More Than a Slogan--August 12, 2022

More Than a Slogan--August 12, 2022

"'All things are lawful for me,' but not all things are beneficial. 'All things are lawful for me,' but I will not be dominated by anything." [1 Corinthians 6:12]

I've got to tell you, I get really nervous these days when I hear Loud Religious Voices talk about demanding "freedom" [and boy, some of them sure do beat that drum]. The reason those voices make me so nervous is that more often than not, that talk of "freedom" boils down to "You can't tell me what to do," or "I can do anything I wish, and nobody can stop me," while the way of Jesus speaks of an entirely different kind of freedom. Jesus and his community are centered around being free for others, being free to love, and being free from worry about being acceptable or worthy.  But Jesus has no interest in that belligerent "Don't-tread-on-me" notion of "freedom." He is literally the One who laid his life down for the world, rather than demanding he was free to be as selfish as he pleased.

That's the crux of the question here, as Paul moves into a new subject writing to the Corinthians.  It's a question of what "freedom" really means, in particular their freedom "in Christ."  And ultimately for Paul, it's about taking Jesus' death and resurrection seriously as the touchstone for our lives, rather than taking our own selfishness and trying to slap Jesus' stamp of approval on in the name of "being free."

When Paul says, "All things are lawful for me," he's clearly quoting a sort of motto that the Corinthians were all proud to recite.  They had heard Paul talk about how in Christ, we are no longer bound to the particular demands of the laws that governed Judaism.  Christians no longer had to be bound to things like the kosher laws about food, or rules regarding festivals and observances, or the regulations in the Torah against wearing two kinds of fabric or planting different kinds of crops in your field at the same time.  As a new kind of community made up of both Jewish and non-Jewish members, all following Jesus, the church made the conscious choice not to require the Gentile [non-Jewish] believers to observe all those particular laws within Judaism.  Paul himself regularly made the point that nobody, Jewish or Gentile, was put in right relationship with God on the basis of how well they kept the law, but rather it had always been a matter of God's gracious gift and trust in that God.  So, you can certainly understand where a motto like, "All things are lawful for me" would have come from.  That could be one way [albeit, a way certainly open to some misunderstanding] of summarizing Paul's teaching that, in Christ, nobody is bound by particular rules about food, cleanness or uncleanness, or the ritual practice of sacrifices and offerings.  

But the thing about mottos is that you can try and make them mean just about anything when you take them out of context. And you can just tell that the folks in Corinth had taken their motto, originally meant to say that the food they ate or the clothes they wore did not affect their relationship with God, and they were turning it into permission to be jerks.  How easily "All things are lawful for me" turns into "I can do whatever I want, and nobody else can stop me."  How easily the language of "freedom" becomes, "I don't have to think about other people, because I'm free."  How quickly we turn "My personal unrestricted freedom cannot be impeded or limited by having to think of the needs of others, or even what is ultimately good for me."  

We know something about that kind of thinking in our day, too, don't we?  Ours is the era of instant gratification, aided by one-click ordering and overnight shipping.  Ours is the land in which folks pride themselves on the ability to order as many Big Macs and large fries as they want, and nobody else is allowed to suggest otherwise, all in the name of the freedom to do whatever-I-want-whenever-I-want-it.  Ours is a culture that glorifies the ability to be as selfish as you wish to be and turns it into a national virtue.  So whether it's fast food or fast cars, hoarding gold or hoarding guns, wasting money or wasting natural resources, we've built a whole cultural myth around being able to do whatever we want, without having to think about our connectedness to others, and without even thinking about what the consequences of our choices will be for our own future selves. And we love to tell ourselves that this is the good life. If the Corinthians hadn't invented the line, "All things are lawful for me," we would have made it our own national motto and stamped it on our coins, I suspect.

Paul, however, wants to get us to ask a deeper question: not merely, "Am I allowed to do it?" but "Is this a good thing for me to do?"  A culture that only thinks of freedom in the negative terms of "Nobody can tell me what to do" has a harder time deciding what is actually a wise, good, compassionate, just, or decent thing to do.  People who only think in terms of, "No law can tell me I'm not allowed to do this, so I'm gonna do it" are going to find it difficult to slow down to ask, "What is the right thing to do in the moment?"  And certainly if we've only ever been taught that "freedom" means you never have to think about other people or their needs, we will have a very hard time making any sense of a Lord who says he has come to serve rather than be served, and that real greatness looks like putting yourself last rather than first.  Whether we hear it in a Corinthian motto or we call it the American dream, the "you can't tell me what to do" kind of "freedom" isn't what Jesus has in mind--in fact, those are sad and shallow distortions of the real thing.  Paul is here to remind us that anybody selling that bill of goods doesn't really understand what Jesus' way is all about, no matter how loudly they claim their religiosity.

Today, let's not settle.  Let's not settle for selfishness and calling it "freedom." Let's not become so bent inward on our own personal wish-lists that we are unable to care for neighbors or see the beauty of being connected to them.  And let's utterly refuse to let the notion of being free in Christ [being free from having to live up to the law's demands to earn God's favor] become cheapened into somebody's political agenda or empty slogan. Real freedom is something powerful, beautiful, and precious--exactly because it is not merely freedom from other people's demands, but freedom for others as well.

Lord God, enable us to live wisely and well in real freedom.