This sermon was preached March 10, 2016, for chapel at Grand View University as part of a series aimed at skeptics, doubters, wonderers, sinners, and seekers.
Grace to you and peace, my friends,
from God our Father and our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ. Amen.
Let me say it straight out: I don’t
want to be bound by anything. I want my boundaries limitless. I don’t want
anything to stop me, hinder me, or throw a wrench in my affairs. And when God
demands that he will be God and I must remain human, fallible, and perishable,
I react as if someone is coming after me with a straitjacket, buckles waving in
the air, sleeves ready to bind me, and a locked and padded cell awaiting me. I
fear that being a Christian will imprison me. Like St. Augustine, I pray, “God
grant me chastity, but not yet. Grant me religious fervor, but not if people
will think I’m weird. Grant me a clean heart, but let me giggle at something
smutty now and then. God, give me a future, but let it be on my own terms. And
keep that damn straitjacket of religion far away.”
I’m a skeptic, there’s no doubt
about that. I know how the world works. An eye for an eye and a tooth for a
tooth. There’s no free lunch. You get what you pay for. You need to look out
for number one. And this business of God being God? It’s for fools and children
and doormats. At best we’ll chafe against our fetters. At worst we’ll wind up
like good king Zedekiah’s in the book of Jeremiah. The Babylonian enemies
defeated his armies. They killed his sons. They plucked out both his eyes. They
bound him in chains and threw him in prison for the rest of his life. I’m not
willing to go there.
I’m skeptical, that’s for sure. But
what’s it ever done for me? All my skepticism is is a way to defend myself.
It’s what we human beings have always been after from the time our parents ate
the apple in the Garden of Eden and throughout history. When the serpent said
to Eve, “Did God really say you would die,” it was the tug into
skepticism. And it’s the first move of
someone like me who wants to save his own backside. I have to be a skeptic of
anything and anyone else. I have to, because I know that I’m the only one I can
trust. I’m afraid of anything that might hinder my freedom. That straitjacket
is the epitome of my fears. My biggest fear is anything that might keep me from
reaching for what I desire – for good or ill. The truth is that my bondage is
far worse than a straitjacket, because I can’t even honestly admit what’s got
me all tied up in my life. I’m like Isaac in the Old Testament, but without
ever knowing the end of the story.
In Genesis, God had promised Abraham
and Sarah in their childless old age a son, an heir, and countless descendants.
When it wasn’t happening, they took matters into their own hands and had
Abraham sleep with their slave Hagar. She bore a son named Ishmael, but that
son of slavery wasn’t the free son God had promised. Finally, when Abraham and
Sarah trust and waited upon the Lord’s favor, Sarah bore the boy Isaac. He
became the apple of their eye, the focus of their days, and the source of their
life. When he was twelve, God told Abraham to take Isaac up the mountain and
kill him as a sacrifice. So Abraham grabbed Isaac and a bundle of wood and
trudge up the mountain. At the top, he placed the kindling and logs on a rock
and then turned to his boy. He took Isaac’s hands and wrapped them in sturdy
cords, tying them in strong knots. He did the same think with his son’s legs.
And he lay the kid on top of the pile. He drew a sharp knife from its sheath
and raised it above his boy’s chest. When it comes down to it, we think God is
going to treat us like Abraham treats his own son. We think God is going to end
things. We’ll be sacrificed to religion. We’ll be given over to the death of
our autonomy. We can’t imagine any other way out, so we will not allow
ourselves to be led up that mountain.
But God will not leave us either to
our fears or the skepticism they hide behind. God goes against his own binding.
God goes against his own demands that you be held to a godly standard. Instead,
God seeks to free you. At the very moment Isaac was about to lose his life, God
provided a lamb to slaughter and sacrifice instead of Abraham’s son. The knife
that the father raised to kill the boy became the very instrument used to cut
the ropes that bound him. And Isaac went down the mountain with a prize: He
held a new wool pelt under his arm that he could wrap up in when the nights
grew dark and the days grew cold. The lamb God provided was for him – not just
on the mountain but throughout his life.
If you’re scared that Christianity
will take your power, autonomy, and freedom away from you, then know this: You
never had any power or control in the first place. Your navel is proof of that.
You didn’t come into this world by your own will, and it’s worked the same
every day since. Christianity is no straitjacket out to bind you, because
you’ve been sacrificed for and now have ultimate freedom – a kind of freedom
you could only hope for against your wildest imagining. Christianity isn’t some
nanny wagging a scolding finger at you and restricting all your fun.
Christianity is a sharp knife to slice through your fetters. It says, “Yup.
You’re free. Wrap up in the skin of the Lamb of God and then look around you.
What do you want to do with all your freedom? Whom might you love, given that
you’re released from having to think about yourself until it makes you sick?”
We get scared of anything that might
hinder our freedom. But here’s the deal: You have a savior in Christ Jesus who
came to free you all the way. As Paul says in our scripture reading tonight,
“For freedom Christ has set us free. Stand firm, therefore, and do not submit
again to a yoke of slavery.” Don’t let yourself start thinking that you have to
be the one to make everything in your life come ‘round right. The Lord has your
freedom so firmly in hand that you can actually start praying against your
autonomy, your independence, your imagined freedom. In the Lord’s Prayer we
pray against those things when we say, “Hallowed be thy name. Thy kingdom come.
Thy will be done.” There we pray that God would deliver us not only from evil
but from ourselves, and then we ask God to deliver the real good in our daily
bread. We pray, “Free me Lord by bringing a lamb.”
And that’s just where we’re headed on a couple weeks
on Good Friday when we hear about the God who would dare subject Jesus, the Son
of God, to our skepticism, to our unwillingness to belief, and to our demand
that he be killed so we can stay independent and autonomous. Then we’ll hear again
about a God who suffers to the bitter end the tragic consequences of our fear
of the straitjacket. If you fear a straitjacket, prepare yourself to hear of a
God who allows himself to be bound in the worst place possible. He allows
himself to be put in the one place you’ll never be able to free yourself from:
the grave.
And when you hear this good news, then will come
even more. You will know the end of the story. You have a God who will not stay
strapped and buckled and bound by death. Like some divine Harry Houdini, Christ
bursts forth. In his resurrection he grabs what belongs to him. He reaches for
every one of us who is caught and bound by life’s circumstances: by cancer, by
sorrow, by schedules and bills, by loss and grief. He shreds that straitjacket
and turns you to face the light streaming into your tomb. Then you will come to
know freedom that comes from a God who turns from his own demands to make your
salvation come, not from what you can do for God, but from what God has done
for you.
Is it possible that you’re actually free? Yes. On
the cross, Christ made it happen. You can breathe easy. The struggling, the
beating yourself up, the banging your head against the wall to make your future
happen – it’s all over. Now all you have is this: Jesus wrapped around you in
your darkest night and coldest day, Jesus your light and salvation taking you
into your new free citizenship in the kingdom of God. Thanks be to God. Amen.
