July 1, 2007 - Using our spiritual freedom

13th Sunday in Ordinary Time
1 July 2007
Galatians 5.1, 13-25
Using our spiritual freedom
© J. Christy Wareham, 2007

Two childhood transportation moments: one on bicycle, one pedestrian.

My older brother Mark’s bicycle was a blue Schwinn one-speed with coaster brakes, which he could ride without training wheels by the time I was ready to learn to ride. So the training wheels went back on. I think he got a new bike, then, a three-speed with hand brakes—a big kid bike. I didn’t get a big kid bike for a while, but I wanted to be like a big kid. The training wheels came off soon enough.

You could ride your bike to Ivanhoe elementary school in Los Angeles, if you had a license and permission. The license was a little tag you got from, I think, the police department—the LAPD, Sergeant Friday, maybe. Permission came from the principal’s office—Mrs. Joyner—and you had to be in sixth grade. That was a dumb rule, because I rode my bike all around the neighborhood and never had permission from the principal’s office. So one day, instead of walking to school, I rode the Schwinn and parked it in the bike rack.. Who was going to notice one more blue Schwinn? Who would have nothing better to do than check for unapproved bicycles in the bike rack?

Just before lunch I got a note to come to the principal’s office. Why, Mrs. Joyner wanted to know, did I ride my bicycle to school without permission? I was reprimanded, and my mother was contacted. No more riding the bike to school.

Another transportation moment. I was walking home from school, which is what you did if you couldn’t ride your bike.( In LA, you walked or cycled; there were no public school buses.) I came to the intersection of Rowena Avenue and Glendale Boulevard, which had a traffic signal, and for some reason I thought, “What would Daddy do here?”.

I had been noticing the way my father drove. Even if I wasn’t going to have permission to get around with the freedom he did, I could at least start to get ready for my freedom for when I got it. One thing I noticed about how my father waited for the signal to change was that he didn’t just sit there watching the signal facing him. He also watched the signal facing the other people, the one coming down the other street. Their signal would turn yellow just moments before his turned green. My father was able to get his car on the way along the street a little sooner by getting it rolling during the yellow light that faced the other way. That meant he could already be getting out of the way of the people behind him by the time his light turned green. This was more efficient and thus more grown up.

So I was watching a red light facing me, and when I also saw the yellow light for coming down Rowena Avenue, I started across the street. Someone driving a Pontiac on Rowena Avenue honked at me and went on through the intersection in front of me. I don’t know why the honking, I could see the Pontiac. It was only six inches away. But there was honking, after which I finished crossing the street and walked the rest of the way home. The lady who lived two doors away from us on Locksley Place drove a Pontiac, and that afternoon my mother was contacted. No more crossing the street on other people’s yellow light.

First we get rules; then we get freedom. The reason for the rules is that we often get hurt without them, since we don’t always know how to use our freedom safely. Some of us grab all the freedom we can as soon as we can get it. Some of us grab it before we can get it. Then there are those who happily wait for when the rules grant us freedom, and there are even those who prefer rules to freedom, even when it’s offered. Me, I’m ready to claim my freedom before people in charge of the rules are ready to grant it to me. Most of the time, that means I get in a little trouble from the people in charge; some of the time, that means I nearly get killed.

When the apostle Paul claims his freedom, he goes for broke. For a long time, he claimed the spiritual freedom to persecute Christians. The religious authorities he reported to granted him that freedom, but in retrospect, it was a bad freedom. It violated not only the spirituality of human beings but also the very spirit of God. The authorities were wrong. So God dramatically took Paul’s freedom away and struck him to his knees. When Paul came around, he made a yet more daring claim on spiritual freedom, the freedom of following Christ, which the religious authorities distrusted, denied and reproved. But it was too late. The spiritual cat of Christian freedom was out of the bag. Christians who know what to do with spiritual freedom have been grateful ever since. Christians who fear spiritual freedom have been undermining what Paul fought for ever since.

The world has never gone back from the spiritual freedom won in Christ and championed by Paul, though some still try to pretend it never happened. They try to paint Paul as the champion for a new set of spiritual rules, not for freedom. Champions of spiritual freedom look different to different people. To those who do not trust spiritual freedom, or who fear it in themselves, a champion of freedom looks childish or irresponsible—and, of course, there are childish and irresponsible spiritual choices that can make freedom dangerous. Sometimes the opponents of freedom have a point. Adolf Hitler claimed the freedom to make Christian spirituality serve the purposes of the German state. That was disastrous, because Hitler may have been old enough to be Führer, but he was so spiritually immature that he used Christianity to commit evil. One way to protect the world from this is to prohibit spiritual freedom, but people who distrust and fear spiritual freedom also commit grievous harm. The atrocities of the Spanish Inquisition prove that there are dangers in protecting human beings from their own spiritual freedom.

Today, there are Christians who out of a combination of care, distrust and fear try to deny spiritual freedom to others. Just try to be a devout Christian and also gay in almost any conservative or mainline denomination, and you’ll find out how welcome your spiritual freedom is. Or try to explain at a presbytery meeting that Jesus is more important to your faith as a moral exemplar, a shepherd to the vulnerable and a spiritual pioneer than as an animal sacrifice for human sin, and your spiritual freedom will invite accusation and threats of censure. The guardians of faith get very edgy about thoughts like that, but if we stop people from their spiritual freedom, we foreclose on the very power of Christ by which Paul made faith in Christ a possibility for anyone in any culture. Were it not for Paul and his freedom, Christian faith would have remained the religious practice of a tiny minority sect in Judaism. There would have been nothing wrong with that, but it would never have been more than that. For the Christian life, freedom is essential.

So once you claim your spiritual freedom, what do you do with it? I believe that we who value the freedom to venture into new spiritual territory are called to four modes of spiritual life: to brave the unknown path, to learn the principles of spiritual sight, to reckon with our own fears and demons, and to stand up against the overly careful, untrusting and afraid. Those are four spiritual modes I see in the champion of spiritual freedom. Let’s reflect on them one at a time.



Brave the unknown path

brave [v., tran.]: to face or endure with courage. (merriam-webster.com)

Spiritual freedom may have its excitement, but it is not all warmth and comfort. You are on a path, not in the bath. In any meaningful journey, spiritual or otherwise, there will be unknown challenges, threats and terrors. If you acknowledge this going in, you can prepare yourself for the unexpected. If preparation meant knowing exactly what to do, it wouldn’t be an unknown path. The Christian life fully lived ventures into the unknown. The moral gate that opens onto the path of spiritual freedom is courage.



Learn the principles of spiritual sight

This is not the same as studying a catechism or mastering theology. It is not even learning the Bible through and through. Those are worthy undertakings for any believer, but spiritual sight goes further. Spiritual sight comes from taking the little nagging question about what you’ve always been told and making it your teacher. There is always more to learn than anyone has learned before, and there is every reason why you should be the one to learn it.. Spiritual sight comes from doubting the familiar answers that are meant to make you stop asking your questions. It is high time that certain impermissible questions be asked, and there’s every reason why you should be the one to ask them. Spiritual sight stares at the unacceptable situation until it sees the one unnoticed possibility that has escaped the vision of even the saints and doctors of the faith. There is always something in the impossible situation that everyone has so far failed to see, and there is every reason why you should be the one finally to see it.

Spiritual sight holds on for dear life to the last thread of Christian truth, for the Christian tradition, like every true religious tradition, really is based on long experience with God through a wide variety of people. Spiritual sight will look at all of the divine, with its depth and height, in its power and weakness, in its fullness and emptiness. Spiritual sight is willing to see any of it, though it is never granted to see all of it.



Reckon with your own fears and demons

Your first and most potent enemy on the quest of freedom is yourself. I have noticed, by anology, that when I feel anxious about a conversation or a meeting where I expect conflict, most of my fear is about my inability to deal with what might happen. The path of spiritual freedom is like this, and for good reason. Since there are no clear rules or predictable patterns on the unknown path, you don’t know what might happen, so you can’t know how you will respond. You have to prepare yourself for the fears of not knowing. Preparation for freedom means learning to find within yourself calm in the face of danger (so you can see everything in front of you), clarity in the face of confusion (so you can think and assess the situation), and resolve in the face of opposition (so others can’t intimidate you).

When Paul talks about works of the flesh versus fruits of the Spirit, he is teaching you to reckon with your disintegrating demons and to harness your integrating gifts. Your inward demons will be as real as your outward enemies, and most of them are defeated by love in the face of hatred (so your emotions won’t control your actions) and self discipline in the face of empty satisfactions (so your pleasures won’t overwhelm your purpose).



Stand up against the overly careful, untrusting and afraid

People who protect their religion from freedom get a lot of practice at it. Careful authorities reasonably try to stop certain spiritual adventures, like Nazism and the Inquisition, that should be stopped, so they have not only the benefit of practice but also a track record of being right. But authorities are not always right. The seeker Martin Luther was right to open the Bible to every believer, and he was opposed by religious authorities. The seeker Henry Ward Beecher was right to denounce slavery, and conventional church authorities justified slavery. What we know is that the world has so vastly changed in the last few generations that untrodden paths of faith will be required, and the seeker on the path of spiritual freedom will have to face down the overly careful, untrusting and afraid.



Now, Paul never got up in the morning wondering what fun he could have dismantling the spiritual constructs of either Jerusalem’s temple priests on the one hand or imperial Roman priests on the other. It’s just that when his time came to explore new spiritual territory, Paul knew it. The good news is that as he struck out in freedom, he became more secure he in his faith, found more peace in his soul, and had more hope for the world God loved so much that he sent his son to save us from the sin of so loving where we’ve been that we would neglect the path on which Christ is leading us.

Claim, then, the spiritual freedom won for us in Christ. Learn to use it and depend on each other for support along the way, for community is the container for spiritual freedom. Trust the gifts you find in yourself, and celebrate the gifts of others, and the safety we seek in freedom will be found in spiritual community. Amen.