Living in Freedom

Sermon for Sunday, May 17

1 Peter 2:16-17 How does the gospel affect our life in society? Society is based on the stories we tell. American virtue, for example, is defined by legends about our founding fathers. We all know the story about little George Washington wanting to try out his hatchet. I guess he had gotten the hatchet as a birthday present, and he couldn’t resist the first tree he saw, one of his father’s cherry trees. He took a swing, and the swing took a chunk out of the tree, and his dad saw the damaged tree and was quite frustrated. When he asked his son, George said, “I can’t tell a lie; I chopped the cherry tree.” According to the legend, his father embraced him and said that his son’s honesty was more important to him than 100 cherry trees. A minister, Mason Locke Weems was the first person to tell that story. He wrote the first biography of George Washington, and he started with the facts and then added stories like the one about the cherry tree in an attempt to show that George Washington’s public success was because of his private virtues. These are the virtues that make for good Americans: honesty, ambition, hard work.  Another era, another place: in the Roman world, the chief virtue was “virtus,” a word that described valor and manliness in battle. It was almost always reserved for free, adult men. The Romans told stories about the emperors to make them seem to have “virtus.” But it was so narrowly defined that those at the bottom of society could only look at it; they could never be considered “virtuous.” Most of Peter’s first audience was fenced off from this idea of goodness. When Peter and the other apostles began to minister to the new converts to Christianity, they had to show them that a new life was possible. They were no longer separated into different classes and affiliations, with different virtues accessible to them. Instead there was one standard and one station. Peter says that all Christians are servants of God, free people in the world, and responsible for their own actions. His goal was to show a simple truth: The gospel makes faithful Christians into good neighbors. Loving our neighbor is one of the virtues that makes us Christians. This new Gospel Peter is teaching the converts to Christianity contains a simple yet powerful point: God set us free. Free from sin, law, and the fear of death. Perhaps it shouldn’t surprise us that the devil, who so corrupted the plan of God and the life God has for us, also corrupts the gospel, so that people think that all there is to it is the forgiveness of sin. We want Jesus to release us from consequences, but do we believe that Jesus has set us free from sin itself? We are servants of God. In Christ, we are freed to be what we were made to be. Consider the plight of the modern hen. The vast majority of chickens are hatched under heat lamps, and never see the light of day outside of the chicken house. They live their lives in cages, penned as tightly as they can be, and they lay their eggs onto a conveyor belt, that sends the eggs off to be washed and graded and put into a carton to be sold at the grocery store. It’s all very industrial. Then I go to the grocery store and I see eggs marketed as laid by “vegetarian” chickens.  Let me tell you what a free chicken does. It wanders around, scratching and pecking the ground, looking for bugs and small animals to eat. Chickens will eat about anything if you’ll let them, plants, small animals, bits of meat. They are certainly not “vegetarians” by choice, the way cows are and some people can be. A free chicken can eat whatever it wants. But a free chicken still can’t fly. Sure, they can play at flying. They can jump and glide if they want to. But they just aren’t made to take flight like other birds. People are made for a specific purpose. The purpose of people is to glorify God and enjoy God forever. We can try to resist this purpose, but when we do that, we are like chickens trying to fly. We were made to serve God. There are lots of ways to do that, but that is the general “mission statement” of a human. To be truly free, we must recognize who we are. Who we were meant to be. Then we will find ourselves free in the world. We are free in the world. When we recognize God’s authority over our lives, we slowly become more human, which is to say human— but in a Christian way. And Christ sets us free in the world. For Peter’s audience, that meant that their slavery became more bearable, as they slowly learned that their earthly masters didn’t have ultimate authority over them. In Bible study a few months ago, we talked about Romans for a while. Paul spends a lot of time in Romans talking about Christian freedom. For Jewish believers, freedom meant freedom to follow the ways of their ancestors, from circumcision and dietary laws to festival days. For Gentile Christians, it meant that they didn’t have to do those things if they didn’t want to. Christ set them free so that they could love each other even if they made different decisions about how to live and spend their time. Peter, like Paul, reminds his hearers not to use their freedom “as a pretext for evil.” We live in a world where this is our constant temptation. We know we are saved because we have accepted Jesus, but we get so caught up in our freedom we forget to serve our neighbors. I hate to break this to you, but Christians are notoriously difficult customers. I have friends who worked as waiters and dreaded the Sunday lunch shift because they knew they weren’t going to get very good tips. One of my friends shared with me that he was excited and surprised one Sunday to see a $100 bill on the table, only to find that it was a fake bill with a gospel tract, promising something far more valuable than $100. Do you think that was a good advertisement for the gospel? We are free to tip or not tip, but not tipping is using that freedom as an excuse to hurt someone else. What gets lost in our misunderstanding of freedom is that we have rights and we have “oughts.” You have a constitutional right to do a lot of things that you “ought” not do. No one can take you to jail for having an affair, for failing to vote, for flying a Nazi flag in your yard. You have a right to do all those things. But ought you? As Christians, one of the things we are called to do is to live responsibly toward our neighbor. We are to live responsibly. When the rubber meets the road, Peter reminds us of our three fundamental relationships: with the world, with our fellow believers, and with God. Christians, Peter says, honor everyone. Now, one of my least favorite habits of speech we have is to start a sentence “with all due respect.” I’m sure when this expression was coined it meant something, but right now it’s just a sure sign that someone is going to disagree with you, often disrespectfully. When Peter uses the word “honor,” he’s not talking about paying lip service. The word honor in Greek means to value someone. So, Peter says, honor everyone. At the end of the verse, he reminds people that everyone includes the emperor. How do we value everyone? Remember that other people are just as human as you are. I’ve seen a lot of interesting rhetorical moves in response to this global pandemic, but one of the most disheartening to me has been that when many people discover that wearing a mask does more to protect other people than themselves the response is: well if it doesn’t keep me safe then what’s the point? The point is that if I wear a mask and it keeps you safe, and if you wear a mask and it keeps me safe, then we’ll both be safer if we both wear masks. Not perfectly safe. But safer. All the employees at Lowes have masks on, for their nine hour shifts. That’s to protect you, not them. As Christians, shouldn’t we do our part to protect them for the forty-five minutes we’re in the store? Even if it is uncomfortable? What does it mean to value those in authority? I think we have a lot clearer picture of what it means not to do it. Think of politicians: do you ever realize that they have lives outside of the spotlight? They go home and, I hope, love their families as best they can. And the things I see said about them. The way people talk about Donald Trump, Barack Obama, George W. Bush, and Bill Clinton. Nancy Pelosi, Ralph Northam, Mitch McConnell, Elizabeth Warren. And look, I’m as guilty as a lot of people. We make fun and call names. We share good looking pictures of our heroes and unflattering photos of the villains. I’m not saying we shouldn’t criticize, but we need to recognize that policies aren’t people. We need to value our leaders, as people who need our prayers and as people who bear the image of God and for whom Christ died. Even when they are wrong. Even when they disagree with us. Conclusion As Christians we are called to be good neighbors in the world. We are to be people who honor charity and truth, who look out for others, and use our free life in service to God in ways that build and don’t tear down. In every moment, we can choose to be critics, or we can rise above the noise and participate in the world around us. Ask yourself this week, are the things I’m doing making the world more or less like heaven? Am I living a life free from sin’s power or am I still its slave? One of my favorite plays, The Cotton Patch Gospel, ends with a song that asks a question: Now if a man tried to take his time on earth And prove before he died what one man’s life could be worth Well I wonder what would happen to this world? Serve God, live free, and be responsible. If we do these things, I wonder what would happen to this world.