{"id":330,"date":"2016-06-26T08:55:30","date_gmt":"2016-06-26T12:55:30","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.firstreflection.org\/?p=330"},"modified":"2016-06-26T08:55:30","modified_gmt":"2016-06-26T12:55:30","slug":"freedom-now","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.firstreflection.org\/index.php\/2016\/06\/26\/freedom-now\/","title":{"rendered":"Freedom Now"},"content":{"rendered":"
A Sermon for the First Congregational Church of Albany, NY
\nby Rev. James Eaton, Pastor
\nSixth Sunday After Pentecost\/C \u2022 June 26, 2016<\/h5>\n

\u201cFor freedom Christ has set us free. Stand firm, therefore, and do not submit again to a yoke of slavery.\u201d [Galatians 5:1]<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Pictures<\/h3>\n

All photographs are the remainder of a story, like shells or seaweed left on a beach. This week I saw a picture that struck me and I can\u2019t escape. It was a little girl, standing on top of a toilet. The girl\u2019s mother explained she thought it was cute and funny so she snapped the shot and posted it to Facebook. Then she discovered what was going on: the girl was practicing for what to do if there was a shooter in her school. She\u2019d been taught this drill in response to the fear of violence. So, far from cute it was an emblem of our slavery to violence. \u201cFor freedom, Christ has set us free. Stand firm therefore and do not submit again to the yoke of slavery.\u201d How can we stay free when the world seeks to ensnare us every day? How can we stay free when the price of living is slavery to fears?<\/p>\n

Today we read how the journey of Jesus and his followers changes. What must have seemed an aimless wandering through the villages of Galilee acquires a destination: Jerusalem. Jerusalem is where he will he be crucified, as he will begin to teach them. Jerusalem is where he will ascend to heaven, according to Luke. Jerusalem is where it will all end\u2014and where it will all begin. I wonder how frightening that was. I wonder how scared he was; we get a glimpse of Jesus\u2019 fear in the Garden of Gethsemane. What gives him the freedom from fear to go? What makes Jesus free is that he lives every moment conscious of the loving power of God, conscious of it in a way that makes each moment an urgent call to live God\u2019s love.<\/p>\n

Being Right<\/h3>\n

So, the text says, \u201che set his face to go toward Jerusalem\u201d but to get there, he has to go through Samaria. Samaria is foreign; Samaria is a place where Jews aren\u2019t welcome, just as Jews don\u2019t welcome Samaritans. But it\u2019s on the way, in the way. So a couple of his followers go on ahead to get things ready. Today politicians have advance people; long before a Hilary Clinton or Donald Trump gets to a city, someone has rented a place, provided for security, set up water bottles and made arrangements, hired a band, scouted things out. That\u2019s what these two are doing. <\/p>\n

But two of the villages say no thanks. These guys are giving their all, they are totally committed to Jesus the Messiah, the man who is going to save the world. They get into a village and the local chief of police says sorry, we can\u2019t provide security; the Holiday Inn Express declines to give them a special rate, they can\u2019t find a place for him to speak. They\u2019re going to have to go back to Jesus and admit their failure. Then unbelievably when they go to the next place it happens again. No wonder they\u2019re angry, no wonder they\u2019re resentful. And apparently they are because they go back to Jesus and suggest that he rain balls of fire on these villages. \u201cThese people are terrible, Jesus, let\u2019s just wipe them out!\u201d \u201c[James and John] said, \u2018Lord, do you want us to command fire to come down from heaven and consume them?\u2019\u201d [Luke 9:54] It\u2019s frightening how wrong we can be; but we are most frightening when we are right.<\/p>\n

Being Wrong When We’re Right<\/h3>\n

When we are right, we can\u2019t stand the ones who are wrong. There\u2019s a long continuum to it. At one end there\u2019s the person who can\u2019t drive right. To get to our home from the airport, we come off Route 85 onto Krumkill Road, follow a bumpy road around a curve and come to New Scotland and turn left. Now driving east on New Scotland is an obstacle course. You have to stay in the right lane because left lane must turn left light a couple blocks up but people park in the right lane sometimes so you have to dodge them. Then right after the light, you have to get in the left lane because the right lane by the hospital at Manning is right turn only. It took me a while to learn this zig zagging course but once I learned it, I got good at it. And it\u2019s intolerable, annoying, to see people who don\u2019t know what they\u2019re doing, trying to drive up New Scotland, suddenly realizing they\u2019re in the wrong lane and darting over in front of me. So I get angry; some days the love of Christ just gets left behind because I\u2019m right and if I could, I would call down the fire on those stupid drivers. So I get where James and John are going with this.<\/p>\n

We are dangerous when we are right. We\u2019re going through a moment when for various reasons many Islamic people are so convinced they are right that they can\u2019t wait for fire from heaven to punish everyone else so they\u2019re doing it with bombs and assault rifles and terrible acts of violence. It\u2019s scary; it\u2019s frightening. But in our fear, we ought to remember we are not so far from the same violence. Before we are too condescending about violence in Islam, we should remember that a few centuries ago European Christians fought a series of wars in the 1600\u2019s that left a third of Germany depopulated. Think of it: people killed over the difference between being Catholic and Lutheran, a difference probably most of us here couldn\u2019t even define let alone fight about.<\/p>\n

Our own tradition shows the same violence. Henry Barrowe was an early Congregationalist hung for his faith in April of 1593 and those who came after were persecuted until they left England, ultimately settling in Massachusetts. We call them the Pilgrims and we love to celebrate them. We seldom remember that the descendants of those Pilgrims and others subsequently were so right and so angry at the wrongness of others that they hung three members of the Society of Friends, often called the Quakers, on Boston Common within a century of Barrowe\u2019s death. We are scariest when we are right. [source: https:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Boston_martyrs]<\/p>\n

Being Right With Jesus<\/h3>\n

So Jesus\u2019 disciples want to hit back at those who are refusing to see how right he is, how right they are. What does Jesus say? \u201cHe rebuked them.\u201d Simple but stunning. \u2018Rebuke\u2019 is the English word for what he says to demons; rebuke is what he says to Peter when he says he is acting like a tempter, like a Satan. It is a small word that offers this picture: Jesus turning in anger at the wrong rightness of his followers. Being right with Jesus means more than just helping him forward, it means following his way and the way is the urgent call of love to live free of hatred, free of violence, free of fear, free from all the worldly things that seek to enslave us. It is loving God so you trust God with your life. Jesus is on the way to Jerusalem where he will demonstrate this love in the most ultimate way, on a cross.<\/p>\n

This isn\u2019t love as an emotion, a nice feeling, this is love as a way of life. When I was doing marriage counseling, I frequently had a husband or wife in conflict say, \u201cBut I love my husband! I love my wife!\u201d I learned to ask: \u201cAs evidenced by what?\u201d If we say we love God, it\u2019s fair to ask: as evidence by what? The real reason we are so dangerous when we are right is that deep down, we often act as if we are the final power. Think of those two disciples; think of those villagers they are so willing to blast. The disciples want to use their power because they are right and they haven\u2019t learned to trust that God will deal with the village. In fact, in other stories, in a later time, we\u2019re going to hear about Samaritans being among the first to embrace the risen Christ. God is at work there but like a farmer growing a field, God\u2019s work takes time to bear fruit.<\/p>\n

Loving God<\/h3>\n

So loving God means giving up our belief in our own power and rightness and righteousness and living in the light of God\u2019s righteousness, God\u2019s power. The urgency of that life changes us and until we are ready to embrace that change, we are not ready to love God. That\u2019s what happens in the three short stories that make up the rest of this story in Luke. Jesus encounters a succession of people who want to fit their faith into their normal lives. One wants to follow him but only in comfort; another wants to follow but has some things to do first. And one has his hand on a plow but is constantly looking back instead of forward. To all of these, to each of these, Jesus preaches the urgency of love right now. We cannot embrace the kingdom with one arm; the call of Jesus is right now to all of us.<\/p>\n

Someone suggested last week that I wasn\u2019t being specific enough. I decided he was right so let me be specific. What does it mean be on the way with Jesus? It means I have to stop beeping at people on New Scotland Road right now. I hate this conclusion because when I beep at someone it\u2019s because I\u2019m right and I want them to get out of the way so I can get somewhere. But the yoke of slavery is my rightness; I\u2019m compelled by it, enslaved by it. Paul has a whole list of things that enslave us: <\/p>\n

Now the works of the flesh are obvious: fornication, impurity, licentiousness, idolatry, sorcery, enmities, strife, jealousy, anger, quarrels, dissensions, factions, envy, drunkenness, carousing, and things like these. [Galatians 5:20ff]<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Any of these are enough to forge chains of slavery. But he also gives us something more helpful: a sort of check off list so we can know when we are in fact living out the love of God.<\/p>\n

the fruit of the Spirit is love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, generosity, faithfulness,gentleness, and self-control.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

He doesn\u2019t explicitly say no beeping on New Scotland but I\u2019m sure he would have if he had driven here. What about you? We all know about being enslaved by things that are wrong: the addict, the criminal and so on. But when has being right enslaved you, made you do things that didn\u2019t embody the love of God? What if today you stopped doing just one of them? <\/p>\n

Freedom Now!<\/h3>\n

These things tend to spread. Stop beeping on New Scotland and it might occur that we don\u2019t need assault weapons in homes out of a fear of others so there\u2019s no reason to have them available. So we could agree to stop arming civilians like soldiers and ban assault weapons. It will lead us to understand that violence often comes from people who can\u2019t get the basic needs of life, food, shelter and so on, so we should work to feed people and shelter them. <\/p>\n

The urgency of love is that once we take off the yoke, we can\u2019t help but want to help others take it off too. That\u2019s just what Jesus does. It\u2019s not our job to call down fire, it\u2019s not our mission to make people right. It is our mission to lift the yoke of slavery to fear, to help that little girl with whom I began down from the fear that put her on that toilet. It is to celebrate the freedom for which Christ set us free by sharing it. <\/p>\n

Amen.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

A Sermon for the First Congregational Church of Albany, NY by Rev. James Eaton, Pastor Sixth Sunday After Pentecost\/C \u2022 June 26, 2016 \u201cFor freedom Christ has set us free. Stand firm, therefore, and do not submit again to a yoke of slavery.\u201d [Galatians 5:1] Pictures All photographs are the remainder of a story, like […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_hide_featured_image":false,"_jetpack_featured_image_duplicate_dismissed":0,"_jetpack_feature_clip_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2},"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[53,39,52,3,2,32],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-330","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-afterpentecost-c","category-exegesis","category-pentecost","category-sermon","category-worship","category-year-c"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.firstreflection.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/330","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.firstreflection.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.firstreflection.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.firstreflection.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.firstreflection.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=330"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/www.firstreflection.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/330\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":332,"href":"https:\/\/www.firstreflection.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/330\/revisions\/332"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.firstreflection.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=330"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.firstreflection.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=330"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.firstreflection.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=330"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}