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The
Allegiance That Sets Us Free Sermon by Cynthia A. Jarvis July 6, 2003, Presbyterian Church of Chestnut Hill I Samuel 8:1-22a "If you continue in my word, you are truly my disciples, and you will know the truth and the truth will make you free." Liberty," says political scientist Glenn Tinder, "is far more puzzling than we who live in societies where it is long-established and taken for granted ordinarily realize." No doubt our foray into Iraq is teaching us this very truth as we puzzle over the Iraqis' resistance to the liberty we say we intend for them. Tinder suggests a reason for such resistance: "People do, of course, like to follow their own desires and that usually requires liberty. But," he says, "in some circumstances, they yearn to escape from a life trivialized by devotion to momentary impulses or burdened by the responsibility of deciding how to live." In such circumstances, more often than not, the escape involves exchanging the liberty of life lived in freely chosen obedience to the living God, for the institutionalized security of civil religion. Such circumstances likely led the people of Israel, at the end of Samuel's priesthood, to demand of God a king like all other nations, for they had become a people burdened by the responsibility of deciding how to live. This was not the first time. In the wilderness, you will remember, when the going got tough, they murmured against Moses and longed for the land of Egypt, the land of slavery, where they "sat by the fleshpots and ate bread to the full." Or again, when they wearied of waiting for Moses to come down from the mountaintop, wearied of waiting for a word from the living God, they grabbed Aaron and said, "Up, make us gods, who shall go before us." Then, having battled their way into the land under Joshua's sword, they are reminded by Joshua that God "gave [them] a land on which [they] had not labored, and cities which [they] had not built...[they] eat the fruit of vineyards and oliveyards which [they] did not plant. Now therefore," says Joshua to them before death, "fear the Lord; serve him in sincerity and in faithfulness; put away the gods which your fathers served beyond the River, and in Egypt and serve the Lord. And," he adds, "if you are unwilling to serve the Lord, choose this day whom you will serve." Choose this day to whom you will pledge your allegiance. Thus began an incredible social experiment on God's part. Israel's two great leaders, Moses and Joshua, were dead. The land they had entered was filled with people worshipping other gods. Though they had conquered these people, they did not drive them out of the land. Rather, they lived with them--and with their gods--as a people who had chosen to serve the Lord alone. A safe assumption would be that their resolve to serve the Lord alone lasted about as long as the first drought or the next pestilence. The chips being down, the gods in charge of rain or health or happiness presented themselves as better choices. So the Israelites bowed down. And so God gave them over to be plundered by the people they had once conquered until, says the Book of Judges, "they were in sore straits. Then the Lord raised up judges [servants] to save them out of the power of those who plundered them." God gave them judges who usually began well but ended badly. Over and over again the people did what was evil in the sight of the Lord; they were delivered into the hand of other kings; another judge was appointed and the cycle repeated. The words of Joshua echo down salvation history's corridor: Choose whom you will serve. By the time we reach the eighth chapter of First Samuel, they were a people overwhelmed by the responsibility of choosing whom they would serve, of deciding how to live. "Then all the elders of Israel came to Samuel at Ramah, and said to him, 'Behold, you are old and your sons do not walk in your ways; now appoint for us a king to govern us like all the nations.'" Samuel protests, offering the people a litany of life under a king: "He will take your sons to be his horsemen...your daughters to be his perfumers and cooks and bakers...the best of your fields...a tenth of your grain...the best of your cattle...a tenth of your flocks, and you shall be his slaves. In that day you will cry out because of your king whom you have chosen for yourselves." Perhaps, but in this day the Israelites say to Samuel, in so many words, "We have enough freedom." Though they are not alone in their weariness, for one also senses that the Lord God has grown weary of this chosen people's inability to choose the God who is God. God's response to their request finally has about it a hint of pathos: "Harken to the voice of the people in all that they say to you," God says to Samuel, "for they have not rejected you, but they have rejected me from being king over them." Three thousand years later, you and I dwell--in a land of people worshipping other gods--as those who have chosen to worship the God made known to us in Jesus Christ. Yet more and more, we are a people burdened by the responsibility of deciding how to live as his disciples. We prefer the security of a civil religion that legislates the morality and secures the faith we have been unable to impart to our children and our children's children. "The natural inclination of faith," says Tinder, "is to build a sacred order--to reconstruct the world in its own image. [But] in granting liberty, [the Church] abandons that spontaneous project. It acquiesces in secularism--life unrelated to [the Living] God and unstructured by faith. Acknowledging the right of human beings to be free, it allows for a repudiation of faith. It provides room in the world for personal habits, for institutions, even for whole societies antithetical to faith...When Christians accept liberty they accept the possibility--a possibility that is almost certain to become a reality--of a world unformed and ungoverned by faith." Thoughtful Christians--to be a bit arrogant for a moment about Presbyterians in the mix of Christendom--thoughtful Christian are usually willing to take the risk of liberty within the social order, trusting that the One who rules incognito--yet is up to something in human history--is finally the One who will reign. We are willing to live in a tension that those on the political left would like to dissolve by institutionalizing various utopian visions...and that those on the right would like to resolve by legislating morality. If we believe people must be free to choose whom they will serve, if we believe God is only truly served when God and the neighbor are loved freely and gladly, then says Tinder, "the human race has to run the gauntlet both of injustice and of unrighteousness. [Sometimes] liberty has to be defended, even though it brings the injustice the left feels to be intolerable and the unrighteousness the right would suppress by law." Again, our story in First Samuel underlines this fine line. God acts in this story not as a tyrant who forces these chosen people to choose Him and so choose what is good and true. God is a God who "seeks a relationship into which men and women enter as freely as God does...In God's wrath, God tries to awaken, not to enslave. In God's mercy, God forgets past acts of rebellion and refrains from vengeance. In God's anger and forgiveness alike, there is human liberty. And at last," notes Tinder, "in Christ, God takes care not to burn up liberty in the fires of his revelation. God did not appear as a lord whose glory effaced every human doubt...but rather as a suffering...human being whose [truth] could easily be missed altogether." That is why Dostoevsky's Grand Inquisitor rails at Christ saying, "'Thou didst choose all that is exceptional, vague and enigmatic,' thus placing on every person an awful burden of choice. 'Instead of taking possession of men's freedom,' he charges, 'Thou didst increase it.'" So, given the increase of our freedom in Christ and the anxiety of a nation burdened by the responsibility of how to live in the face of our diversity and divisions, we must ask what it would look like both to live in liberty as those who have chosen to serve the Living God alone...and to live in the presence of the other's liberty such that community rather than coercion results. In the first place, we must beseech God for a greater trust in God's sovereignty over human history and so over our life together. "Christians who are very anxious about the fate of God's truth," says Tinder, "must have forgotten the doctrine of the Holy Spirit, which implies that God does not send his truth into human history like a ship that is launched and then forgotten...Need Christians fear that God's voice will be drowned out by human error? When [we] succumb to the temptations" of wanting the state to promote God's cause at the cost of liberty, then we "betray an assumption that God is incapable of caring for God's own concerns!" But in the second place, if liberty is something other than the trivial pursuit of one's own happiness, then we must engage one another--within the church and way beyond the church's doors--in serious and searching conversations about our common responsibility of deciding how to live. It is not a matter of saying we want a Christian understanding of truth or justice or righteousness enshrined by the laws of the land. Quite the contrary! From the perspective of faith in the Living God, we must become a people who guard the other's part in the conversation fiercely. We do this believing that God has given us all the choice of whom to serve, lest our love of God be something less than love freely given. But God has also given us to one another and made us all--through God's exceptional, vague and enigmatic revelation--seekers after the truth, sojourners toward a common destiny. God made us that we might engage one another endlessly, inquiringly, as regards the people we are becoming in freedom, as regards the community we were called together to be in freedom. It is a responsibility that requires we pay attention to the destiny of the other even as we attempt to live our own destiny with humility and gratitude. Finally, we must bear witness to Jesus Christ in this land of diminishing liberty as those who--trusting God and engaging in the lively and common search for truth--create a free space for the "unfolding of the drama of divine-human relations." In Jesus Christ, God gave us "time and room to listen thoughtfully and answer responsibly...to dispute God's Word or simply not to listen." We bear witness to God in Christ when we make such time and room manifest in our common life. I think that is what the founders of this nation meant this land to become: a free space for the unfolding of the drama of divine-human relations, for the unfolding drama of our common destiny. With people risking life and limb, fleeing countries created to coerce them into a destiny decreed by a king or a priest, we place a lady at our door, declaring in almost biblical cadences: Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breath free, the wretched refuse of your teeming shore. Send these the homeless tempest tossed to me." It is an act of hope in a land anxiously trying to force God's hand by our ordering of the common life…an act of faith in a time marked by fear of the other and the stranger…an act of love before the God whose rule is love alone and whose reign will never end! Thanks be to God! |