Christian Liberty

Being the 4th of July weekend, I preached a sermon this morning entitled "What Is Freedom?" I thought of the idea a while ago, but since then I had an occasions to help me think more deeply about the whole idea of freedom, both as a Christian and as an American.

The occasion was the annual Barth Seminar for Pastors, which I attended last month. Each year, about 15 pastors get together to discuss the theology of Karl Barth. We take a passage from his Church Dogmatics, a monumental work of theology, and try to understand it. This year, however, since we are celebrating the 500th anniversary of John Calvin's birth, we chose an earlier work of Barth, which amounts to his lectures on John Calvin.

The particular passage was on "Christian Liberty." Oddly enough, the whole passage was about the Church's relationship with the State: what is the Christian's obligation to the government? It doesn't sound much like freedom, but then I got a deeper lesson.

The leader helped us understand this by outlining two types of freedom: negative freedom and positive freedom. Negative freedom is to be free to do anything you want, as long as it doesn't hurt anyone else. It is freedom from being restricted to do things. It is freedom "from something." This sounds like a typically American understanding of freedom.

Positive freedom was harder for me to understand. The way it was explained to me was "the freedom to fulfill your potential." It is a freedom "towards something." As I see it, positive freedom is the freedom to love, the freedom to be responsible toward our fellow human beings.

I noted this morning that freedom begins with God. The very essence of God is love, and that, in love, God created humans in his image. That means, at the depth of our being is this potential to love as God loves. The grace-filled freedom that Christ gives us through the power of the Holy Spirit is the freedom to love our neighbors as our selves.

Positive freedom is the freedom that Christ can give us to overcome the "powers and prinicipalities" that enslave us - the forces in our world that seem to overwhelm our lives and lead us to give away our freedom. It is a very subtle thing, but these forces have a way to deceive us and to make us give away our freedom. These forces may be marketers, convincing us that we are lesser people without what they have to sell. They may be family and friends, exerting peer/family pressure over us. They may be all the things we are addicted to (alcohol, drugs, shopping, sex, sports - you name it!).

All of these forces seem to have a deceptive way of telling us that, although we have given power over to them, we are in control, and looking after our best interests. They compel us to be self-centered, self-indulgent people.

Ironically, people most possessed by these powers and principalities are usually those who think they are free, doing what they please.

Christ can have the power to free us from these delusions, and to lead us to true freedom: the freedom to fulfill our potential, the potential to love in the way that Christ loved.

During the weekend we celebrate freedom, let us remember Paul's words to the Galatians, "For you were called to freedom, brothers and sisters; only do not use your freedom as an opportunity for self-indulgence, but through love become slaves to one another. For the whole law is summed up in a single commandment, "you shall love your neighbor as yourself."