A sermon on 1 Corinthians 9:16-23 & Mark 1:29-39 by Nathan Nettleton
This sermon is greatly indebted to the Lectionary commentary found at Preaching Peace.

I feel like a bit like I’m stepping out on a tightrope with the things I want to say tonight. A few of you will recognise bits of this sermon from the conversations you’ve had with me this week, because you had questions about last week’s sermon and my wrestling with your questions has shaped this week’s sermon. The idea’s emerge in the readings anyway, and perhaps in some ways the gospel writer and the Apostle were walking the same tightrope, because the ideas continue to unfold in their next sections which we heard tonight. It feels like a tightrope because you don’t have to step very far either side of the truth here to be in serious trouble.

The question or the issue is freedom. Freedom. What is it and what isn’t it? Over the last few weeks, we’ve heard the Apostle Paul say things like “I might be free to do anything, but that doesn’t mean everything is a good idea”, and “don’t use your superior freedom in ways that cause others to stumble”, and tonight he’s talking about the freedom to “do as the Romans do when in Rome”. Or is he? You can see Paul on the tightrope. Yes, you’re free. Don’t overdo your freedom. And it is very tempting for preachers like me who are also pastors to be wanting to tighten the reins even more than Paul, and to qualify these images of freedom with even more “but, but, buts”. We want to proclaim the freedom of Christ, but we are fearful of the sort of mindless pursuit of freedom that leads to anarchy and the fracturing of community. Most tightrope walkers us a long balance pole — a thing that reaches out over the abyss in both directions for balance. Garry Deverell described the preacher’s balance pole once when he said that in order to faithfully preach the truth, a preacher has to preach one heresy one week, and its opposite the next. And on our specific topic of freedom, Martin Luther sounded a bit like he was using a balance pole when he said, “A Christian is a perfectly free lord of all subject to none.  A Christian is a perfectly dutiful servant of all, subject to all.”

So what is freedom really? Is it a bit of an illusion? Just a redrawing of the boundaries? Is it really more like the “freedom” of Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World: the freedom to be blissfully happy and healthy and comfortable and entertained all the time so long as you live in absolute conformity to the rules that protect the balance of this nirvana? Is that what’s really going on when Paul talks of Christ as “the end of the law” but then in the next breath speaks of a new law, the law of Christ, the law of love? Are we really free, or aren’t we?

In wrestling with this, I want to turn first to the stories we’ve heard from Mark’s gospel this week and last. In these stories, freedom is not discussed as a concept, but it is brought into being in very concrete ways. It is experienced, and if our theories ever get too removed from lived experience, they are probably not much use, so let’s start here.

Last week we heard of Jesus being confronted by a man with an unclean spirit in the synagogue, and rather than throw the man out, Jesus throws the unclean spirit out and leaves the man free of it. These week’s story started with the words “As soon as they left the synagogue…” so we know that what is going to happen next has a continuity in both time and in meaning. As soon as they left the synagogue, Jesus and his followers went to Simon Peter’s house, where Simon Peter’s mother-in-law was very sick, and Jesus heals her, setting her free her from the illness that was confining her to bed. And then the word gets out and by nightfall there is a huge crowd outside the house, with every family in town bringing those who were suffering from illnesses or disabilities or demonic afflictions, and Jesus sets many of them free from the things that had laid them low.

Now perhaps you’re already catching on to what I’m doing here, playing with the language so that the ideas of being healed and of being set free begin to morph into one. You see, our concepts or dreams of freedom vary depending on our experience. Those who are blind dream of the freedom to see. Those who are bedridden dream of the freedom to go outside and run through the grass. Those who are in prison dream of being outside the walls. Those who are being bullied or blackmailed or impoverished or hungry or exploited and oppressed dream of much more concrete and specific kinds of freedom than those who are privileged and have the luxury of philosophising about the nature of absolute freedom. But at the same time, perhaps those of us who have such luxuries are also crippled and confined but the Brave New World has taught us to think of ourselves as free even when we’re not so we won’t ask questions or rock the boat. We are simply prescribed more and more entertainments and medications and distractions to keep us blissfully ignorant of our own enslavement. We have no one to carry us to Jesus’ door because our afflictions have been declared normal and even desirable. And yet that quiet yearning for freedom continues to stir restlessly within us and will not be silenced.

The Apostle Paul, in the letter we are hearing to the Corinthian church, gets a bit more theoretical and theological about the concept of freedom, but he still grounds his discussion in practical examples. Last week he was talking about ethical freedoms. I might be sure that I am ethically free to have a beer without causing any offence to God. But that doesn’t mean that I should regard myself as free to sit in on a meeting of the Christian Temperance Association and have a beer there. Or walk into an AA meeting and promptly pour myself a beer. What Paul wants to stress is the voluntary nature of this limitation of our freedom. If you think of it only in terms of the loss of your freedom to have a beer every time you feel like it, then you will persuade yourself that your freedom is being eroded, but if you think of it in terms of being set free to love your brothers and sisters for whom alcohol is a threat, then you be coming closer to the meaning of freedom in Christ.

If this is not becoming clear, let me scale it down even more to an individual level. I happen to like drinking beer, which will come as no surprise to most of you. If I had no reason not to, I would probably have a beer with my evening meal every night, and for many years I pretty much did. This past year I drank a lot less beer, but it wasn’t for any ethical reason. I just decided it was time to get serious about reversing my trend of putting on a kilo a year for the past twenty years. Another twenty years and I was going to be hitting a hundred and twenty kilos and I decided that I didn’t want to go there. I realised that continuing to exercise my freedoms to drink all the beer I felt like and to have thirds after every dessert was not compatible with my freedom to reverse the trajectory of my middle age spread. So if I approach the question of freedom merely as a philosopher, I would conclude that I am not truly free in any absolute sense. I cannot have this and that both at the same time. I have to choose one or the other. There are laws of the physical universe, even my own little bodily universe, that limit my freedom to claim both this freedom and that freedom at the same time.

But does that really mean I am not free? Is it not more truly the case that my God-given freedom lies in my ability to exercise that choice, to decide which was more important to me — the beer or the belly — and choose accordingly? You see, if I was an alcoholic, my freedom would be much more constrained. For me, cutting back the beer was just a commitment. For the alcoholic, it would be a pitched battle. And this is where the rubber really hits the road in our quest to clarify what freedom means and what it looks like.

Freedom as an abstract concept is not really very helpful because it has very little to do with life as we actually live it. Theoretical absolute freedom would presumably mean freedom from things like the laws of gravity too, but such theories have little relevance to our actual lives. Freedom as an abstract concept always seems to means “freedom from”, freedom from the other, freedom to live my life without regard to what anyone else thinks, wants or needs. The freedom that Jesus offers us is not an abstract freedom from others, but a freedom for. Freedom for God, for others, for love.

You see, whenever anyone has ever gotten close to any kind of absolute freedom from everything — from every constraining relationship, expectation or cultural norm — they don’t experience it as freedom at all, or at least not as any kind of freedom that could be regarded as a gift. Instead they experience it as lostness, rootlessness, aimlessness, meaninglessness. It is more like the freedom to keep falling into the abyss without any rescuing hand to catch you. As Karl Barth noted, Christian freedom does not assume a neutral stance as though we are in the garden standing before the tree able to choose either good or evil.  The tree of the knowledge of good and evil is not the solution, it is the problem. When we abstract it and regard it as a meaningless choice, a pure freedom, it leaves us feeling utterly lost, and we are.

But in the real world, we do not stand before the tree with a purely meaningless freedom to choose either good or evil. Mostly our choices are shaped and constrained and channelled by the patterns of choices we have been exposed to since birth and see all around us. We find ourselves desiring what we see others desiring. When Eve stood at the tree, her choice was shaped by the contagious desire of the serpent, and when Adam approached the tree, he in turn imitated the pattern of desire he saw Eve expressing. And so on and so on and so on, and so we find ourselves not really free at all but overwhelmingly pushed towards choosing wrongly. So when strangers approach our shores seeking refuge, and we can choose to pick the fruit of hospitality or the fruit of hostile possessiveness, we all too readily imitate one another’s fearful rejection of the stranger. And when someone lashes out and wounds us and we can choose to eat the fruit of mercy and reconciliation or to eat the fruit of vengeance and retribution, we all too readily imitate the wounding we received and reciprocate it with interest.

The freedom to so choose might be a freedom in some abstract theoretical sense, but it is not the freedom that Jesus came to offer us, and, like the alcoholic trying to lose his beer-gut, if you try to choose against the flow, you will quickly discover that it is far from an equally free choice.

Christian freedom is not simply a matter of being able to choose, but to choose well, to choose rightly. In as much as it is a freedom “from”, it is a freedom from all that would oppress and impede you from being all you could otherwise be, from all that binds you and weighs you down and presses you into the mould of contagious fearfulness and hostility and possessiveness and bitterness and jealousy. It is Jesus meeting the sick and disabled and demonised outside his door and setting them free from all that binds them to a life that is less than the life they were created to live. It is Jesus meeting you at the door and wanting to set you free from all that prevents you from choosing rightly to live generously and expansively and joyously.

So when we hear Paul talking this week about his cultural freedom to “become all things to all people”, he’s not talking about the valueless imitation of “when in Rome, do as the Romans do.” It is not “when with the violent, do as the violent do” and “when with the selfish and indulgent, do as the selfish and indulgent do”. Paul is not advocating the freedom to do as one pleases, and selfishly indulge one’s every desires. What he is talking about is the freedom to freely lay aside one’s own ways and desires in order to freely be for the other.

Freedom in Christ is not freedom from gravity or from every expectation or obligation. Rather, it is a specific way of relationship. In Christ, we are set free from our ingrained tendencies to imitate one another in a downward spiral of jealousy and hostility and we are instead liberated to imitate Jesus. Freedom in Christ is the freedom to reconcile, freedom to liberate, freedom to forgive. It is the freedom to begin doing these things when everything around you would herd you in the opposite direction. At the cross we are shown our bondage to sin, death and the devil; in the resurrection we are given liberation, forgiveness and grace. We are set free to choose to live the life that that persistent whisper inside us has kept us vaguely aware of and restlessly yearning for.

Like those desperate broken people gathering around the door looking to Jesus for freedom, we gather here around Word and Table looking for the same freedom. Jesus is here. Receive freely. Embrace your freedom to imitate Jesus. Welcome. Forgive. Reconcile. Love. Freely.