The Rev. Joseph Farnes
July 2, 2023
All Saints, Boise
Proper 8A
You know it’s the Fourth of July when social media starts to light up with the same three posts: “Was that a gun or fireworks?”, “Won’t somebody think of pets and veterans instead of lighting off fireworks?” and “Those veterans fought for my right to light explosives on fire for fun, thank you very much.”
There is a lot to consider around Independence Day. On the one hand, who isn’t inspired by those wonderful lines from the Declaration of Independence about life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness? It’s an expansive vision of human dignity and freedom, and it has inspired countless generations both in the US and abroad to work and struggle and even fight for that freedom for all people. In the aftermath of the Revolutionary War, we saw independence movements throughout South America and elsewhere. The year 1810, for example, a short thirty years after our revolutionary war, multiple South American countries began to declare independence from the Spanish Empire. And don’t forget independence for the people of Haiti in 1791– when enslaved peoples threw off their shackles and fought for freedom, and then were forced to repay their enslavers for the money they lost.
And, on the other hand, I know it’s a complicated story. It isn’t as neat and tidy and perfect like some folks want it to be. That proclamation that “all men are created equal” had some caveats to that word “all” – the working poor, the enslaved, Native Americans, women, and others – they weren’t seen as equal. The right to vote was restricted to landowning males, and enslaving others whether by law or by wage was seen as just a matter of business. The freedom and dignity proclaimed in the Declaration of Independence had an asterisk next to it over many years.
And it took – and will continue to take – many years to erase that asterisk little by little. The 13th Amendment banned enslavement … except when you’ve been convicted of a crime. The 15th Amendment guaranteed the right to vote regardless of race … except when creative legal strategies undermine it. The 19th Amendment guaranteed women the right to vote … and yet women’s pay still lags behind men’s. Real equality, real life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness is still a thing we must build together.
For some, to even have this conversation feels like a betrayal of the Founding Fathers and even a betrayal of America. You and I know that to admit what we’ve done wrong is not the end of the story – we say a confession together most Sundays! – but for some, any amount of self-reflection is one step too far because it might lead to feelings of guilt and remorse, and those feelings are too close to shame, and the only feeling we should ever feel is absolute pride.
Can we imagine being so enslaved to fear, fear of any emotion that self-reflection might stir up, fear of facing difficult and honest history – imagine being so enslaved to fear that this fear manifested itself in rage, demanding a safe and simplistic and fundamentally false view of history?
Because that’s what it is: it’s slavery to fear.
St Paul in his letter today talks about how easy it is to enslave ourselves. We normally think of slavery as something imposed because that is how it generally has been through human history, even today. Humans kidnap or capture in war other humans, sell them off like possessions. Humans use the pain and desperation of other humans as a bargaining tool, and force them to work so that the person pretending to own them can make a lot of money.
And yet, Paul points out, we also enslave ourselves. Paul writes, “Do you not know that if you present yourselves to anyone as obedient slaves, you are slaves of the one whom you obey, either of sin, which leads to death, or of obedience, which leads to righteousness?”
We enslave ourselves and strip away our own freedom. We enslave ourselves and sell our lives (and others’ lives!) for money. We enslave ourselves and sell ourselves as a brand, as a resume of work experiences, social connections, and educational attainments. We enslave ourselves and hold ourselves hostage to fame and prestige and power. We enslave ourselves and put ourselves in a prison of “positive vibes only” where we strip away our right to have the full range of human emotion and connection.
Why do we do this?
Because, honestly, we’re afraid. We’ve heard so long that we’re only worth what we earn, we’re only worth what people think of us, we’re only worth what we sacrifice. These voices around us have convinced us that there is no alternative. We sink down, we get angry. We pile our own chains higher because the chains make us feel worthwhile.
But there is an alternative. The alternative is God’s free gift: eternal life in Christ Jesus our Lord. It isn’t just freedom – its freedom for a purpose, for new life, for eternal life.
Christ doesn’t just unlock our shackles and say, “There you go, you’re free” and walk away. No, Christ walks us into his freedom, a fullness of freedom in the divine life. Because if we’ve spent years enslaving ourselves, we need help to be free from shackles and also to be free from the idea of these same shackles. The Emancipation Proclamation and the 13th Amendment abolished slavery, but that wasn’t enough to undo slavery. It took the era we call Reconstruction to try to abolish the effects, the resonance of slavery. (If only we’d kept to that vision instead of letting slavery back in with the legacy of Jim Crow!)
If we’ve spent years enslaving ourselves to all these ideas and fears, we need years to unlearn that habit of enslaving ourselves. It might feel like enslaving ourselves to righteousness, to a new way of thinking and being. Paul does talk about us being slaves of obedience to God. But, as St Paul also says, “I am speaking in human terms because of your natural limitations.” Because truly, this freedom from slavery to sin and death and all those things to bind us, this freedom is life. A free gift freely bestowed by God upon all people, of all nations and genders and abilities and sexualities.
This free gift of divine life takes time to manifest in our lives more fully. We are granted freedom by God’s free gift, and we must walk that way of freedom as best as we can, however imperfectly. We won’t get it right. Our future selves, and future generations, will look back and see what we should have done differently. This is no cause for shame, and absolutely no cause for refusing to see our failures. The freedom of God sets us free from fear. Even if future generations see so obviously the sins I commit, am I afraid of their judgment and rejection? God will figure out how to work with imperfectly free me, and perhaps the little acts of God’s freedom along the way will have made a path for those who come after.
Every imperfect step toward living out that divine freedom, that divine life is a blessing and a gift to others. But we cannot stop walking, and we must always look to see where our imperfect steps may need to be corrected. We keep walking our way in Christ’s freedom as best as we can, and work to guarantee freedom for all of God’s beloved creatures, every single one of them, no exceptions, no asterisks. Amen.