Ethics For Modern Christians, Part IV

Freedom John M, Buchanan
Galatians 2:15-17, 5:1, 13-15 Broad Street Presbyterian Church
March 20, 1977 Columbus, Ohio

Sooner or later you have to deal with Freedom. In this series of sermons on
Ethics for Modern Christians we have thought about the fact that we are in a new
situation and that more is demanded of us ethically than of any other generation of
Christian people before us. We have looked at the New Morality and discovered that
it isn't really very new; that the fact of the matter is that our Lord Himself was
criticized for operating outside the boundaries of law and tradition. Last Sunday we
thought about a story He told; a story of two traditional religious types who walked
by a man in critical need, and the Samaritan, the one operating outside the frame-
work of religious rules, who was a neighbor to the man in need,

Today - Freedom, What a troublesome word it is! Men have died to win it, and
their children and grandchildren have found it so difficult, so unattractive, so
demanding, that they have given it away, No topic has inspired humanity to more
eloquent rhetoric, In 1941 Franklin D. Roosevelt said: "We, and all others who be-
lieve as we do, would rather die on our feet than live on our knees,"' But today
political scientists observe that freedom is in trouble throughout the world; that the
momentum belongs to oppression and tyranny, Social scientists debate whether it
exists at all, Some suggest that freedom of will is an illusion; that we are pro-
grammed biologically and act, essentially, on the basis of instinct and need, Others
suggest that we behave on the basis of the expectations of our parents, peers and
culture, In the civil arena freedom is very tenuous, It does not include, every
school child knows, the right to "shout fire in a crowded theatre", Whether it in-
cludes the right to shout obscenities at the corner of Broad and High is another
matter which gives us periodic pause. Freedom does not include thg right to drive at
60 miles per hour on a city street, It does not include, I keep discovering in a
painfully tangible way, the right to park for more than an hour, in downtown Columbus,
free of charge,

In terms of ethics, freedom is very much an enigma, It is mentioned prominently
in both Bible and Christian Theology. Sometimes Christian Freedom is used in defense

of the Mid-twentieth Century's great ethical dictum - "Do your own thing", Our friend,
Elton Trueblood, thinks that is the sickest sentiment in history, It is simply an
upbeat version of the old hedonist credo - “Eat, drink and be merry for tomorrow we

die", the bankruptcy of which is demonstrated the next morning when we don't die. The
fact is that we must continue to live, ordinarily, with the results of our behavior:
so must others. And so without some sense of responsibility, some high commitment,
freedom comes dangerously close to simple selfish indulgence, or what Christians

used to recognize as sin,

Given all the ambiguity and perplexity surrounding the word, freedom remains very
much at the heart of the Gospel. The eariy Christian Church in Galatia encountered
it squarely, In its infancy the Church was the child of Judaism, Jesus was a Jew:
His disciples were Jews, He said, rather clearly, that His purpose was not to destroy
the law of Judaism, That law, based on the Ten Commandments, expanded to include 613
separate rules, governed all of life. It was the ehtical code, It described how God
wanted human life to be lived. It became the vehicle by which a person lived the
good and righteous life. It was not there initially, but over the centuries, the law
eame to be regarded as the way a person earned salvation. That really wasn't much
of an issue so long as Christianity was confined to Judaic culture, But a man by the
name of Paul felt called to take the Good News of Jesus Christ into the cities of

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Asia Minor: Gentile cities, The record of that project is found in the fifth book of
the New Testament, The Acts of the Apostles - exciting reading, The people Paul en-
countered in those cities were not particularly interested in Jewish law: the dietary
restrictions, the Sabbath rules were totally strange to them, And so Paul started his
venture where they were, He told them about God's love in Jesus of Nazareth, and the
new Life in God's spirit which was available to them, Some of them believed: Paul
baptized them and brought them together in tiny communities called churches: men,
women, Jews, Greeks, slaves, freemen,

Two things happened almost immediately. The Christians back in Jerusalem heard
about what Paul was doing and were aghast. Paul, they thought, was far too liberal,
too easy, Some of the more zealous among them traveled to the cities where Paul had
been,met with the newly converted Christians and delivered some disconcerting news.
"Priends," they said, “you really have to be a Jew before you can be a Christian. You
have to obey this law - all of it, If you are a man, you have to undergo the rite of
circumcision." They were called Judaizers: apparently they precipitated quite a
crisis, Some Gentile Christians quit. After all, they hadn't bargained for this:
Paul hadn't told them about this part. Others were convinced and began furiously to
abide by the Mosaic law, all the while looking askance at their less zealous brothers
and sisters, The situation was confusing and destructive, particularly in Galatia,
And so Paul wrote a little letter: a remarkable document which has been described as
the Magna Charta of Christian Freedom, "No man is ever justified by doing what the
law demands,"" he wrote, “you, my friends, were called to be free men...for the whole
law can be summed up in a single commandment; 'Love your neighbor as yourself'."

"You are free," Paul told them, "In Jesus Christ you are free from trying to
earn your salvation by obeying the rules of religion, God won't love you any more
if you fast, pray twenty times a day, and submit to circumcision, He already loves
you totally, I£ you elect to do these things, do them out of gratitude for God's love."

Thus he thwarted the efforts of the Judaizers to impose legalism on the Christian
community, And then the second thing happened: freedom became anarchy, "Hurrah,"
said the Galatian Christians, "we are free, If God doesn't love us anymore for obeying
the rules, why bother?" Who hasn't asked that on occasion? "Let's do what we want to
do!" And they did. In the name of Christian freedom they lived it up, In a sister
church in Corinth they got drunk on the wine of the Lord's Supper, They fought with
each other, and argued, and practiced a wide-open sexual standard under the guise of
freedom, And so Paul wrote again, "You were called to freedom, brethren; only do not
use your freedom as an opportunity for the flesh,'"' What kind of freedom is that? We
are called to it, but advised not to use it, Paul wrote: "through love be servants
of one another," The way really to be free, that is to say, is by giving it away -
in love and service,

If we Christians have any ethical wisdom at all, it is in that brief statement,
Freedom is what we are given by the Gospel of Jesus Christ. But to realize it and
use it we must freely accept the standard of service to others ~ love for others -
as our ethical benchmark. Joseph Fletcher writes: "Christian Situation Ethics is
not a system or program of living according to a code, but an effort to relate love
to a world of relativities,.,.It is a strategy of love," (Situation Ethics, p.30).

St. Augustine, Bishop of Hippo near the end of the Fourth Century, wrote his
Spiritual autobiography under the title Confessions. He described his struggle
with the Gospel as a young man; how he tried the life of a scholar, then the life of

a lusty libertine, and how he returned to the church to become one of its leading
apologists, One of the most significant things he ever said, nearly 1,600 years azo,
is this deceptively simple little sentence: "Love, and then do what you please."

Helmut Thielicke, our contemporary in Germany, observes: "At crucial points in
the Bible Jesus refuses to give us very definite and detailed rules of behavior, It
would be far too simple to follow them; all you would have to do would be to pull
your belt tighter; otherwise, though, you could be miles away inwardly. Instead of
these rules, Jesus unlocks the much more strenuous world of freedom to us and lets us
decide for ourselves which way of obedience we think is demanded of us," (How to
Believe Again, p,146),

Does it sound difficult? Demanding? Vague? Risky? It is; those and more, Freedom
is troublesome, Jcan Paul Sartre, French existentialist, saw freedom as a kind of
curse: "we are condemned to freedom," he wrote and realized that without it we are
less than human but with it we are seldom very happy. People who live in rigid,
structured cultures sometimes have a sreat deal of trouble existing in the Western
World. I'm interested in the fact that of the number of persons who risk life and
limb escaping from East to West Germany, a portion choose, voluntarily, to return.
They find freedom too unsettling, too anxiety-producing. On the very day, two summers
ago, that Indira Ghandi clamped down on the press, declared a state of emergency and
put Indian democracy on the shelf I found myself in a conversation at Princeton with
an Indian Christian, a staunch supporter of Mrs. Ghandi, I tried to explain that the
freedoms so easily and simply suspended in India were at the heart of democracy, He
couldn't understand, "Without those freedoms", he said, "India could get on with the
business of providing food and economic stability for her people." When I suggested
that Lenin, Mao Tse Tung and Adolf Hitler shared the same sentiment he became angry,
It was unkind of me, But freedom is troublesome,

The church, for instance, has always flirted with legalism as the simplest way
to foster right behavior, The Christian Ethic has often been expressed in simplistic
terms of "don't do this - don't do that", And to many well-meaning Christians the
suggestion that the strategy of love is the important point, not the rule book, has
sounded like soft-headed liberalism,

In the arena of our common life the issues become even more difficult. I think
that any comparison between Thomas Jefferson's commitment to a free press and the
publication of a pornographic magazine is outlandish and dishonest and vulgar.
Jefferson didn't mean Hustler Magazine, But the issue will not submit to simple
resolution, No Christian with any sensitivity at all to the sanctity of sexuality,
the dignity of persons and the beauty of honest love can be anything but appalled at
pornography as it is now commonly available, But Christians, among all people, ought
to be very careful about siving away the freedom to choose what one prefers to read,
That, I understanc, is not a very popular position, There should be other options
available to us, I look to the courts to discover and devise them, I value my
freedom not to have to confront, nor to have my children confront, pornography on
every corner, But I remain unconvinced that censorship is the way best to serve my
freedom, I've agonized over this and my own position became solid when, reading for
this sermon I discovered the following statement by Andrei Vishinsky, a spokesman for
the USSR. He said, "...freedom of speech, of the press is the property of all the
citizens of the USSR, fully guaranteed by the State upon the sole condition that they
be utilized in accord with the interests of the toilers, and to the end of strengthen-
ing the socialist social order," (Declaration of Freedou, p.59).The trouble with that
is that someone has to decide what is in the common interest, In a free society that
someone must be the individual,

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Freedom is troublesome. Apart from the political arena the area of ethics which
seems to concern us most deeply is sexual conduct. Until fairly recently the church's
answer to the question of pre and extra marital sex was one word: Don't, And then
Kinsey and others informed us that a lot of people weren't paying much attention and
that those who were interested in chastity and fidelity weren't receiving much real
help from religion, The simple solutions of legalism fell apart in the Mid-twentieth
Century, Freedom, once again, looked suspiciously like License to do whatever one
wanted to do, "Do your own thing", a generation of young people told us, And weekly,

a television show advised that "if it feels good do it!" TI continue to believe, how-
ever, that the best approach to sexual morality is based on love - love of self, love
for the other, and love for all the others who inevitably are involved, [I continue

to believe that building an ethic on the contraction "don't" is a waste of time; but
that young people know what you're talking about when you begin with love and trust
and self-esteem, seasoned with the grace of forgiveness and understanding. We have
given up too easily, I think we can and should say that the highest exercise of free-
-o7 sometimes is in self-restraint out of real love for the other.

Twenty centuries ago St, Paul observed that freedom is not really freedom when
it is used as the rationale for doing whatever one wants to do, Trueblood writes
that empty freedom turns into a new kind of bondage - bondage to self, St, Paul called

it "slavery to the flesh", We know, I think, what that means. I've been reading

Thomas Merton this Lenten Season, He wrote - on Freedom, "I do not find in myself the
power to be happy by doing what I like."' How ironic, that the goal for which we strive -
doing whatever we want to do ~- turns out to be rather unhappy. "On the contrary if I

do nothing except what pleases my own fancy I will be miserable most of the time, This
would not be so if my will had not been created to use its own freedom in the love
of others." (No Man Is An Island, p,35).

Christian freedom is the freedom from restrictive religious rules: freedom for
serving and loving others. The second statement is more important than the first. It
is not an answer for every question but a "strategy of love". It is the demanding
call of God to obey Him by living an ethic of love in every situation, Sometimes it
will be very difficult: the way will not always be clear: the going may be risky.
But God wants us to work our way through it, Thielicke writes: "God wants us totally,
He wants our understanding: He wants the exertion of our thought processes; He wants
our struggle for the right path; He wants - to use the words of the Bible itself -
all our heart, all our soul, all our strength, even our mental strength." (op cit p.147).

Ethics for Christians begin not with rules and regulations, but with Gospel: the
Gospel that sounds like this: "God so loved the world that He gave His only Son."
Before any demands are made of us we are given something - God's love. In Jesus Christ,
we believe that God cares about us personally: He accepts us as we are: He doesn't ask
us to become loveable before He extends His love. Love is not the reward for goodness;
it is how God hopcs to inspire us to be good. He loves us as only a father can love
his children, But it seems that we are always trying to turn that around: to put our
goodness before His love: to devise ways to render ourselves deserving of His love,

We have, that is to say, turned the Gospel into bad news: the bad news that we've got
a long way to go before God can bring Himself to care about us,

But the Gospel of Jesus Christ is the Good News. Very good news - God loves us
in spite of what ve are, To know that: to know that I am loved by my Creator is to be
devastated: it is to be made humble at the incredible nature of things, It is to be
grateful beyond the words with which to describe it. It is to be free - in the
sense that I know now that I don't have to earn God's love: integrity has always

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told me that I couldn't do it anyway, Now I know that I don't have to spend the rest
of my Life worrying about it - I already have it, And it is suddenly, out of the
deepest gratitude, to want somehow to love in answer,

It is to sense, perhaps for the first time, that the only way I have of answer~
ing God's love for me - is to act lovingly in every situation. That is the beginning
of Christian Ethics,

Helmut Thielicke is very helpful when he suggests that the Christian Ethic is
not 4 road map but a compass. The compass points to the one ethical imperative that
is always valid: love God and your neighbor, But we must find our own way, That is
our freedom. The ethical Landscape includes mountains and swamps and very rough
terrain, At every corssroads we have to decide what to dc, Following the compass,
we are free to pause, free to be creative as we devise ways of conquering the rough
terrain,.."The whole countryside is mine: that is my freedom, But I am Christ's
and His love controls and leads me," (Ibid p, 150-151).

We cannot go it alone, Given their freedom by God, people in the past have been
inclined either to abuse it, or to tum it in for a form of safe legalism. We need
help, We need the support and stimulation and leading of the God who has set us free,

The cimes in which we are living, and the era into which we are moving will be
demanding, Thinss may never be as simple ethicaily as they once were, Technology,
mobility, urbanization will continue to challenge Christian people to find new and
relevant solutions to hard moral questions,

My deepest conviction is that the God who gives us freedom will walk with us
and puide us and be with us through the moral complexities of our time: that He calls
ug to the exciting venture of Life lived as free people, and that He wiil not abandon
us when we stumble and fall.

That was said very well in a great old hymn written in 1745:

Guide me, O Thou great Jehovah
Pilgrim through this barren land,
I am weak, but Thou art mighty,
Hold me vith thy powerful hand.

You and I are free, We have been given the burden - and gift - of personal
responsibility. It demands our heart - our soul - our mind.
Amen,

Guide us, Father, as we make our way. Give us courage to embrace and live
our freedom, Give us love big enough to answer Yours; through Jesus Christ our Lord,
Amen,