Free to Be ... What?

1 Peter 2:2-10; Micah 6:8; texts from John on truth

May 14, 2017

It’s Mothers Day, so a happy day to every child born of a woman. Mothers Day can be a mixed bag, for sure. Some of us have or had rich, joyous, loving relationships with our mothers; others of us have or had challenging or even painful, hurtful relationships. Some women love being mothers; others find it challenging in ways to bring more grief than joy. Many choose never to become mothers, and yet others wish desperately that they could be but circumstances prevent it. So, yeah, Mothers Day can be a mixed bag.

At its best, that first relationship is a treasured one remembered with deep love that provides a foundation for life. At its worst, that first relationship is a primal example of a past from which we need liberation. Heck, did you see the article in the Post last week about George Washington’s relationship with his mother? The Father of Our Country had some issues with his mother.

There are, of course, plenty of examples of pasts we need to let go of.

I found myself engaged briefly in a couple of social media threads last week that got me thinking about our complicated relationships to the past. One thread began with a friend’s post encouraging people to send letters to Speaker Ryan’s home voicing opinions on the health care bill – remember the simpler times when that was in the news … a week ago?

In any case, someone was moved to post this comment: “Right now we need to pray for our nation.” Sadly, I tend to roll my eyes when a comment begins that way. This one went on to say, “When men can go in women’s restrooms […] in the name of born the wrong gender we have a huge problem. Pretty sure you can look at your self in the mirror and figure out if you were born a man or a woman.”

Having just preached a sermon quoting the line in A Brief Statement of Faith about hearing the voices of peoples long silenced, I felt compelled to offer a different perspective, so I wrote:

Do you actually know any transgender persons? Have you ever sat down with someone who is transgender and listened to their story? Have you ever spoken with someone who was born intersex? The world is not black and white, and gender is not a simple binary.

As you might expect on social media the conversation didn’t go far, but it left me wondering just what the other person was afraid of and why. What had happened in his life that left him with such a constricted lens for seeing the world? From what did he need to be free? What scars did he bear from what ancient wounds?

Social media is the last place in the world one should look for social change or even the slightest change in the mind of any individual, and when I engage threads it is usually for the sake of clarifying my own thought. We may be free to express ourselves, but our expressions seldom lead to liberation. Even as I express myself, I am constantly reminded that most of need to be freed from some parts of own past and the stories we tell ourselves about what really happened.

So I wondered about the person seeking prayers for the nation: what god does he think we need to pray to, and what texts taught him about that god?

Those questions popped up again for me yesterday morning when I got a FB message saying: “So, send me some prayers. I’m giving dad his first progressive Christian book to read this weekend.”

The dad in question is a high school buddy of mine. I connected with the young man via FB a few years ago when he was struggling to come to grips with the United Methodist church’s treatment of gay seminarians such as himself. I saw something in an exchange with his dad at the time and chimed in with some progressive pastoral support that apparently meant a good deal to both father and son.

In offering a supportive word to a friend’s young-adult son, I suppose I was also trying to say, “the love of the gospel is more important than any other word; and if other readings of the text have oppressed you then those readings are not the truth and you should be liberated from them.”

In John’s gospel, Jesus tells his followers, “if you follow my way in the world you will know the truth, and the truth will set you free.”

At a moment in our country when so many misconstrue religious liberty for the freedom to discriminate, it’s important that we understand what freedom is for. At a moment in our country’s history when truth, itself, is under assault, and when our nation’s leaders regularly and obviously lie to us, it is important that we understand what truth is, as well, for we long for the liberation that comes when we know the truth.

Our particular moment feels more fraught than many, to be sure. I am not downplaying the seriousness of the current leadership crisis in America by noting that, in many ways, this is nothing new under the sun.

Every season of momentous change is marked by questions of truth and liberation. Jesus clearly understood this, and so did Herod. “What is truth?” is not only a lofty and abstract philosophical question, it is also an everyday existential one, as well.

Truth was at stake in the Reformation, when early democratic impulses led Luther, Calvin, and the other Reformers to question the Roman Catholic Church’s monopoly on “truth.” The translation of scripture from the Latin insisted upon by the church to the common idiom of the people rested on a core conviction held by the Reformers that the people could be trusted to discern the truth.

Similarly, it’s no accident that when the Founders of the American experiment in self-government articulated their impulse for independence they did so by declaring certain truths to be self-evident. Those truths, they insisted, shall set us free.

Of course, whenever “truth” is given voice there’s a better than even-money chance that the “truth” spoken will be shaded in the direction of the speaker. In other words, if you have the power to articulate “truth” for the public, odds are you will articulate only that part of the truth that maintains your own privilege to speak it.

That’s why the Elizabeth Schuyler character in the musical Hamilton sings, “We hold these truths to be self-evident that all men are created equal … and when I meet Thomas Jefferson I’m ‘a compel him to include women in the sequel.”

The first Christians, the Reformers, the Founding Fathers and Mothers were all trying to throw off the shackles of an oppressive past while articulating a renewed understanding of the truth. Being human, though, they were – just as we are – prisoners of our own time and circumstance.

So, what oppressive past do we need to cast off? What in your own history do you need to let go of? What does the church need to be freed from? What in the broader social, economic, and political life of the commonweal do we need to be liberated from?

Those are starting places, and questions for renewal and reformation. But if you don’t have some sense of where you want to wind up, any road will get you there. So, what is liberation for? Is it liberty for the sake of libertines? No rules? No broader purpose?

That way is always a theoretical option, but it is never the way of Jesus. In other words, when Jesus said, “if you follow my way you will know the truth and the truth will set you free,” he was pointing toward a way of living that is liberating.

Moreover, when he later insists “I am the way and the truth and the life,” he both underscores and gives contour to the way toward which he points, from which he beckons. His very life, into which he invites his followers, is the way into liberating truth.

It’s not a way marked by signposts of particular belief systems. The gate to the way is not some creedal or confessional statement. When Jesus speaks of this way in John it sounds like this: “they will know you are my followers by the way you love one another.”

Freedom is a beautiful idea. Freedom is coming. Freedom is coming. Freedom is coming, oh yes, I know. But freedom for what?

Earlier in worship we sang the best answer I know: “to do justice, and love kindness, and walk humbly with your God.”

Personally speaking, I learned that lesson first and best from my mother. So that’s not a past from which I need particular liberation. There are, of course, other demons and fears and scars from which I need liberation in order to live more fully into the freedom that Micah articulated and into which Jesus invites.

I’m living into that step by step. Letting go of what needs to be let go of, and holding on to that which liberates. I hope you are, too.

More than that, I hope the we, as a people of hope, are always a place of liberation for one another, that, together, we are known by how we bind together love and justice. For that is what true religious liberty is all about. That is what we are freed for. Amen.