Proper 9 (July 3-9)
Texts: Matt 11:16-19, 25-30;
Romans 7:15-25a
YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/live/6RPVV0ZDj5A?feature=share&t=732
PowerPoint Slides for Sermon
NURTURING TRUE FREEDOM
Everyone has a bachelor or bachelorette party disaster story, right? Things got a little out of hand? Mine involves a friend I made through seminary. Things are a bit hazy since it was forty years ago . . . though the haziness may be due to more than just the passage of time. Things might have gotten a bit hazy already towards the end of the party itself, if you know what I mean. In any case, I was one of the first to leave and missed the grand finale. I didn’t find out about what had happened until I arrived to the wedding and learned that the start was being delayed. They weren’t sure if the groom could make it through a wedding. No one can be sure if it was because he flushed a lot of fluids through his body during the Bachelor’s Party, but as the party was breaking up he suddenly became crippled with pain from passing kidney stones. Ouch! They did end up having the wedding, I’m glad to say. They had to shorten things up a bit, and give the groom two things: a cane to help him stay standing and massive doses of pain killers. What’s your horror story?
Bachelor and bachelorette parties are famous for something else, too. At some point or another, someone makes a toast to celebrate the groom’s or bride’s ‘last night of freedom.’ Before taking on that ‘yoke’ of marriage. We joke about this to some extent. But what about the part of this which is serious? Does one’s freedom diminish when you get married? Then why do we get married?
Or, does this mean that perhaps we have a flawed understanding of freedom? Does yoking one’s life to another’s in marriage actually have the potential to increase our freedom? We don’t read Ephesians 5 as much at weddings these days: are we turned off by St. Paul’s language about spouses being subject to one another in Christ’s love? Paul actually begins this section speaking to the whole congregation, whether married or not. “Be subject to one another in reverence to Christ.” Does being subject to another person sound more like enslavement or liberation to us? And, again, what does that say about our understanding of freedom?
One of Martin Luther’s better essays was one titled, “On Christian Liberty,” where he articulated Christian freedom around these two paradoxical statements:
• A Christian is a perfectly free lord of all, subject to none.
• A Christian is a perfectly dutiful servant of all, subject of all, subject to all.
Which is it? I believe Luther was trying to express our true freedom in terms of being subject to one another in Christ, whose main teaching revolved around lovingly serving one another. Jesus had so many ways of saying we should lovingly serve one another, particularly the least among us. ‘I was hungry and you gave me to eat. . . .’ Let me cut right to the chase: I believe a true Christian understanding of human freedom teaches us to be more free by lovingly serving each other. Being subject to one another. That’s why Jesus can truly say in today’s Gospel Reading that his yoke is less of a burden. It’s a liberation. It’s more freeing. Why? Because he teaches us to serve one another. (We’ll get to a second part of this when considering our Second Reading from Romans 7.)
But this Christian understanding of our human freedom goes even deeper, I think. It teaches us that human beings are yoked to each other, in the first place. The Bible teaches us right from the beginning that God created us knowing that it’s not good for to be alone. First the animals, but that’s not quite. Then God creates gender, male and female, as equal partners. We are created to be in covenant community with each other — created to be yoked to one another. Our lives go astray if we try to live independently. Staying alive and even thriving is too burdensome alone. The two oxen yoked together (in the picture) are grateful for to share the load. We are created to help each other, and our earth home, by working together to help all life to flourish. Martin Luther King, Jr., used to put it as, “No one is truly free, until everyone is free.” In other words, it’s about learning to work together for the common good.
Well, that seems like ‘pie in the sky,’ doesn’t it? How can we all work together? That’s tough enough to do just in our families, right? How often do our desires in life seem to clash and go in different directions? Life seems to be more of a battle of working to get one’s own desires met against the differing desires of others. Freedom, in that scenario, seems to be about getting my desires accomplished either independently of others, or on the backs of others. Freedom seems to be about getting to the top of the pyramid where my desires are preeminent. I get to dictate my desires to and over others.
Here’s where a Judeo-Christian understanding of being human presents another view of freedom. First, it’s not good for us to be alone. God models this by yoking God’s self in covenant to the people of Israel, whose calling is to be a blessing to all the families of the earth. In light of the Christian revelation, we’ve even come to see God in terms of a community: Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, the three persons of the Trinity who subject themselves to one another in love. And they invite all of creation into its dance. As the creatures created in God’s image, we are the ones who yoked to one another in loving service to each other’s desires.
In recent decades, there’s been a Christian anthropology that helps us to understand our yoking as part of our hard-wiring, so to speak. Through the ways in which are brains are structured. Scientists have discovered special neurons in our brains that they’ve dubbed “mirror neurons” because they tie us together subconsciously in mirroring one another, in learning from one another by imitation. Because we have so many of these neurons, we more than any other creatures are tied into each other through the anatomy of our brains. We are yoked to one another on a deeper level than any other creatures. Dr. David Eagleman, previewing a PBS episode of “The Brain” that aired November 12, 2015: “There’s no avoiding the truth that’s etched into our neural circuitry: we need each other. Relationships are rooted in trillions of electro-chemical signals. We’re something like a single, vast superorganism. Our future, our survival, is intimately bound up with that of the people around us.”1 This is especially true on the level of our basic desiring. We catch our desires from each other. But then that means that we eventually become rivals for the same objects of desire. It cuts both ways. Our lives can seem like a battle to get our desires fulfilled above those of others.
Or we can learn a certain way of desiring that tends to lead away from such clashes. When our desiring is grounded in God’s love through Jesus Christ, our desiring begins to become more Christlike. We learn to serve one another’s desiring so that we increase one another’s sense of freedom. Here’s the bottom line: true freedom is not about if we are yoked to others. Trying to become unyoked from others, or in control of the yoking, does not bring true freedom. True freedom depends upon whom we are yoked to. When we are yoked to God’s love in Jesus Christ, all our relationships become more free by increasingly becoming more about lovingly serving each other needs and desires. Jesus’s yoke is liberating through being subject to one another.
Another way to approach this paradox is through what Paul is talking about in Romans, the matter of law and grace. He speaks about the frustration that, even when we try to do things right — yoked together under the law, in a beautiful system and nation like ours — it can still become a matter of merit, where we’re constantly keeping score. We’re paying attention to what everyone else is doing, like, ‘I’m doing my part. What about that slacker over there.’ We start to play those games, and suddenly we’re in the dilemma Paul articulates: This whole business of being under the law turns into a struggle — both with other people but also internally. ‘I struggle to do what’s right, and I can’t seem to do it.’
Sometimes as Lutherans, though, I think we leave off that last sentence, which says, ‘Hey, in Jesus Christ, we can begin to be liberated from that kind of struggle!’ We can become free from that kind of struggle when it becomes a matter of grace rather than law. Living in grace rather than under the law. Living under the grace of God’s unconditional love for us, under God’s unconditional forgiveness for us. That when we are yoked to God’s love in Jesus Christ, things can begin to be different for us. True freedom is not about if we are yoked to others; true freedom depends on whom we are yoked to. When we are yoked to God through the love of Jesus Christ, all our relationships can become more free.
How might that freedom work out in marriage, in Christian love, as we learn to imitate lovingly serving one another in grace? How does that work our as church? As Lutheran Church of the Resurrection moves forward to call a new pastor, how can we be yoked together in ways that increase our freedom through lovingly serving one another? How do we all get on the same page for mission?
What does that freedom mean for us as a nation? For me, the COVID pandemic offered the opportunity to get our freedom right. That our freedom lies in our loving and serving one another, coming together in a way so that we could beat this thing together. What happened instead. We splintered in so many directions, disagreements on even what freedom is.
Jesus came to give us a different kind of yoke. That when we follow him together in discipleship, in love, in grace, we can begin to all these things together in grace. Amen
Paul J. Nuechterlein
Lutheran Church of the Resurrection,
Racine, WI, July 9, 2023
YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/live/6RPVV0ZDj5A?feature=share&t=732
PowerPoint Slides for Sermon
Note
1. This quote was from a preview video for Episode 5 in the Series The Brain, “Why Do I Need You?” The entire episode is worth viewing at: https://youtu.be/GxLMZKhB3FA?si=zf7KzhJVbX0xpRZB. Much of the quote is from the concluding words in the episode, beginning at 52:25: https://youtu.be/GxLMZKhB3FA?si=_8zkLJmMkvR2NBUM&t=3145
