For Freedom Christ Has Set Us Free - Galatians 5

Galatians 5

For Freedom, Christ has set us free.

We have been freed by the Gospel.

Freed from the law.

Freed from the ladder of achievement and failure.

We are freed. We don’t have to do anything.

So, as my Lutheran Confessions professor used to say,

“Now that we don’t have to do anything,

what should we do?”

So when I was young,

I remember getting into a lot of

spats with other kids, usually verbal.

And inevitably, when I would say,

“Stop saying that”, or “stop doing that”, or

“stop” whatever it was that they

were doing that was bothering me.

Another kid usually much tougher than me would say,

“It’s a free country!”

People only say “it’s a free country” when they’re doing something bad.

This sticks in my mind because even at the time

I knew that wasn’t what freedom was for

but I couldn’t articulate it at that young age.

And I probably would have gotten  in more trouble if I could.

The insinuation here is that freedom means

that you should be able

to do anything that you want, take anything you want,

say anything you want as long as you’re strong enough.

This attitude is not limited to playgrounds either.

Some adults seem to think this too.

To some freedom means some sort

of absolute independence from responsibility

and a freedom from all obligations to community

and a dedication to self-indulgence.

And maybe American freedom means or has

come to mean something else all together.

But Paul tells us that freedom in Christ does not mean those things.

Paul warns the Galatians against using their freedom for self-indulgence.

For Paul freedom doesn’t just mean doing what you want.
We’re freed for a purpose.

Now that we have all that free time because we’re not

trying to win God’s favor and seal up our own salvation,

we can focus on other things.

First Paul outlines how we shouldn’t use our freedom.

He tells us that we should not gratify the desires of the flesh.

And Paul Goes to list them out.

Just a little derailment here:

For about two thousand years, the church has been

hung up on this “desires of the flesh” and taken it

to mean only sexual desires.

And this has been used to further divide people and demean people

for doing what most everyone does and doesn’t talk about,

and since no one talks about it, 

we’ve either felt guilty or self-righteous.

This just serves to push people away from the church and from God.

And yes, Paul does starts this list with

with fornication but to be honest,

we’re not exactly in agreement about

what fornication was in Paul’s eyes.

We do know that the sexual rules of the Roman society

Paul lived in were much, much different from ours

And actually monogamy with the same person

that you were married and had children with

was kind of seen as not normal.

And Jewish morays have certainly evolved over time,

as we learned from Paul telling

 the story of Sarah giving her slave Hagar to

Abraham in the last chapter

and feeling pretty comfortable with it.

And, besides, if we focus too much on

“desires of the flesh” being all about sex,

that certainly lets some of us off pretty easily.

But look at the rest of the list.

Look at the middle of the list, because it’s easy to get

hung up on other people’s sorcery and drunkenness and carousing too.

fornication,

impurity,

licentiousness,

idolatry,

sorcery,

enmities,

strife,

jealousy,

anger,

quarrels,

dissensions,

factions,

envy,

drunkenness,

carousing,

I have done all of these things. I have given into these desires of the flesh.

How about you?

And what all of these things have in common with each other?

They are self-focused. They serve ourselves and our needs and our egos and pride.

And that’s why they are desires of the flesh.

They come naturally to us,

we don’t have to try to argue and be jealous and have factions,

those things come naturally.

They feed on our fears and anxiety,

they bring us temporary satisfaction

but they never bring us true happiness or fulfillment.

Paul says people who use their freedom in this way will not inherit the Kingdom of God.

I would say that Paul doesn’t simply mean  that people

who do these things won’t go to heaven when they die.

I think he’s saying that if we only use our freedom for ME, ME, ME

we will never experience and taste the kingdom of God in this world.

I actually like the list  of desires of the flesh that appears in the Message,

Eugne Peterson’s interpretive re-telling of the bible:

Instead of desires of the flesh, he calls them “Competitive Selfishness”

repetitive, loveless, cheap sex;

a stinking accumulation of mental and emotional garbage;

frenzied and joyless grabs for happiness;

 trinket gods;

 magic-show religion;

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 like this because it really paints a picture:

This could be what freedom is used for.

This is what Roman freedom sometimes came to I’m sure.

This is sometimes what American freedom has become.

But this is not the freedom that Christ freed us for.

But what is our freedom for? What has Christ freed us for?

And here is Paul’s great paradox.

Paul says that we were FREED so we could become SLAVES

13 For you were called to freedom, brothers and sisters;^* only do not use your freedom as an opportunity for self-indulgence,^* but through love become slaves to one another.

We have been freed from the law,

so we can be slaves to one another.

Not like we have to get people’s pants for them,

but in being focused on the needs of others.

Now that we don’t have to climb the ladder,

now that we don’t have to

focus on whether we are impressing God,

 or whether we’re good enough to be Christians,

Now that we don’t have to worry about

who is earning God’s blessings or curses.
And we don’t have to worry about who is circumcised or who isn’t.

Now that we have Jesus and don’t have to worry about our relationship with God.

Now we can focus on our relationship with each other.

On reconciling with one another, serving one another, loving one another,

Or, another way Paul puts it is this in verse 6

^“”6For in Christ Jesus neither circumcision nor

uncircumcision counts for anything;

the only thing that counts is faith working through love.”

And Paul paints a picture of what this freedom looks like:

love,

joy,

peace,

patience,

kindness,

generosity,

faithfulness,  

gentleness,

and self-control

this gives us a taste of the Kingdom of God.

I have one last illustration here, and

I wondered whether  and how to bring this story in.

But I think it’s important and timely since they’ve been here this weekend

and we’ve seen them on the news.

We all know about the Westboro Baptist Church.

That terrible organization that keeps picketing everything

from Lady Gaga concerts to military funerals.

They seem to relish bad things happening so they

can talk about God’s wrath.
And you know the leader now that Fred Phelps has died

is Shirley Roper-Phelps.

She’s a lawyer and spends her time running the church

and defending the organization against law suits.

I’ve mentioned them a lot as extremely bad

examples of what not to do as Christians.

I think these people are religion and law gone crazy.

And no one likes them, even people who believe some of the same

things they do think their tactics are terrible.

But I read a series of stories about a man in his 20’s,

he was radio DJ in Kansas City where the Phelps have their headquarters

His DJ name was Scoops.

He saw the Westboro picketing at a Justin Bieber concert

and he just struck up a conversation with them.

He talked to the daughter Meagan and they got along

really well, they actually exchanged phone numbers.

By the way, he’s openly gay and he was very vocal about it.

Later, he was after some publicity, so he  called Meagan

asked if he could come over to their house. They said yes.

They gave him chocolate chip cookies and they talked.

He asked them if they could picket him for publicity.

They said sure, and they made a sign that said, “God Hates Scoops.”

Later on Easter, he had been fired from his radio

job for an unrelated issue and he called up the Phelps

and went over to their house with a friend to get some legal advice.

The friend wrote a blog about the experience.

Meagan served him some homemade apple crisp.

After the legal advice, Scoops had one of those

existential crisis that most people have when they lose their jobs.

Where is my life going, what

The woman who wrote the article said that Shirley Phelps

kicked into “mom mode”

She asked about his family and told him that this

was the time that he need to call on them,

and she suggested he move back with his mother

They talked about family and jobs and

the balance between finding your passion and needing to eat and pay bills.

Then they asked them both to stay for dinner.

The woman asked her why she let him come around their house

and visit with them,

“He doesn't come up and hit us!

He doesn't throw things at us and he doesn't spray bear mace at us!"

This is an encounter with them that was filmed after that.

http://www.ebaumsworld.com/media/embed/82234098

(the end of the video has a little cursing. Just watch to 1:55 to avoid.)
 

You can obviously see that she is just smitten with him in a motherly way.

She is still doing horrible things,

but he obviously has broken down her hard exterior and found the mom in her.

What can we learn from this agnostic radio DJ about the power of our shared humanity?

What a way to disarm those signs and the hate.

love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, generosity, faithfulness,  gentleness, and self-control

Even in the worst conditions, the fruit of the spirit can grow.

This is what can happen when we lay down our laws

and our check lists and our prejudice and our preconceived notions.

This is the power of God working here.    

SLIDE

This is the DJ and Megan Phelps 

after the Lady Gaga concert.

He’s dressed up like he said 

and they’re singing  together.

Just a couple months after this, Meagan left the Westboro Baptist church and the family,

she didn’t mention him as a cause,

but she does mention all the 

people who were kind

and cared for them despite how hateful their family had been.

self-control

gentleness,

faithfulness,  

generosity,

kindness,

patience,

peace,

joy,

love

This is what Christ has freed us for.

Not self focused freedom, but other focused freedom.

Not serving our self and our fears and status, but serving others.

What could  we do with this freedom?

We could know the kingdom of God.