Sermon by Tom Are Jr. | October 6, 2024 | Fourth Presbyterian Church

World Communion Sunday
October 6, 2024

Free at Last

from the sermon series:
"What Being Presbyterian Teaches Us about Good Governance"

Tom Are Jr.
Interim Pastor

John 12:12–19
John 13:1–17

For a few weeks we have been reflecting on what our faith teaches us about good governance. We began by pointing out that government in the macro sense is about how we relate to our neighbors. Christian faith is also a vision for how we relate to our neighbors. So while faith and politics do not play the same role, they are in the same conversation. We then talked of some of our values and practices — for example, avoiding giving one person too much power. No kings for us. Not even bishops, thank you. And last week we talked about truth as the ligament that holds the communal body together. While there is nothing uniquely Presbyterian about the pursuit of truth, there are many today who have decided we can live without it. They are wrong about that.

Today we conclude this short series with some reflections on freedom. Like truth, freedom is not a concern that is unique to Presbyterians, but faith enriches our thoughts about freedom.

I have chosen some odd texts for today. If you were here for the first sermon in this series, you may remember that I read the Christmas text from John’s Gospel, and now on World Communion Sunday I have us listen to the story of Palm Sunday. If you are a lectionary adherent and believe that certain texts can only be read on certain days, you must be thinking the interim pastor has lost his mind. The good news for you: the Pastor Nominating Committee is meeting again this afternoon. Help is on the way.

The Palm Sunday parade begins with the people. The ordinary people and the broken people, the people who go nameless in the story. This parade attracted anyone who would have reason to celebrate a new king. This is the closest they would get to an election of any kind.

They danced and they sang. They lifted their babies in the air. They paved the way with palm branches. Fathers looked deep into their children’s eyes: “Remember this day. Hosanna. We are free.”

They weren’t wrong about that. Jesus did come to set them free.

Jesus rides into Jerusalem to set us free. A few nights later when he kneels down with bowl and towel to do the servant’s work of washing feet, he is still teaching us what it is to be free. To be free is not simply to do what I choose, but rather to choose what is good.

I suppose that there has never been a place on earth or a time in history when there has been more talk of freedom than here in America. But what do we mean when we say we are free?

In our early days as a nation, Patrick Henry, urging his fellow citizens to throw off the tyranny of England, cried out, “Give me liberty or give me death.” Apart from liberty, he said, we were left in “slavery” (Patrick Henry, “Give Me Liberty or Give Me Death!” 1775, cited in Lend Me Your Ears: Great Speeches in History, William Safire, ed., p. 86).

Given the social realities of the day, it was a sinfully ironic way to say it: freedom or slavery. The irony was not lost on Abigail Adams. In letters written to her husband, John Adams, during the meeting of the Continental Congress, she wrote, “It always seemed a most iniquitous scheme to me — [to] fight ourselves for what we are daily robbing and plundering from those who have as good a right to freedom as we have” (David McCullough, John Adams, p. 104).

Sixty years later, it was Frederick Douglass who asked, “What to the American Slave is your Fourth of July?” His response? “It is a day that reveals the gross injustice and cruelty to which he is the constant victim. … Your celebration is a sham,” Douglass declared (Frederick Douglass, “What to the American Slave Is Your Fourth of July,” Speeches That Changed the World, p. 227).

In January 1941, less than a year before Pearl Harbor, FDR said, “Freedom means the supremacy of human rights everywhere.” He said Americans would stand for —

The freedom of speech and expression.

The freedom for every person to worship God in their own way.

The freedom from want. And freedom from fear … everywhere in the world (Franklin Delano Roosevelt, “State of the Union,” 6 January 1941).

A decade later, John Steinbeck would write, “This I would fight for: the freedom of the mind to take any direction it wishes, undirected. And this I must fight against: any idea, religion, or government which limits or destroys the individual” (John Steinbeck, East of Eden, p. 151).

There have been many different definitions of freedom over the years.

American historian Andrew Bacevich has said, “These days freedom seems less a word with content and more an incantation (Andrew Bacevich, The Limits of Power, p. 6; Bacevich is leaning heavily on the theological work of Reinhold Niebuhr, The Irony of American History).

What do you think? What does it mean to be free?

They hailed their freedom that Palm Sunday. Jesus came riding on a donkey. This was more than a parade convertible for Jesus. They knew the promise of the old prophet Zechariah. Zechariah said when the new king comes, the one who will set you free, he will come “Triumphant and victorious, humble and riding on a donkey” (Zechariah 9:9).

Jesus knew what he was doing, and the nameless crowds knew what he was doing. He was coming to set them free. So they danced in the streets. They paved his way with palm branches. They sang from the scriptures the songs of salvation. They looked into the eyes of their children: Remember this day. The oppressive powers of Rome would not define them anymore. He had come to set them free.

I suppose some would say by Thursday night, when Jesus gathered with his friends and he took a bowl and towel and began to do the work of a servant, that Jesus had changed the subject. Freedom was for Sunday; service for Thursday. Riding the king’s donkey is freedom work; washing feet is servanthood. Yet if I understand the text, even on Thursday Jesus is teaching us what it is to be free. And what he teaches is that those who know freedom are those who know the meaning of serving one another. Freedom is not simply the power to choose what I want, but the possibility to choose the good.

Earlier this summer I shared with you some dialogue from one of my favorite Flannery O’Connor stories, called “The Displaced Person.” Let me remind you. Ms. McIntyre ran a farm somewhere in Georgia in the 1950s, I suppose. She has a farm worker named Mr. Guizac, who is a war refugee. He knows his way around a farm. But he doesn’t understand American racism, and he crosses the line by treating everyone the same. Ms. McIntyre can’t take that, and she decides she must let Mr. Guizac go. She “has no other choice,” she says. She knows he has nowhere else to go — he is a war refugee. But, she says, “it is not my responsibility that Mr. Guizac has nowhere to go. … I don’t find myself responsible for all the extra people in the world” (Flannery O’Connor, “The Displaced Person” Flannery O’Connor: The Complete Stories, p. 226).

She has no obligation. Without obligation, she is free to do what she wants.

But this understanding of freedom is fundamentally flawed, because it is freedom without responsibility. It is an immature freedom that is rooted in the certainty of what is not my responsibility.

Jesus provides a richer, more life-giving understanding of freedom. As I understand Jesus, he has no understanding of freedom apart from responsibility.

That’s why the church remembers that the Lord washed feet. It was servant’s work. He demonstrates, freedom is not simply doing what I want but the possibility to choose the good.

It was Christmas of 1976. My family had gathered around the tree to open the rather modest collection of gifts that we had secured to give to each other. I was working at Florsheim Shoes at Northlake Mall in Atlanta. My dad had dropped anything but subtle hints that he wanted Santa to bring a pair of cordovan wingtips. They were under the tree.

The unwrapping was completed when my dad said, “Oh, I think I see one more gift.” He reached into the tree, and there, hanging among the ornaments, was a car key. He handed it to me. I jumped up and down, shedding any need to display dignity. I raced to the front window to look in the driveway, and there was a new, or at least new to us, Ford Granada. Sky blue. OK. I looked at the key more closely. It was not a key to the new car in the driveway. Dad explained that car was my mom’s new car. I was getting her old car. A 1967 Mercury station wagon with wood-grain paneling down the sides. Who thought putting faux wood on the side of a car was a good idea? This car could even make you envy a Ford Granada.

It wasn’t the car I wanted to be seen in, but I had a car. And I could go anywhere I wanted. “I’ll be back in an hour,” I said. It was a remarkable feeling of freedom. I could go anywhere. I would have driven to my friend’s house, but it was a station wagon with wood-grain paneling, so I just drove. When I think of feeling free, I remember that first hour, my hands on the wheel of my first car. I was free.

There is a perspective in moral philosophy that argues that this is what freedom really is. Freedom is the capacity to do what I want to do. John Stuart Mill, a nineteenth-century British moral philosopher, argued that freedom of choice is essential. Over one’s own mind and body, Mill argued, the individual is sovereign (Michael J. Sandel, Justice, p. 49).

Mill’s assertion that the only free person lives without obligation to any lord is picked up and carried further by twentieth-century libertarian philosopher Robert Nozick. Nozick claims that expectations placed upon the individual requiring, for example, care for a neighbor who is in need, that such infringement upon us is the equivalent of stealing. Nozick is not opposed to compassion, but it must never come in the form of obligation. It must always be freely offered; otherwise one is not free to do whatever one wants to do.

I understand that. I remember my first day behind the wheel of a ’67 Mercury wagon, and that’s what freedom felt like. But I confess I have grown weary of the expressions of freedom that rest solely in what I want. I am drawn to the wisdom of Jesus, who teaches that the truly free are those who can choose that which is good, including good for others.

These days it seems we are becoming Ms. McIntyre — embracing an understanding of freedom rooted in the certainty of what is not my responsibility. I have no obligation to all the extra people, she said. Obligation has become a dirty word. We are all about rights and ignore responsibilities. And it is choking the life from us.

But I am not without hope. I read about Black Mountain Presbyterian Church this week. It is the church that your fabulous former pastor Shannon Kershner served before God called her to serve you. It is nestled in the beautiful town of Black Mountain, North Carolina, much of which still lacks electricity, running water. And if my information is accurate, still hundreds missing. But the Presbyterian church there has opened their doors, and they are feeding hundreds every day. They aren’t a restaurant, but they know that when Jesus Christ is your Lord, then you are not embarrassed to embrace your obligation to neighbor.

And on this World Communion Sunday, I am mindful that there are people all over the planet who are professing their trust in the Risen Christ, claiming not to be sovereign over their own lives but claiming that Christ is sovereign over their lives: he is Lord. I have seen them in Nicaragua, and I have been with them in Ghana, West Africa. I have seen them serve in the West Bank of Palestine. And I have known them in Sudan. Perhaps another time I can tell you their stories. But for now, let us just remember all over the globe there are people trusting that they aren’t sovereign over their lives, but Jesus is.

Ms. McIntyre said, “He is not my responsibility.” Jesus took a bowl and towel and instructed that until we know our responsibilities, we will never be free. For true freedom is not the power to do what I want, but the possibility to choose the good.