Pentecost IV, Proper 8, Year C

1 Kings, 19:15-16,19-21
Galatians, 5:1,13-25
Luke, 9:51-62

+ In the Name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.

Whether you believe our cause is just or not, the news from Iraq in recent months has been particularly distressing. We can never easily countenance the loss of life, and especially on the recent scale. I wonder what we tell those whose loved ones aren't coming home. Although ours is now a much different conflict, the best person for such answers may come from President Lincoln, who pondered such questions with great depth, who tried to find God's purposes in history, who tried to understand how God was involved in all of the suffering and violence.

In November of 1864, President Lincoln wrote to Mrs. Bixby of Boston:

Dear Madam: I have been shown in the files of the War Department a statement of the Adjutant-General of Massachusetts that you are the mother of five sons who have died gloriously on the field of battle. I feel how weak and fruitless must be any words of mine which should attempt to beguile you from the grief of a loss so overwhelming. But I cannot refrain from tendering to you the consolation that may be found in the thanks of the Republic they died to save. I pray that our Heavenly Father may assuage the anguish of your bereavement, and leave you only the cherished memory of the loved and lost, and the solemn pride that must be yours to have laid so costly a sacrifice upon the altar of freedom.

The altar of freedom. Most of us would agree that freedom is worth dying for, a noble altar indeed. Time and again, Americans have bravely been willing to offer and to sacrifice our blood for the cause of freedom. The Revolutionary War, the Civil War, World War II, our greatest national struggles have been about winning, protecting, and expanding freedom. We rightly honor and cherish the millions of Americans who have made enormous contributions and sacrifices for our freedom. Most of us wish to emulate the greatness of character of these men and women. But let's be clear: we are talking about political freedom.

Although our best have been willing to give their lives for political freedom, there is an even more precious and fundamental freedom - a freedom that exists in all places in all times for all people, even in the most brutal and repressive regimes. Our world generally assumes freedom to be the quality of living without limitations and restrictions, without constraints or obligations. Our world encourages us to expect the opportunity to choose and to determine our own actions with minimal coercion. But that is not the most profound freedom.

S. Paul's epistle to the Christian community in Galatia, a region in what is now central Turkey, has been called the 'Magna Charta of Christian liberty.' Paul's extremely interested in freedom. He believes our freedom expands as we grow in our service to God. One of the daily collects in the Prayer Book expresses this: "O God, . . . whose service is perfect freedom. . . ." For Paul, our baptism inaugurates our freedom. Answering God's call for our lives is a call to freedom. In today's epistle, Paul says: "Brethren, you have been called to freedom."

The great oppressor in life is the same this age and in every age. It is sin. The cruelest yoke of slavery is sin. An essential part of breaking free of that yoke is to be concerned for the right things in life. So much of our lives is consumed with things that aren't essential. Some things are primary in life, and others aren't. Happiness and freedom come from knowing what truly matters in life and pursuing it; unhappiness and bondage come from taking the wrong things seriously and pursuing them. What matters most in life is building a holy relationship with God through Jesus Christ, and we do that by serving and loving one another. That's true freedom.

For Paul, freedom is living in the Spirit and not gratifying the flesh. Now this does not mean we should not enjoy earthly and physical pleasures. We should. But they are not the purpose of our lives. Living in the Spirit does not mean that the Spirit is wholly other than the body and physical world. Wrong. Paul and the Church have always understood that we experience the Spirit through the material world, that the Spirit nourishes us through physical things, such as bread and wine which become our spiritual food.

Paul's definition of 'flesh' is not our conventional understanding. For Paul, flesh is not exclusively physical, but more generally human weakness and immorality. For Paul, gratifying the flesh includes spiritual sins. For Paul, living for the flesh is placing our trust and value in anything other than Christ. Living for the flesh means "doing what pleases us, because in the satisfaction of our desires and in our own self-interest we find the centre and sufficiency of life." ⁽¹⁾ Living for the flesh means living for ourselves, not for others. It's a human centered life, not a Christ-centered life. It's a perverted life because it's not relying upon God but something else. It's focused on the wrong things, instead of pursuing the good.

Paul provides one of his grocery lists of sins we have when we life for the flesh, three verses of unpleasant things. Since we are a sex obsessed people, we tend to associate the fruits of the flesh as primarily sexual: adultery, fornication, lasciviousness. The fruits of the flesh also include other sins of body, indulgences like excessive drinking and gluttony. But that's only a fraction of what concerns Paul. The fruits of the flesh include religious sins: idolatry and witchcraft. We shouldn't be so naive and smug as to think we have nothing to do with those sins. At a recent vestry meeting, one long-time parishioner wisely noticed a real threat, especially for this parish, of making worship an idol, of forgetting that our worship only points us to Jesus, of forgetting that we are not here primarily to enjoy the worship, but to pray and to build up our relationship with Jesus. Worship is not our end. Jesus is.

For Paul, most of the sins of the flesh, however, are social sins, sins of wrong relationships to other people. ⁽²⁾ These sins have no specific reference to the flesh at all. These sins are what really concern Paul because these are the sins that he spends the bulk of his letters trying to defeat. Paul wrote his letters trying to build up healthy Christian communities, and it's the social sins of Paul's congregations that most threaten the mission of Christ. The social sins are hatred, strife, jealousy, anger, selfishness, dissension, party spirit, envy, disrespect. For Paul, these are sins of the flesh.

On the flip side, the fruits of the Spirit, those joys and privileges of following Christ, these are mostly social as well. Love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, gentleness - these are social virtues. Christians full of the Spirit live in harmony. These are the things that matter in life. These are the benefits of following Christ. Following Christ changes us. Having a relationship with Jesus changes our hearts. Jesus and his way becomes primary and other things less so. We have freedom in Christ because all of our anxieties about the less important things in life melt away. This liberates us. Freedom comes from serving God.

That's also a theme of today's gospel. Jesus says everything other than himself and his mission is secondary. In the gospel, three people consider following Jesus, and he responds to them not by letting them make their own terms of discipleship, but by setting rigorous standards for them. The first says that he will follow Jesus wherever he goes, but Jesus says, "Are you willing to rely wholly on the hospitality of other people? Are you willing to give up pursuing material security and rely wholly upon the generosity of others?" The gospel is first. Our physical comfort and security is second.

The second potential disciple says, "I'll follow you, but first let me bury my father." Jesus says, "No. Don't postpone commitment. Let the dead bury the dead. Let those who don't make God their first priority - those who are dead - bury the dead!" In other words, even a seemingly reasonable responsibility, indeed a responsibility proscribed by the Bible, this does not take precedence over following Jesus. Religious observances, religious customs are less important than following Jesus, less important than entering a relationship with him. Religious observances and customs can get in the way of faithfully following Jesus.

The third potential disciple says, "Let me first say goodbye to my family." Our Lord responds, "No. Keep your eyes on the Kingdom of God." Religious traditions are not the only good thing that can get in our way of serving God. Another good thing that can get in the way of following Jesus is family. We need to honor and serve our families, but family can smother growth. Family can become an idol. Family is not more important, does not have a higher claim on us, than Jesus: Jesus first, then family. We love and honor and serve our family because first we love Jesus.

These are tough demands, and Jesus gives us them because he loves us, not because he wants to treat us harshly - not at all. He doesn't react with hostility to those who treat him with hostility. He loves us all, even those who reject him. This is what James and John don't get. They are following a leader who is continually rejected. In today's gospel, the Samaritans wouldn't receive Jesus, but Jesus is used to it. It takes him all the way to the cross. He doesn't respond to hostility and injustice and meanness in like manner.

James and John want to respond to hostility with force. They become defensive and recall what Elijah the prophet did when he met resistance: "Lord, do you want us to command fire to come down from heaven and consume them?" Jesus put them in their place. Had they not been listening to him? James and John, like most of us, are quick to seek revenge and retribution. James and John, like most of us, are quick to use scripture to bludgeon their foes, quick to use scripture to bless our worse desires and to justify bad behavior. Jesus is about mercy and charity and forgiveness and generosity and trust. Always.

As the Civil War came to its bloody end, and just a month before his assassination, President Lincoln said:

With malice toward none, with charity for all, with firmness in the right as God gives us to see the right, let us strive on to finish the work we are in, to bind up the nation's wounds, to care for him who shall have borne the battle and for his widow and his orphan, to do all which may achieve and cherish a just and lasting peace among ourselves and with all nations. ⁽³⁾

There's no anger, no desire for revenge - just lots of charity. The great tragedy of Lincoln's death is that we lost a leader who appealed to our finer qualities, and so the Reconstruction was a disaster, leaving eternal scars on our nation. We praise and honor Lincoln today and for centuries to come because he appealed to our best instincts, he appealed to godly, social virtue. That is what matters in life. That is where true freedom and happiness come from.

+ In the Name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.

1. John Ziesler, Pauline Christianity, Revised Edition, OUP (1990), p. 78.

2. Ziesler makes this distinction between social sins and sexual sins and other sins of the body, p. 79.

3. Abraham Lincoln, Second Inaugural Address, 4 March 1865.