Overcoming Our Fear of Freedom

Philippians 1:21-30

Exodus 16:2-15

  

Israel’s story mirrors our story.  We – like them – have been delivered from captivity to live in freedom.  The Apostle Paul puts it bluntly in Galatians 5:1, “It is for freedom that Christ has set us free.”  Because we share in Christ’s glorious life through our baptism, our faith, and our shared work, our lives are now characterized by freedom.  

With God utterly and decisively on our side, all the powers that enslave people have lost their grip on us: Powers like sin, evil, and death.  Powers like hatred, anxiety, selfishness, and meaninglessness.

We could stop there, congratulate ourselves, and this would be a really short sermon!  But unfortunately our story mirrors Israel’s story in another respect: we are often afraid of the very freedom that God provides.  We cry out for deliverance from the powers that harm us and bedevil us.  And just as soon as God ushers us forward into a life of freedom, we start longing for the good old days when we lived like children and someone else told us what to do.

 

We’ve come through these readings from Exodus with the assumption that freedom from slavery is a good thing.  That freedom from slavery is what we all want.  But is that true?  Today’s reading forces us to ask some hard questions about ourselves.

Not long after they were liberated from slavery in Egypt, Israel began to grumble and complain.  The road towards freedom turned out to be a difficult path.  Safely across the Red Sea and secure from Egyptian threats, Israel found itself in the wilderness and desert for the next 40 years.  They had been promised a land flowing with milk and honey, but that would have to wait.  For now, their freedom meant staggering from oasis to oasis in the desert – hungry, thirsty, and unsure if their leaders even knew where the group was headed.

It turns out that freedom takes enormous effort and energy, imagination and creativity.  The path is unpredictable and the outcome is never guaranteed.  And in their anxiety they begin dreaming about their past lives as slaves.  They get so desperate on the journey that they’re longing to trade in their newfound freedom in order to return to lives of slavery in Egypt.

Here’s how they remembered their lives in Egypt – “There we sat around pots of meat and ate all we wanted.”  This is no doubt a selective memory.  They are manufacturing a better version of their past, motivated by the difficulty of their present.  The book’s opening scenes (in Exodus 1) of backbreaking labor and de-humanizing oppression suggests to us that they have falsified what life used to be like because they’re afraid of moving forward.  They have a fear of freedom.

This story describes a powerful dynamic of resistance at work in our lives.  We might shake our heads at Israel’s ability to forget God’s powerful work of liberation for them – the plagues, the Passover, the parting of the Sea.  But we’re just like them.

People give away their freedom in all kinds of ways.  You see it anytime a person surrenders their power in unhealthy ways to some other person or some organization or institution.  There are unhealthy marriages where one person willingly becomes the slave of another.  Parents can give all their power to their children.  There are people who become slaves to their work and career, yielding completely to its demands for their time and energy.   There are people who completely lose themselves in the task of serving others.  They say yes to everything.  They jump at every opportunity to put others first, to put others needs before their own. 

These lives may appear as Christ-like service, but often it is a form of hiding.  Handing your freedom to others signals a life concocted to erase the pressure and anxiety of living one’s life responsibly.  These are complex maneuvers on our part.  But we frequently hide behind the slavish demands of spouse and family, job and career, or just the many demands of life.  It’s a kind of slavery.  But at least it keeps us from ever having to ask the question, “How should I take responsibility for the life of freedom I’ve been given in Jesus Christ?”

When we come under stress or hardship, we begin to long for a simpler, easier kind of life.  We look back with nostalgia to earlier periods in life when someone told us what to do.  We look back to childhood.  Other people set the rules and we lived by them.  We once lived in a world with clear boundaries – others told us what role to play, where to be and when, what to do and how to act.  And this kind of reliance on powerful authority figures is appealing to us because it relieves us of anxiety and worry.  It pulls us back to a time when someone else was responsible for the general shape of our lives.

We often say that the gospel is good news.  That the story of God’s love for us in Jesus Christ is good news.  And it is good news.  But it’s complicated good news.  Complex good news.  Because God sets you free in Jesus Christ but God doesn’t fix all your problems.  God sets you free in Jesus Christ but God doesn’t magically turn the journey ahead into an easy path.  God sets you free in Jesus Christ but God demands that you begin to grow up, to use your freedom like an adult, to begin to take responsibility for the shape of your life.

This is why we’re so often unimpressed with the life God offers to us.  Fine, we admit, the plagues and the Red Sea were impressive.  Fine, the arrival, ministry, death and resurrection of Christ were impressive.  But what now?  While we might be impressed at God’s liberating power, we’re not always impressed with what this new life feels like.  Grumbling and complaining are the primary signs that we’re not satisfied with the freedom that God has offered us.

Never has the gap between expectations and reality been greater than my last experience at Golden Corral.  Weary from travel on our mission trip with High School students, we allowed Maddy Martin to choose among the chain restaurants near our hotel.  Inexplicably, she chose Golden Corral, where the sign advertised “All the steak and shrimp you can eat for $10.99”.  The “steak” turned out to be the largest piece of solid gristle I’ve ever encountered.  I ate three salads.  The meal fell far short of what we’d hoped.

Like Jesus’ many opponents during his ministry, we listen to his stories about God’s kingdom.  We watch him healing others as a sign of the kingdom’s presence.  And then we balk and turn back when he invites us to enter this new kingdom, because we’re unimpressed at how many of life’s big questions he leaves unanswered.

The freedom that God offers to us is an invitation to be on the journey as a person loved by God.  God provides much on the journey – daily provisions of food and drink, a band of fellow travelers, a set of stories to live by.  But God doesn’t want to relate to you like a slave master who dictates your every move.  And God doesn’t want to relate to you like the hovering parent of a three year old.  God unleashes you into a life of freedom and promises to be with you along the way.

So what can we learn from this story that will help us receive the freedom God offers to us and to move forward without fear?  There is actually a quite revolutionary insight here.  A kind of light that allows a real breath through for us.  And it’s this: Pay attention to everyday blessings.  Pay attention to the way God cares for you in the ordinary rhythms of life.  God chose specifically to provide for Israel through the blessings of nature.  The quail settled in the evening.  And the dew left a crust of flaky manna on the ground each morning.

Too much focus on the miraculous and extraordinary dims our view of God’s connection to everyday blessings.  Yes, God is the one who enacts a dramatic, victorious freedom for us in Jesus Christ.  But God is also the God of daily blessings.  The two go together. 

Let me mention two specific ways you can claim more of the freedom God has given you in Jesus Christ:

Gather only what you need each day.

God “tests” us by providing what we need for each day.  If we can become content with our daily needs, we will learn to leave tomorrow in God’s hands.  We will become more trusting of God as a loving parent.  (Strangely, learning to live as an adult with freedom calls you to some behaviors that are more child-like.)

The gathering of too much by some, in a frenzy of scarcity, is a large part of what’s wrong with the world.  Afraid we will not have enough, we stock pile too much, leaving others with not enough. 

When Jesus teaches us to pray, he teaches us to ask for “daily” bread.

We are not to be like the man in Jesus’ parable who builds bigger and bigger barns to contain his surplus of crops (Luke 12:18).  We are not to be anxious about what we’ll eat tomorrow (Luke 12:22-28).  We’re to learn to rely on God for our daily needs, for “where your treasure is, there will your heart be also” (Luke 12:34).

Find times for rest and protect those times from the demands of life.

God’s people were not to gather manna on the seventh day, the Sabbath day.  The day before, they can gather twice as much.  The goal is for them to experience a full day of rest each week, to have a day not defined by work and worry.  Their daily needs are still important – they are still to eat and to enjoy the meal and the day. 

God expects us to schedule time each week when we stop being productive and stop getting things done.  God invites us into an experience of freedom from the need to be efficient.  We are not machines with outputs.  We are God’s beloved children, called to live in rhythms of work and rest. 

Notice that this teaching about Sabbath rest appears in the story even before Israel makes it to Mt. Sinai and receives the Ten Commandments.  So this is a gift from God to all peoples everywhere, a gift to all creation.  This is a time to recognize our limits, and to honor the frailty of our bodies.  It is an act of faithful resistance against all oppressive, enslaving systems that demand too much from us.  It’s a chance for us to confess that we love God more than we love being busy and productive.

When we come before God through faith in Jesus Christ, we are not simply trading in one set of rules for another.  We’re not simply exchanging one unhealthy kind of slavery for another.  Instead, we’re saying “Yes” to the freedom God sets before us.  While we can admit our fears about taking responsibility for our lives, we know that we are not alone.  We’re on the journey with lots of others who can help us along the way.  And we trust that God is with us in all the daily blessings that sustain the journey from one day to the next.  By simply taking each day as it comes, and by taking time to rest, we honor Christ’s continued presence along our path.