Made for Freedom

Easter 7C

I heard through the grapevine that Rev. Karen preached on basketball last Sunday. And I was so glad, because I am utterly incapable of preaching on sports. It’s good to have a diversity of preachers who use different metaphors for our life in Christ, and—since basketball isn’t in my wheelhouse—I was grateful that Karen took one for the team. So to speak.

I spent last Monday morning working on a sermon that I could record for our online service on Tuesday, as is my habit. It had no references whatsoever to the Dubs, I assure you. And then came Tuesday morning, and I—like most of us—was left utterly wordless by the school shooting in Uvalde, Texas. 19 children, 2 teachers, and the lost soul who was the shooter himself, dead. Let that reality sink in. Cry for as a long as you need to. And we all need to. We cannot afford to grow numb to the devastating cost of gun violence in our country, which has no parallel in the community of western developed nations.

We have tears. I’ve had plenty of tears. But I had no sermon to record on Tuesday. Really, no words made sense to me to me at all, except those of the Trisagion that we spoke and sang throughout Lent and Holy Week. “Holy God, Holy and Mighty, Holy Immortal One, have mercy on us.” That’s been my prayer all week. Until, of all things, a friend referred me to Steve Kerr’s Wednesday press conference. Yep, Steve Kerr, the head coach of—wait for it—the championship Golden State Warriors—

“I’m not going to talk about basketball,” he said. “In the last 10 days, we’ve had elderly black people killed in a supermarket in Buffalo. We’ve had Asian churchgoers killed in Southern California. Now, we have children murdered at school. When are we going to do something? I’m tired, I’m so tired of getting up here and offering condolences to the devastated families that are out there. I’m tired of the moments of silence. Enough.”

“I ask you… Senators who refuse to do anything about the violence, the school shootings, the supermarket shootings,

I ask you: ‘are you going to put your own desire for power ahead of the lives of our children, our elderly, and our churchgoers?’ Because that’s what it looks like. I’m fed up, I’ve had enough.”

“Fifty Senators in Washington are going to hold us hostage. Do you realize 90 percent of Americans, regardless of political party, want universal background checks? We’re being held hostage by 50 senators in Washington who refuse to even put it to a vote, despite what we, the American people, want. It’s pathetic. I’ve had enough.”

“Enough.” That is a cry of the heart. And it is also the words of a very public person who simply doesn’t care any more about what twitter might say about him. Nor does he seem to care about the all too frequent arguments that it’s not guns but people that kill people, or that mental health—which we still do not fund adequately—are somehow higher priorities than sensible gun control. If Senators in Washington are going to hold us hostage, Steve Kerr has nevertheless chosen to speak up like a free man. We can too.

The 16^th chapter of the Book of Acts—which we have been hearing from these past two Sundays—uncharacteristically features the stories of two Philippian women. Recall that last week we were introduced to Lydia, a dealer in purple cloth. Only Roman citizens could wear purple, so that meant her business served the imperial class. She was wealthy, independent, and—to the degree possible for women of her time and place—free.

In contrast, the nameless young woman that we learned about today was anything but free. She was not only a slave, but she was also possessed by a spirit. She had a gift of divination—that is to say, she was something of a successful fortune teller—but the gift wasn’t really hers. She was held hostage to the speech of the alien spirit, even when she was saying things that were true. “These men are slaves of the Most High God, who proclaim to you a way of salvation,” she cried out, day after day, until Paul finally ordered the divining spirit to leave her.

Notice that it wasn’t the slave girl who Paul was annoyed by, but rather the spirit that possessed her. The casting out of which caused an economic loss to her owners, and likely damaged her own reputation. But she wasn’t the only woman whose status was put at risk by the ministry of Paul and Silas. We don’t know what ultimately happened to the slave girl absent her valuable spirit, any more than we know what happened to Lydia the purple cloth dealer after her conversion. But I’m willing to bet that joining the cult of the subversive Rabbi Jesus wasn’t the best business decision for a haberdasher to the Roman empire. Freedom is free, but it sometimes comes with a cost.

The Apostle Paul, who landed in jail as a result of his exorcism of the slave girl, had a thing or two to say about freedom. “For freedom Christ has set us free,” he wrote in his letter to the churches in Galatia. “Stand firm, therefore, and do not submit again to a yoke of slavery.” In this case he was talking about the temptation to make an idol of adherence to the law—a frequent theme for Paul—but he was also speaking out of the ancient Biblical understanding God as liberator. Freedom is the Exodus of the people enslaved to Pharaoh; freedom is following a leader who was crucified for the sake of love, and freedom is also saying “enough is enough.”

I wish I knew more about what happened to Lydia or the slave girl of Philippi; about what they did with their hard-won freedom. I don’t yet know whether or how we in the United States can reclaim our freedom for safe public schools. But I do know this. If a religious or political or any other persuasive message threatens to hold you hostage or harm others, it might be time to say “enough”. Sometimes freedom means refusing the power of the oppressive speech, the nasty twitter feed, the expectations of friends and family, the substances we abuse, the resentments we nurture, or even the spirit of resignation and despair that possesses us. If you don’t know what holds you captive, I hope you do yourself the favor of finding out. Notice where you feel shame, resentment, and fear. We can’t exorcise an enslaving spirit or break out of a prison or if you don’t know what it is.

On this Memorial Day weekend, we remember the sacrifices of free people. Did you know that the earliest Memorial Day commemorations were organized  by a group of formerly enslaved people in Charleston, South Carolina, less than a month after the confederacy surrendered in 1865? Their communities had suffered devastating trauma, and they were barely free themselves. But that knew that memorializing freedom is critically important to being and remaining a free people. And that we must gather—as we do this very day and this very weekend—to remember that we are all responsible for protecting the freedom of each other. Which includes the freedom of children to attend school without fear of being shot. We are not made by God to be slaves to the gun lobby.

Rather, we are made for the unity that Jesus prayed for and taught in the Gospel we heard this morning. That’s the loving mutuality—the oneness of God’s people made free by a liberating God—which comes at the cost of breaking out of our self-imposed prisons.  So we gather to share both the stories and the sacrifices of freedom.  Even though we are not privy to what happened to them after Paul’s fateful visit to Philippi, I like to imagine Lydia and the slave girl eventually meeting each other at some local house church gathering. I like to imagine them recognizing each other as people who had suffered losses, who said “enough” to their old ways of speaking and doing business, and celebrated their freedom in Christ. May we, and our safe and healthy children, follow their example.