Pentecost 3 Year C

(1Kings 19.15-16, 19-21; Galatians 5.1, 13-25; Luke 9.51-62)

The question I find myself often returning to – and most sermons begin with a question – is, what are we doing here? At a time when churches are struggling to stay open, and there are debates about the future of Christianity, what are we doing here? Why do we return week by week? I recognise that this is not a disinterested question – it’s no surprise that a priest whose sense of purpose and livelihood comes from the church, should worry away at that question. But I find myself returning to the question partly because I find myself less worried about, and more fascinated by, the fact that church persists, and, here at any rate, continues to grow and engage new people.

Many of the younger people I talk to about their developing faith, and their reason for coming to church, mention, in one way or another, their sense that coming to church helps address a persistent and almost all-pervasive sense of anxiety. Anxiety about themselves, whether they are good enough; anxiety about the future and the fear that the comforts of a home, a stable job, a pension - comforts that their parents’ generation often took for granted - now seem a distant prospect. And the most existential anxiety of all – the fact that the earth’s climate is heading for inexorable breakdown and all possible futures are threatened. And I suspect all of us share in that sense of anxiety, and not least in the ways in which it seems to be amplified and expressed in the increasing fractures of our common life, both nationally and internationally. And if that pervasive anxiety is something to do with why we are here then the question is how church responds to that anxiety. Most fundamentally are we here to escape it for a while, or to be given some tools to engage with it, work on it? Is church a haven of peace in an otherwise anxious world, a place to get away from it all, or a place that gives us a fresh perspective on our fears? Is faith about escapism or engagement? Does it comfort and heal or challenge and disturb? Is faith that which soothes the rough edges of our stress-filled lives, or might it also ask why our lives are so stressed to begin with (if that is the case), and who and what else is being put under stress by our lifestyles and culture. As John Bell puts it, ‘One of the purposes of the great world religions is to enable people to face up to what they would rather avoid. … There is no authentic spirituality, there is no deep faith conviction, there is no true devotion which emanates from a life which is constantly pleasure-filled and pain-free.’

Certainly the Jesus of today’s gospel is not interested in comfort: ‘Foxes have holes, and birds of the air have nests; but the Son of Man has nowhere to lay his head. Follow me.’ Are you attracted? Jesus has set his face to Jerusalem, we are told, and an urgency now characterises him – almost shocking in its brusqueness: ‘Lord, first let me go and bury my father.’ – ‘Let the dead bury their own dead; but as for you, go and proclaim the kingdom of God.’ Jesus has set his face to Jerusalem, journeys towards the pain, the conflict, the disturbance that await him there. And the repeated invitation is ‘follow me.’ In what sense is that a response to anxious times?

Paul, the writer of the letter to the Galatians that we also heard this morning, has some answers to that question of how following Jesus, demanding as that might seem, might also be a journey into freedom, freedom from our fears and anxieties. Paul begins in blunt, unequivocal terms: For freedom, Christ has set us free.
But freedom, for Paul, as he goes on to argue, is not the freedom of being able to do whatever we like. In his usual blunt and forceful language, Paul states it is the freedom discovered by, through love, becoming slaves to one another. Freedom is found in slavery. How are we to make sense of that?

Paul’s moment of conversion, the moment when his relationship, his following of Christ comes into focus, is when he recognises the face of God in the one he is persecuting in the name of God. His sense of what is right is overturned in that moment, and the God who he believed was asking him to condemn the followers of Jesus, is revealed in the face of the one who was himself condemned. Paul converting insight is that a religion couched in terms of do’s and don’ts, leads to condemnation, to death, to persecuting people in the name of social order and tradition and religion, as he himself did – as some expressions of church can still do today. But Christ himself, Paul has come to recognise, bore that condemnation on the cross. Christ’s freedom is the freedom to be willing to bear that condemnation, to reveal a God who disarms us by bearing the condemnation we often imagine it is God’s role to dispense. And the risen Christ, the conqueror of the death which could not silence him, invites us to step into that same freedom – freedom from the need to condemn and divide the world into those who are right and wrong, in and out, the saved and the condemned.

For Paul, our following of Christ, frees us from the God of condemnation; the God who is nothing other than an idol, a finger-wagging projection of our deepest fear that we live in a world out of control, and our desire for a God, like some authoritarian figure, to sort it all out. The cross of Christ reveals that that idol leads only to death and destruction, the crucifying of love.

But Paul is also interested not just in what we are freed from, but in what we are freed for. The freedom given in Christ cannot be a free-for-all, an irresponsibility about what we do and who we are. Instead our freedom is found by life in the Spirit, as Paul puts it. Paul goes on to present two lists of ways that the two forms of freedom might take. These he labels as freedom by the flesh, and by the Spirit. One, living by the flesh, characterises freedom as the ability to do whatever we like, freedom as hedonism, life without limits or constraints, with the pleasure-seeking self at its heart. The other life of freedom, in the Spirit, sees that our freedom from the tyrannical God of condemnation can evoke another response, in that encounter with God’s Spirit, the response of love and joy, peace, patience, kindness, generosity, faithfulness, gentleness and self-control.

Shortly, in our Eucharistic prayer we will hear that ‘Christ broke the bonds of evil and set your people free to be his Body in the world.’ We are freed from the evil that leads us to crucifying one another, to be Christ’s body in our world. We find freedom not in escape, but in commitment, in engagement, in being together the Body of Christ. Freedom is not, in the Christian understanding, found in un-commitment, in not being tied, in having limitless choice, but in finding a ‘home’, a place in the world, a language to speak, a task to do, a self discovered not through the relentless acquisition of ‘experiences’ or possessions, but discovered through relationship; in relationship to God who loves us, and does not condemn us; and in relationship to one another. Freedom found in the bondage of love.

Such freedom is no easy matter, as Paul well knew. But the third way in our age of anxiety between hedonism and condemnation is about that journey into freedom; being open to God’s judgement and truth because that does not condemn us but disarms us and invites us into freedom. Such freedom is learnt in community – alongside others, in prayer, in the surrendering of the selfish self to receive back from God a truer self; and in that school of wisdom that despite all its fallibility and failings, is the church, following Jesus, gathering around and seeking to be the disturbing and healing Body of Christ. Amen.