Sunday, June 27, 2010

Freedom's Just Another Word for Nothing Left to Lose

13th Sunday in Ordinary Time
Cycle C
1 Kngs 19:16b;19-21
Gal 5:1, 13-18
Lk 9:51-62

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights; that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness. Next weekend we will celebrate the 234th anniversary of the signing of the Declaration of Independence. Every year at this time we stop and think about freedom and what it means to us as a nation and as individuals. The Declaration is the defining statement about what we believe it means to be free.

Thomas Jefferson used the Declaration to set forth not only a list of grievances against what the colonists considered to be the actions of a tyrannical British government, he also set the foundation for how we Americans would view ourselves and our inherent rights as human beings, superseding even our rights as citizens. The founders saw freedom as an extension of natural law and acknowledged that it is God who ultimately gives us our freedom.

We have come a long way since those words were written. And we have wandered far from their original meaning. We no longer hold life as an unalienable right for all people, especially when it’s inconvenient for us to do so. Liberty? What exactly is that? We talk about it once a year but I don’t think many of us truly know what it means. We talk about our rights all the time but not about the responsibilities that go with them. But the pursuit of happiness? Ahh, that’s the one we understand, and hold as our most basic right, surpassing all others. For us, freedom has become the unfettered ability to pursue happiness. I should be able to do whatever I like, as long as it makes me happy. You do your thing and I’ll do mine. And we both determine what’s right and wrong for each of us. Freedom is the ability to do whatever we want whenever we want. For Americans today, freedom is something we take for ourselves, not something that is given us by our creator.

George Orwell said that if you control the language you control the people. We use words that all people agree refer to a great good, such as freedom and choice, and we use them to describe things that are actually sinful. We’ve muddied the waters to the point that we have lost sight of what freedom really is. Orwell also said that “doublethink means the power of holding two contradictory beliefs in one's mind simultaneously, and accepting both of them.” We have heard and spoken these words and their twisted meanings so often that we have come to believe in their contradictions. We have descended into doublethink.

What is freedom to God? Has God created us to be truly free, or does He just set up a lot of rules for us to follow? Are we truly free agents or just servants? Actually, it’s both. We are free agents when we are servants. Freedom is not the ability to do whatever we want. That is license. Freedom is not live and let live. It is not license for individuals to act whichever way they want. Freedom is truly the ability to live as we were originally intended to live. As our creator made us.

Freedom to us is really freedom from sin. Because God didn’t make us to be sinful.
He hard wired us for himself, to be like him, and we can only be truly free when we live and act as he wills. It’s not about us and yet it’s all about us.

The Declaration of Independence wasn’t the first declaration of freedom. For that we look to St. Paul. He declared long ago that we have been made free by the sacrifice of Jesus on the cross. Jesus of Nazareth is the example of what it means to be truly human and truly free. Jesus had the power to act any way he chose. He had the ultimate license to do what he pleased. And he was all about the pursuit of happiness. But it was our happiness he sought. He wielded his freedom in the way it was intended to be; by submitting his entire life to the Father’s will. Freedom to Jesus was not living according to his own will but to that of his Father’s.

And he said that he longer considered us to be slaves; we are now called his friends.

We were not created slaves, we were created free persons. In the beginning, humanity was created without the slavery of sin and death. All our needs were supplied by God and we had such a close relationship with our creator that it says in Genesis that God actually walked in the garden with Adam and Eve. As friends. It was through sin that we became enslaved and lost our way. When humanity chose to define freedom as doing our own will in opposition to that of the Father’s, suffering and death came into the world.

We can try and try to fill that hole within us with as much stuff as we can. We can think that we’re the ultimate arbitrators of our own destiny. We can assert our own wills day in and day out, and we will never be happy. Because our pursuit will never end in happiness until we surrender our will to the Father. And that’s hard. Because everything in our culture is pulling us in the opposite direction. Society says that we only have value when we assert our independence. We only have value when we can keep score of our accomplishments. Of our possessions. Of our status. Of our own inner strength. In order to live as we are intended to live we have to fight every day of our lives to keep our perspective clear. We have to declare our independence from the flesh each and every day. That means surrender. Another seeming contradiction. We triumph when we surrender. And it never gets easier, this war against contradiction.

What, did you think that now that you have declared your independence there wouldn’t be a war?