Monday, April 18, 2016

God for the Skeptic: Christianity Is Not a Straitjacket


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.