better integrating such concerns into my broader agenda.
Yes, I'm not being very specific. And rather than blogging something dense, I thought I'd share the Vesper's Talk I gave during the week. The readings included Galatians 5:13-15, Psalm 49 and "God Bless the USA" by Lee Greenwood.
We are called to freedom, brothers and sisters. Yet we are in bondage to sin and cannot free ourselves.
This is our tensive identity as Christians. And in a country that values the rhetoric of individual freedom more highly than ending poverty and homelessness, injustice and inequality, our calling yet as Christians is to live out this Christian freedom.
And it starts with a simple phrase: I am in bondage to sin and I cannot free myself.
I am in bondage to ideas: that my neighbor’s lives are better and happier than mine; that a larger screen television and a faster computer will make my life more comfortable. I am in bondage to the idea that my needs and rights matter more than the least off in society. I am held hostage by the ideal that political freedom is true freedom, rather than a form of bondage to the tyranny of individualism, to placing individual rights over the common good.
I am in bondage to sin and I cannot free myself.
I am in bondage to my culture, a culture that has partially made me who I am. I am not free to create my own identity. It is a culture that expects God to Bless America, rather than asking America to bless God. It is a culture that is willing to spend over $4 Trillion dollars for regime change and tax cuts for the wealthy, rather than universal health care; that sees social value determined by the size of one’s budget and having the wealth to shape political discourse. It is a culture that values us most highly as consumers rather than lovers, wealth-creators rather than healers, cogs in a machine of economic efficiency rather than images of God. It is a culture that can ask us to die for it, that expects pride in country rather than humbleness before God.
I am in bondage to sin and I cannot free myself.
I am in bondage to my desires. I want things: new golf clubs, a Viking Range, an expensive college education for my daughter, cheap T-shirts. I want security, whether vocational, financial, physical or emotional. I want things, I want happiness, physical fulfillment and sensual satiation. I want more….
I am in bondage to sin and I cannot free myself.
I am in bondage to my body. If I don’t get eight hours of sleep a night, I get cranky; I get a headache when I miss my morning coffee. My back is hunched and I get neck and back pain. My eyesight is going, and though I don’t want to admit it (especially to my wife), my hearing isn’t what it used to be. One day my body will perish; I will be no more.
What are you in bondage to? For you are called to freedom, brothers and sisters.
Our freedom comes through faith to participate in the free gift that is Jesus the Christ. His self-giving freedom is not a political freedom, nor the idea that I can do what I want because that is what I want. It is not freedom from hurt, from insecurity, from worry and anxiety; but freedom to relate most lovingly to those around you. It is the freedom for a promiscuity of love, not in the erotic sense, but rather as a form of love that sees my freedom to fulfill my calling interwoven with the freedom of all to fulfill their callings. It is the freedom to see and act that when my neighbor is hungry, I am hungry; when my neighbor is homeless, I am homeless; when my neighbor lacks a quality education, I lack an education. For you are called to freedom, brothers and sisters, freedom to serve, to act and to love.
We are in bondage to sin and cannot free ourselves. Thanks be to God.
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