July 7, 2013 | 4:00 p.m.

It’s Not [Just] about You

Edwin Estevez
Pastoral Resident, Fourth Presbyterian Church

Galatians 5 and 6 (selected verses)

In the letter to the Galatians, the Apostle Paul is talking to a divided community. Early Christians are struggling with identity; some are former Jews and some are not—called Gentiles. When Gentiles convert to this group of Jews who believe that Jesus is the Messiah, who was killed and rose again from the dead, should they also adopt the customs of the Jews?

This is a serious question. Jews who believed in Jesus didn’t want to abandon their Jewish identity. It was something they had struggled for in the Roman Empire and before. The story of the Jews is a story about preserving the practices, honoring the languages and the ancestral memory, going through the rituals—all of which point to God’s faithfulness, called the Hesed of God in Hebrew—God’s steadfast love.

When these Jews who followed Jesus began to receive Gentiles into the fold, some wondered whether the men should be circumcised and whether dietary practices needed to be adapted, all the things the Jews interpreted from Torah. For modern readers, we sometimes miss the importance of this. If you don’t eat like the Jews, don’t practice the customs of the Jews, and don’t share similar histories/languages/values, well, it’s like a deal breaker.

When people date, they try to find a common language together, and they want to share the same core values, or it’s a deal breaker. Or picture your children marrying someone who doesn’t speak your language or practice any of your customs. Some might fear that family unity might be at stake unless families carefully reach out to the multicultural element of this coupling.

Having recently celebrated America’s colonial independence from the crown of Great Britain—a struggle of identity—we can acknowledge the question: what makes you American? It’s a question that even undergirds the debate surrounding immigration. What makes one belong here? It’s a question that has been asked by every culture in the world throughout history.

Along these struggles of identity, Paul wants to tell those early Christians it’s not about you or your group. It’s more than that. It’s about others. It’s about community. It’s about God’s plan in Jesus Christ—that the divisions might come to an end and that we might live as the community of God’s children, loveable, lovely, loved, and loving.

He writes to them about freedom. And given the recent Fourth of July fireworks commemorating something we associate with freedom—this human impulse to actively engage with their environment, be it a natural or political landscape, and to do so with some sense of choice and not be forced by another—it is only appropriate that today we talk about freedom. Well, freedom as Paul defines it—freedom in Christ.

It is a striking contrast. American independence, as it’s storied, is full of figures whom many of us, when we were in grade school, honored as heroes—Patrick Henry, Thomas Payne, Samuel Adams (who is more than just a beer, folks), John and Abigail Adams, James Madison, Alexander Hamilton, John Jay, Thomas Jefferson. These figures are associated with the fight for individual liberty, for personal freedom, freedom from the oppression by the majority, social oppression. Their impulse for this freedom is noble. Yet many of them spoke about freedom while oppressing others in systems such as slavery.

Nonetheless, the mythic power of the American Revolution inspired many intellectuals to reflect on it. “Rugged individualism” as an important historical event was first presented here in Chicago in 1893 at a conference. A professor named Frederick Jackson Turner read his social analysis entitled The Significance of the Frontier in American History. He described Americans as a “rugged, self-made race of men, forged in adversity through the pioneering experience, reborn and purified into a breed unique on earth.”

Rugged individualism was picked up by President Herbert Hoover, referring to the idea that each individual should be able to help themselves out and that the government does not need to involve itself in people’s economic lives or in national economics in general. During the Great Depression, he believed the federal government should not interfere with the American people.

Early in the republic of these United States, Alexis de Tocqueville wrote a political studies classic titled Democracy in America, in which he warned that modern democracy may be adept at inventing new forms of tyranny because of the materialism of an expanding bourgeoisie and the selfishness of individualism. “In such conditions we lose interest in the future of our descendents . . . and meekly allow ourselves to be led in ignorance by a despotic force all the more powerful because it does not resemble one,” he said.

He’s warning that the individualism will lead to a deterioration of society. Yet this idea of the individual hero is pervasive in our culture. We see it in our films and literature, the Batman and Superman comics, the sense of the one saving all. It was Wyatt Earp, after all, and his principled stand on behalf of the law that brought justice to Tombstone, we say. It was Serpico that led to “spring cleaning” so to speak of the New York City police department when he detailed the corruption of undercover cops.

And for some it is the rugged individualism of Edward Snowden who is fighting against what some see as government overreach, violation of citizen’s rights, and oppression. In fact, in a recent letter made public, Edward’s father, Lon Snowden, and lawyer cowrote a statement of praise that likened Edward to Thomas Payne, an American hero of mythic proportions for defending freedom, a letter published just two days before we were set to celebrate “freedom” in the United States.

I think one reason we’re fascinated by Edward Snowden is because he might just be the lone hero fighting against everything that is set against him. For whatever we think of this situation and of Edward Snowden (and I won’t resolve that here), Paul calls us to look at our lives of faith as more than this rugged individualism. While Paul himself refers to heroes in the faith, like Abraham and of course Jesus, he calls us to another kind of heroic way of living—in community. Paul repeatedly calls the early Christian community brothers and sisters in Christ, and yet, he also calls them the church ekklesia, Greek meaning a political assembly. We’re not just family, we’re also the assembly of saints pointing to God’s kingdom.

In this new way of life, as followers of the way of Jesus Christ, Paul wants to define freedom as beyond a Roman legal code, tradition, and beyond our current debates about freedom. Paul wants to define freedom as under the purview of Christ, as the only one who can give it, and that this freedom, the only true freedom, comes with responsibility.

It is paradoxical then, that freedom as Paul defines it, freedom in Christ, is not about personal freedom, about the rugged individualism of doing as we please, but in pleasing God. And what pleases God? The letter to the Galatians says it’s serving one another. In fact, Paul says that Christ’s freedom means to become slaves to one another. It means that we obey the truth of God’s grace.

Interesting. This freedom isn’t about how many channels we have on our cable television package or access to wireless Internet; it’s not a freedom concerning entitlements, but beyond all of that—it is service to one another. It is service to the last, and also the first, to the haves and have-nots, to the least, to the poor and marginalized. To all of God’s creation. It’s what Paul calls the law of Christ, and in obeying this law, we are truly free. Listen to what it sounds like:

Love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, generosity, faithfulness, gentleness, and self-control. . . . Let us not become conceited, competing against one another, envying one another. . . . My brothers and sisters, if anyone is detected in a transgression, you who have received the Spirit should restore such a one in a spirit of gentleness. Take care that you yourselves are not tempted. Bear one another’s burdens, and in this way you will fulfill the law of Christ. . . . (Galatians 5:22—6:3)

For Paul, our education, money, status, all of it is second to this living in community—living in kindness, living as servants to one another.

It’s something like the “beloved community,” that Martin Luther King Jr. preached. In this community we recognize that black or white, rich or poor, we are capable of wrong and yet are created as God’s good creatures. In this community we recognize that we are loved, even when we don’t love ourselves and are called to forgive ourselves and others, to love one another.

Take a moment, pause. Look to your left and to your right, in front and behind. This is your community. Imagine those back home, friends, family, and neighbors. That is your community. They will disappoint you. They will hurt you. You won’t always like your community. But you’re called to serve it, to remind the community of who we all are in Christ—loved and loveable, and lovely and loving.

As we reminisce about the wonderful Fourth of July weekend we had or wish we had, now with most fireworks settled, and red-white-and-blue-themed parades and barbecues done, let us now take up the task of our true freedom in Christ. Let us serve one another, let us be community to one another, let us help one another with the load we carry, with the burdens our past, our guilt and shame, our sin, and our pain, and let us walk together into the freedom of Christ. Amen.