collins had a benefactress, Lady Catherine DeBerge, and in this novel Lady Catherine was at the very top of that hierarchy --  this Wonder Woman in this huge, massive house with all of this education and ability.  Mr. Collins, the preacher, was eloquent in her praise, Jane Austin says.  The subject elevated him to more than usual solemnity of manner, and  he protested that he had never in his life witnessed such behavior in a person of rank, such affability and condescension as he had himself experienced from Lady Catherine.  She had been graciously pleased to approve of both the discourses which he had already had the honor of preaching before.  Don’t you wish I had that attitude towards you? 

She had also asked him twice to dine at Rosings and had sent for him only the Saturday before to make up her pool of quadrille in the evening.  Lady Catherine was reckoned proud by many people he knew, but he had never seen anything but affability in her.  She had always spoken to him as she would to any other gentleman.  She made not the smallest objection to his joining in the society of the neighborhood, and on-and-on-and-on Mr. Collins went about Rosings and Lady Catherine DeBerge.  That was religion in Pride and Prejudice, those who support that structure, that repressive, non-opportunity driven culture.

But that was a sideshow, because the real story was about Mr. Darcy and Elizabeth, two very interesting characters in English literature.  Darcy was practically perfect in every way.  He was very wealthy, the wealthiest of all the characters in the book.  He had a beautiful home, Pemberly, with the grounds immaculately kept.  He was brought up extremely well by his father who taught him how to treat the servants in a kind and generous tone.  He was very well educated, understood music and finance, and managed to run the estate in a way that helped it to grow and the town to grow around him.  Mr. Darcy was really something -- except for one thing.  He was rather proud of his position in this structure.  He enjoyed his position  just a little too much, and in fact, so much that it moved him to snub our heroine, Elizabeth.  He snubbed her at a dance.  Now Elizabeth was a lady of great joy and great opinion and great hope.  She was bright and graceful and beautiful, but she was not somebody from the most excellent class of relations.  She just wasn’t the right kind of person for Darcy to look upon her as a possible mate, and so at a dance he is overheard as saying, “There is nobody at this dance with whom it is worth dancing.”  He sticks his nose in the air and shuns all of the society around him because they are not big enough, important enough, or high enough to illuminate his character. 

Still, somehow his eye is drawn to the grace and the beauty of Elizabeth.  His eye is forever coming back to the joy of life that lives inside this woman’s soul, the love that expresses itself to all the people around her,. Time and again Darcy’s eye is caught, and his heart is gathered up into that joy and love of the spirit until finally he bubbles over.  He can’t do anything else but bubble over and tell her about his affections, his deep wonder, and his love for her in spite of the fact that it is an improper idea.  Our heroine responds in a pointed way.  She says, “Nothing could induce me to marry you.”  All the pride, all of the snubbing, all of the taking hold of position for position’s sake, the man of the system, the man of the structure is rejected because he does not understand what he is living for within it.  Elizabeth snubs him for his pride, and he goes away wounded. 

Now here is where the novel to me gets interesting.  Most novels end up a story of somebody getting back at somebody and somebody else being hurt, and around and around it goes. But Darcy changes and tries to begin to understand his place in the structure of the world around him.  The snub tears a little hole in his pride, and he recognizes that in his position as an heir, he is able to take hold of the position and make something of it -- to, like his father, build his estate so that it feeds the lives of other people, not take them away.  Darcy’s character starts to change in the way that he treats other people who used to be beneath him.  Instead, honor and respect become the tone in his voice.  Caring begins to happen.  He goes way out of his way to help somebody else in deep despair and deep trouble.  Darcy understands his position of privilege in the structure.  Everything that he has, that has been given to him only by God’s grace, is to be used to build up the Kingdom.  That is what it means to be an heir.  The heir of the estate is there to build it and help it to grow. 

The heirs in the Kingdom of God, says the Apostle Paul, are here for just that; to build the Kingdom and help it to grow.  Christian people, believers, those who have the Spirit of God living within them, do not have this spiritual status so that they can look down upon anyone else.  They have that sonship and daughtership, the Apostle Paul says, so that they can use the privilege to encourage the world to grow towards God. 

That’s what it means to be an heir.  Paraphrasing Paul’s words, “We cannot be stuck in the structure so far that we cannot let our lives renew the Kingdom and help it to grow.”  We are heirs, not slaves.  We are people who see the system we live in and recognize that our privilege is the privilege that allows us to help that system open up and bring opportunity to the world around us.  The religious structures in Paul’s day were undermining this.  The Jewish religious structures were undermining this, and Paul preached the Gospel of Freedom, freedom from the oppressive place that people seem to hold within their religion, freedom to break loose and look at the bigger picture, not hold on to privilege but instead hold on to the Spirit of God and to the love that goes through him so that the place of power, the place of creation can begin to emerge and grow.

Parochial interests are not to be served here, and that worries me when I think about the church in the United States of America these days.  It does worry me some because I seem to feel, from time to time anyway, that we are an awful lot like Mr. Collins, the Church at large, thanking this wonderful country, which certainly is wonderful, for all the benefits and the pleasure that we have, and supporting this country in the many things that it does to maintain its place in the structures of the world. We in America talk about freedom and democracy.  We talk about the rights of the individual which are limited by the rights of another individual.  We talk about these things, and yet at the same time we hear our government talking about driving the North Korean people into economic collapse.  That’s our country.  We talk about freedom, and we talk about democracy, we also abhor innocent death, and yet we hear our President at least raise the possibility that he might use nuclear weapons on Iraqi soil. 

The defenders of freedom and democracy in the Church have not screamed out at the top of its lungs “How dare we!”  Why do we have the privilege that God has given us in this structure in the world if it is not to help the world grow, if it is not to help the world love.  We support economic structures that repress opportunity, not only for people in our own nation but for nations all over the globe, and we wonder why people hate us.  Like Darcy, it is as though we look down with disdain on those who cannot live up to our position and our place.  We are prideful. 

We need to renew our sense that we are  heirs to the Kingdom of God.  This nation needs to  recognize that we are not here to promote our own privilege but rather to use what gifts, opportunities, and privilege we have to care for other people in the world around us.  We can’t be Mr. Collins anymore. And so we need to open our hearts to the Spirit of God and look upon the others, all those people that are down beneath us, we think, and see what God is doing with them, and see if maybe the joy and the presence of the Spirit of God doesn’t start to enlighten and enliven our hearts.  We need to look upon the people that we see as enemies with compassion and with understanding of what drives them, asking ourselves what we can do to contribute to their growth.  This is worthy of heirs to the Kingdom of God, but does it mean that we move without any moral structure?  Does it mean that we move without any ability to say “No” when people cross inappropriate boundaries?  No, of course not.

Elizabeth knew how to say “No” at the right time, and when she said “No” it had the wonderful effect of changing Mr. Darcy.  That is the kind of No we need to say, the kind of No we need to say to the people around us,  the kind of No our nation needs to say to other nations that are bent on our destruction, the kind of No that moves people to repentance and gets them to understand what they are worth and what God is doing in them.  Elizabeth knew when to rebuke, and our Church needs to know when to rebuke as well.  We need somehow to stand against the rising tide. 

Have you tried to do this over the last few months?  Have you tried as a person who loves Jesus and who knows the love of God inside your heart, have you tried to stem the tide against the violence?  I have, and I know most of you have.  It is a difficult position to hold.  It is as though an entire society is caught up in its own structure. But the birth of the Christ Child into this world is what gives us our hope in that endeavor, because it is the birth of the Christ Child, the birth of Hope, the birth of New Life that comes into each one of our lives and begins to change our hearts.  I believe that. 

Hearts are changed when the life of Jesus Christ moves in.  There are Darcys all over the world who are changed because the Spirit of Love that sparked the Divine moves in and begins to grow and change. And so our job as the Church is to nurture that spark within each one of us, to nurture that spark in everyone we see.  It is “for freedom Christ has set us free,” free from the structures, free from the desire to simply promote our own privilege. “Stand fast, don’t submit to that yoke of slavery again,” says the Apostle Paul.  Instead “be heirs to the Kingdom.”  We have a stake in what happens all over the globe, not just what happens inside our home.  Heirs to the Kingdom, for freedom God has set you free.

Let’s pray. 

“There is tremendous challenge and tremendous hope in your word to us, Spirit of God.  You call us heirs.  We ask that you will empower us as heirs.  Give us great courage and tremendous love.  Let your Spirit move on this earth so that lives can be changed.  Amen.”