Free to Follow Jesus

The Reverend Luther Zeigler

Emmanuel Church

June 30, 2013

"For freedom Christ has set us free."  Galatians 5:1

When I was in seminary, a professor once challenged us wannabe priests with the following question:  If you were put on trial for being a Christian, would there be enough evidence to convict you?  Now, that is a provocative and somewhat humbling question, isn’t it?

After posing the question, the professor then asked us to participate in a little exercise.  Close your eyes, she invited us, and review your own life’s story as if it were a silent film.  Just play back your life in your own mind’s eye:  your childhood and adolescence, your college years, the relationships you formed, the people you’ve loved and been loved by, your career, your family life, your contributions to your community, all of your day to day actions and interactions with the people around you, the legacy you will leave behind.  How would your life look to an outside and independent observer? Would Christ recognize himself in this film?  Is this life of yours a distinctively Christian life?

If you’re like me, this little exercise makes you feel more than a little uncomfortable.  Truth be told, my actions and relationships rarely seem to measure up to Christ-like standards.  

The point of the exercise is not to depress us, but rather to remind us that the Christian faith is more than just having the right beliefs. Christianity is as much a way of life as it is a set of creeds.  Indeed, if you read the gospels closely, you’ll notice that Jesus never asks the disciples to believe this or that; rather, what Jesus asks is that they follow him.  That is what ‘disciple’ means:  one who follows. 

This is a hard message and one which the Church, quite frankly, has not always paid heed.  As the great American preacher Harry Emerson Fosdick used to joke, people have for thousands of years been trying to get rid of Jesus. First, they crucified him. And when that didn't work, they started worshipping him. Worship can be just another form of crucifixion because we often use it to get ourselves off the hook of answering the real question Jesus poses. For the truth of the matter is that Jesus doesn't ask to be worshipped, any more than he asked to be crucified.  What he asks is to be followed.

So, how then are we to follow Jesus?  What are the hallmarks of authentic Christian discipleship? 

This is precisely the question Paul is wrestling with in his letter to the Galatians in our first lesson.  It seems so strange to us now, but the central issue the early Church faced as it moved out of Palestine to the Mediterranean basin was whether and on what terms to include Gentiles in this new Christian community.  The vast majority of the earliest Christians were Jews and continued to adhere to the Mosaic Law, including the rituals of circumcision for men, the observance of dietary laws, and the celebration of the traditional Jewish festivals. 

People at the time knew what it looked like to be a good Jew:  it meant conforming your life to Torah and to its many requirements for daily living.  But, as the Church’s missionary activity through Paul expanded to Gentile communities in Asia Minor, the issue became:  do we require these Gentiles to conform themselves to the ancient rites, rituals and patterns of life of the Jewish tradition, or is there a new moral standard?  Indeed, it is this set of issues that leads to the famous showdown between Peter and Paul, a quarrel that Paul ultimately and convincingly wins for all the reasons set out in what we now call the letter to the Galatians.

For Paul, Christian identity is not about our ethnic heritage (one needn’t belong to any particular clan), it is not about adhering to a set of ritual observances (one needn’t comply with traditional dietary laws or observe certain festivals), it is not about a physical symbol of the covenant (one needn’t, if male, be circumcised).  Christian identity is not about superficial and accidental external characteristics such as gender, race, ethnicity, or national origin.  It is not even about subscribing to any particular set of theological propositions.

Rather, as Paul makes clear in his letter, Christian identity is about turning one’s self and one’s heart over to Christ so that, through Him, we can cast aside our natural and ultimately destructive self-centeredness and instead become free to serve the other.  This is what Paul means when he writes:  “For freedom Christ has set us free.  Stand firm, therefore, and do not submit again to the yoke of slavery.”  Christian identity is about trusting that we will be cared for by God in Christ, come what may, and that we can therefore turn our attention outward rather than inward.  We are freed from the bondage of the self, and all the worries that come with self-absorption, to live in freedom for others. 

Paul recognized that this message of Christian freedom was a dangerous one for the Gentiles of the Galatian church to hear, raised as they were in a Greco-Roman culture that was defined by violence and hedonistic self-indulgence.  So, Paul warned them:  to say that a Christian is free from the requirements of Torah is not to say that one is therefore free to indulge in whatever satisfies the self’s appetite or inclinations.  On the contrary, to be free in Christ is to choose to open ourselves to the Spirit, who leads us into a life oriented toward others and characterized by the nine fruits of the Spirit:  love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, generosity, faithfulness, gentleness, self-control, and all the other hallmarks of the Christian life.

To quote my namesake, Martin Luther, who loved Paul’s letter to the Galatians more than any other:  In Christ, through faith, we are freed from the tyranny of ourselves so that we might, through love, become slaves to one another.  Let me say that again:  In Christ, through faith, we are freed from the tyranny of ourselves so that we might, through love, become slaves to one another.

That may sound somewhat counter-intuitive.  Who, after all, voluntarily wants to be a slave to someone else?  And yet, the astounding mystery of our faith is that we find our true and fullest identity as God’s children when we die to our own selfish preoccupations so that we can instead love and serve others with abandon.

One of the central purposes of the Church, therefore, is to be a place where we can support each other in learning how to live such Spirit-filled lives.  Think of church as a training ground where disciples practice the art of following Christ.  Thus, in church, we say prayers of thanksgiving so that we can practice gratitude; in church, we sing songs of praise so that we can feel the joy of God’s presence in our hearts; in church, we confess our sins so that we can practice humility and recognize our dependence on the God who sustains us; in church, we pray for one another so that we can bear one another’s burdens in empathy and kindness; in church, we offer up our treasure when the collection plate comes around so that we can experience the liberating power of generosity; in church, we share the bread and the wine so as to experience the mystery of God’s presence among us in ways that defy words. 

Church is not just what well-bred people do on Sunday mornings.  Church is school for the spirit.  Church is where we learn how to be Christ-followers.

Which is why I always have to grimace when I hear people describe themselves as “spiritual but not religious.”  “Don’t get me wrong,” they say, “its not that I don’t believe in God or a greater power in this world.  I am a spiritual person.  It’s just that I don’t see the need to go to church when I can have my own personal relationship with God in other ways.”   These folk will often acknowledge Jesus as a great teacher, they may even regularly read the Bible for inspiration or instruction; but, they insist, church is not my thing. 

But being privately spiritual without church is akin to throwing the baby out with the bath water.  For there is nothing challenging about having deep thoughts all by oneself.  What is important is doing this work in community, where other people might call you on stuff, or heaven forbid, disagree with you.  Where life with God gets rich and provocative and meaningful is when you dig deeply into a tradition that you did not invent all for yourself and where you are held accountable by others who share that tradition. 

The very notion of “private spirituality” is, I’m afraid, an invention of an American culture captivated by the twin dangers of consumerism and narcissism.  The former values the freedom of the consumer over all else, and treats everything as a commodity to be bought and sold.  The latter values the individual self over all else, and treats everything as an object for the self’s gratification.

Christianity is, in this sense, profoundly counter-cultural because it values relationships over commodities, and community over individuals.   The Christian faith is not a private affair.  I am not free to pick and choose those bits that I like, and those bits that I don’t, as if I were shopping for God’s truth.  Nor is the question of faith about what I find personally fulfilling.  On the contrary, the faith belongs to the community of the faithful, and Jesus’ reality becomes most clearly manifest only when we, his gathered followers, come together in relationship to discern his presence in word and sacrament, in prayers, and in fellowship.  It is no accident that Jesus surrounded himself with a community of disciples, that he conferred upon this community the authority to interpret his teachings, and that he commissioned them to extend his ministry into new and emerging communities.

Don’t get me wrong:  Growing in the spirit, learning to follow Christ, is no easy task.  Nor does it always or inevitably lead to the results we expect.  While we are called to do what we can to be beacons of God’s love to this broken world, we shouldn’t lose heart if we don’t see immediate or unambiguously good results from our discipleship.  God’s time is not our time.  We call it “faith” precisely because we trust in the unseen and place our hope in a future that only God knows.  But while it is often hard to see the Kingdom toward which we are striving, we do know this much:  we know whom we must follow if we are to get there.  May the grace of our Lord Jesus Christ be with your spirit, my brothers and sisters, as the silent movie of your life continues to unfold.  Amen.