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| "The Spirit of Detroit," by American sculptor Marshall Maynard Fredericks (1908 – 1998). |
2 Corinthians 3:17-4:6
Fourth Sunday after
Pentecost/ 6th July 2014
A song came to mind this week. It’s from 1974 or 1975, when
I was about ten or eleven years old, when the musical Shenandoah was on Broadway.
At the time, perhaps the best-known song from the show was “Freedom.”
That’s about the only song I remember from it, a musical that’s largely
forgotten today. Perhaps you remember
the words:
Freedom ain’t a
state like Maine or Virginia/
Freedom
ain’t across some county line/
Freedom
is a flame that burns within us
Freedom’s
in the state of mind.[1]
I remember thinking: where is freedom? There are places that are free and places
that are not. The United States, I
learned in school, is a place of freedom; the former Soviet Union was not. There are places where liberty is in the air
one breathes and there are places where it’s not. Sometimes you can be so close to freedom, see
it at a distance, and yet know that where you’re standing, you’re not
free. A line makes all the difference. On one side of border you’re free; on the
other side enslaved. What is it like to
live enslaved or with limited freedoms within a stone’s throw of freedom?
When I was in Detroit two weeks ago for the General
Assembly of the Presbyterian Church (USA), I walked past a remarkable monument,
the International Underground Railroad Monument. The walk between my hotel and the convention center followed along the Detroit
River. On the other side of the river, to the south, lies Windsor, Canada. Detroit was a terminus on the Underground
Railroad. On the other side was
freedom.
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| "Gateway to Freedom" |
It’s easy to associate freedom with geography. I remember
driving through East Germany on the way to West Berlin. It was 1990.
The Berlin Wall had come down the previous autumn, but there were still
two Germanys at the time. It was a
harrowing experience to go from West Germany into East Germany—through the
heavily fortified border crossing, barbed wire, watchtowers, tanks, machine-gun
batteries—driving through East Germany along the only highway allowed by my
transit visa (we were not allowed to exit off the highway), and then eventually
enter West Berlin through the British sector.
It was disturbing and stressful. I arrived in West Berlin with one of the worse
headaches I’ve ever had. Then, in West
Berlin, we saw the remains of the Wall, (I still have a piece of the Wall) and
looked across No Man’s Land into East Berlin. Freedom on one side; very little
freedom on the other.
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| Tearing down the Berlin Wall, 9th November 1989. |
“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 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.” From the Declaration of Independence.
It’s easy to demonstrate that very similar ideas are
found in, of all people, John Calvin (1509-1564). At the end of Calvin’s magisterial work, Institutes of the Christian Religion, 1559, he talks about the
responsibilities given to those in authority over the people. Those in leadership have an obligation to
care for the needs of the people. If the
welfare of the people is in question, then the people might have a right to do
something about it.[2]
They might not be fit to serve.[3]
We might poke fun at Calvin today. But we cannot underestimate the influence of
his pen and his mind and heart upon the formation of the United States. Calvin and Calvinist theologians had an
enormous sway over the intellectual life of the British colonies, primarily
through the voice of the minister. Presbyterians
in New York, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Delaware and Congregationalists in New
England, together, represented that Calvinist voice. These were the people
saying no to bishops and no to kings.[4] Through clergy educated at Harvard and Yale
and the College of New Jersey (later Princeton), clergy educated in Scotland
and England and the Continent, Calvinist ideas combined with ideas that flowed
from the Scottish Enlightenment in Edinburgh and Glasgow and provided the
intellectual framework for independence.
It’s for this reason the war against the crown was known in the Houses
of Parliament in London as that “Presbyterian rebellion.” The British army closed many Presbyterian
churches in New Jersey because the ministers were preaching sedition. The British vandalized or destroyed
Presbyterian churches. The British
converted the First Presbyterian Church in the City of New York in a
stable. The British burned the
Presbyterian Church in Elizabethtown, New Jersey.[5] The church I served in Mendham, NJ, founded
in 1738, was a field hospital for Washington’s troops that camped for two
winters at Jockey Hollow, near Morristown. This was not unique. An Anglican,
loyal to the Crown, Dr. Charles Inglis, rector of Trinity Church in New York
City, noted in 1776, “I do not know one Presbyterian minister, nor have I been
able, after strict inquiry, to hear of any who did not by preaching and every
effort in their power promote all the measures of the Continental Congress,
however extravagant.”[6]
The person who best represents this Presbyterian
“extravagancy”—it feels odd putting these two words together, “Presbyterian”
and “extravagancy”—was the Reverend John Knox Witherspoon (1723-1794),
president of the College of New Jersey, the only minister to sign the Declaration of Independence and later
member of the Continental Congress. In
pulpits and in lecture halls in Princeton, through his writings, Witherspoon
was one of the strongest voices for independence. John Adams (1735-1826) called
him a “high Son of Liberty.”
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| John Witherspoon statue, Princeton University, by the renowned sculptor Alexander Stoddart. |
Since the time of Moses, when God’s people were liberated
from oppression in Egypt, to the emancipation of God’s people from the grips of
the Babylonian Empire freeing them to return home from exile, to the ministry
and message of Jesus Christ who came “to let the oppressed go free” (Luke
4:18), to Paul’s experience of the Holy Spirit as freedom, we find this broad,
overarching theme of scripture, a theme near and dear to the heart of God: liberation, liberty, freedom. God
wants our freedom.
Walking through the streets of downtown Detroit two weeks
ago I came across a large statue that contained these words by Paul: “Now the Lord is the Spirit, and where the
Spirit of the Lord is, there is freedom” (2 Corinthians 3:17). It’s actually one of my favorite passages of
scripture. What’s so striking about the
way Paul talks about freedom here is that it’s not an idea or a concept or
principal. It’s not really a place or
region or territory. Instead, freedom is
discovered through a relationship, through Paul’s relationship with the
Lord. Freedom is something he discovers
in and through his experience of the Spirit.
Freedom is not “from” something or someone, but something, freedom, received
in and through someone.
So often we associate freedom with independence, not being
dependent upon anyone or anything. We think of freedom as being ruggedly
individualistic, alone, solitary—free to do whatever we want, whenever we want,
free to be whatever we want to be. Self-sufficient. Free to do it, “My Way.” That’s certainly one way to talk about
freedom. It’s also a pretty good
description of hell.
In his classic work On
Christian Liberty, Martin Luther (1483-1546) said, “A Christian…is the most
free lord of all, and subject to none; a Christian…is the most dutiful servant
of all, and subject to everyone.” It’s a paradoxical statement, but it
beautifully captures the Christian
idea of freedom. Luther points to what freedom looks like theologically. Freedom is found in and through the
relationship with Christ. When we know Christ
and are known by him we discover what freedom looks like and feels like—a space
is provided, space to breathe and thrive and live. With Christ, through the experience of
face-to-face mirroring, as we come to know Christ more and more, as our
relationship with him deepens we are transformed, we are changed, and we
experience freedom. That’s what the Holy
Spirit is always trying to do for those in Christ, transform us, change us,
reform us. We discover within the covenant
of God’s love and grace that we are forgiven, loved, accepted, wanted by God, and with all of this
comes freedom—which means we can let down our guard and not be afraid, it means
we can relax, relax and fall into the arms of God, allowing Christ’s Spirit to
carry us and hold us and transform us and love us. That’s freedom.
This means that we as Christians are never
really our own. We don’t belong to ourselves. We’re not individualists, off doing
our own thing. We are bound to Christ. Or as Paul described himself, doulos Christou: a slave or servant of
Christ. Therefore we are called to serve
others—not because we have to, but because we freely want to. “For we do not proclaim ourselves; we proclaim
Jesus Christ as Lord and ourselves as your slaves for Christ’s sake” (II
Corinthians 4:5). We enact our freedom
by freely caring for our neighbor, by serving one another, loving one another,
giving of ourselves to the other as servants of Christ.
This means that we servants of Christ have an obligation
to our neighbors, whoever our neighbors happens to be, because Christ is
committed to them too. This is a
contrasting view of freedom, so often confused with being an isolationist, a
rugged individualist. There’s little
Biblical support for that view. When we
know that to be in Christ is freedom, that in Christ we know we are already
free, this awareness frees us to extend freedom to others, to know we’re
already free means we don’t have to worry about it being taking away from us,
we can let others be, let them be free. It also means we are free to work and
strive and even fight for the freedom of others, on behalf of others who are still
bound. Freedom begets freedom.
God desires our freedom. I wish more Christians, as well
as non-Christians knew that this, too, is part of the faith experience. “For freedom Christ has set us free”
(Galatians 5:1). God desires our freedom. And one of the best ways to discover that
freedom is to be found in Christ, bound to Christ, to know the life of the
Spirit who always, now and forever, works for our liberation, our liberty, our
freedom—all for the glory of God.
Freedom begets freedom.
[1] Shenandoah (1974). Music by Gary Geld, lyrics by Gary Udell.
[2] John Calvin, Institutes of the Christian Religion
(1559), Book IV, Chapter XXV, “The Church and the State.” To those with civil authority, “...if they
remember that they are the vicegerents of God, it behooves them to watch with
all care, earnestness, and diligence, that in their administration they may
exhibit to men an image, as it were, of the providence, care, goodness,
benevolence, and justice of God…. If
they fail in their duty, they not only injure men by criminally distressing
them, but even offend God by polluting his sacred judgments….” IV.xx.6.
[3]Calvin is very clear
that regents and magistrates deserve respect and should be obeyed. “But in the obedience which we have shown to
be due to the authority of governors, it is always necessary to make one
exception, and that is entitled to our first attention, –that it do not seduce
us from obedience to [God], to whose will the desires of all kings ought to be
subject, to whose decrees all their commands ought to yield, to whose majesty
all their scepters ought to submit.” (IV.xx.32).
[4] Bradley J. Longfield, Presbyterians and American Culture: AHistory (Louisville: Westminster John Knox Press, 2013), 32ff.
[5] Longfield, 45.
[6] Randall Balmer and John
R. Fitzmier, The Presbyterians
(Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1993), 37. See also Lefferts A. Loetscher, A Brief History of Presbyterians
(Westminster Press, 1978).
[7] Longfield, 41.
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