What Pastor Jon Preached on Sunday, June 26, 2011

Second Sunday After Pentecost
Jeremiah 28:5-9 • Psalm 89:1-4, 15-18 • Romans 6:12-23 • Matthew 10:40-42

Therefore, do not let sin exercise dominion in your mortal bodies, to make you obey their passions. No longer present your members to sin as instruments of wickedness, but present yourselves to God as those who have been brought from death to life, and present your members to God as instruments of righteousness. For sin will have no dominion over you, since you are not under law but under grace. What then? Should we sin because we are not under law but under grace? By no means! Do you not know that if you present yourselves to anyone as obedient slaves, you are slaves of the one whom you obey, either of sin, which leads to death, or of obedience, which leads to righteousness? But thanks be to God that you, having once been slaves of sin, have become obedient from the heart to the form of teaching to which you were entrusted, and that you, having been set free from sin, have become slaves of righteousness. I am speaking in human terms because of your natural limitations. For just as you once presented your members as slaves to impurity and to greater and greater iniquity, so now present your members as slaves to righteousness for sanctification. When you were slaves of sin, you were free in regard to righteousness. So what advantage did you then get from the things of which you now are ashamed? The end of those things is death. But now that you have been freed from sin and enslaved to God, the advantage you get is sanctification. The end is eternal life. For the wages of sin is death, but the free gift of God is eternal life in Christ Jesus our Lord.

“Winners” can seem to be the ones who get all the glory. Several summers ago there was a wonderful film called Little Miss Sunshine, in which a father, Richard, was trying to get a self-help book published that was called The Refuse-to-Lose Program. His career as a “success” coach drove him and his entire family with their old VW bus all the way across the American southwest in order for his daughter to compete and win in a “Little Miss Sunshine” dance competition. To Richard, this appears to be the only possible way that his daughter could feel good about herself by being a winner—by refusing to lose.

Richard is in a lot of ways a “template” character, whose values are exaggerated in order to get the story’s point across. But his “success at any cost” approach to life illustrates the false notion that being a slave to success will provide us with freedom.

If we can just win, and come out on top, we can be free set from rules and even not have to play by the rules--or at least that’s the way that those in power often try to define freedom. Obligations, commitments, responsibilities, even maintaining sexual boundaries—these have no bearing within the ideal American definition of freedom: “I can do what I want, when I want, how I want, and when I want it.”

Christian freedom, however, looks much different than that. Winning to gain free reign over our lives was challenged this past week by someone who would appear to have all the fame, notoriety and “success” that would warrant embracing such freedom. Stephen Colbert, host of the popular TV news satire show “The Colbert Report”, addressed the graduates of Northwestern University last week with a surprisingly different address than anyone could have expected:

“If you do get your dream, you are not a winner.

After I graduated from [Northwestern], I moved down to Chicago and did improv[ised comedy]. Now there are very few rules to improvisation, but one of the things I was taught early on is that you are not the most important person in the scene. Everybody else is. And if they are the most important people in the scene, you will naturally pay attention to them and serve them . . . . You cannot ‘win’ improv.

And life is an improvisation. You have no idea what's going to happen next, and you are mostly just making things up as you go along. And like improv, you cannot win your life.”

By the same token, we can’t “win” at the improvisation of being the church, or “win” at the improvised life of being a disciple. And we cannot “win” our freedom. Freedom is a gift. It is a gift of grace given to us by God, won already for us on the cross by Jesus. God’s promised Word of Life to us, Jesus Christ, comes to us to set us free. In him we are free from being enslaved to a life of separation from God and from one another. We are free to no longer have to strive to fill a self-serving hunger to come out on top.

The apostle Paul in his message to the Roman Christian community helps us to see that Christian freedom is defined quite differently from our wider culture—it is something for us to give back in obedience to God. “But thanks be to God that you,” he writes, “having once been slaves of sin have become obedient from the heart to the form of teaching to which you were entrusted, and that you, having been set free from sin, have become slaves of righteousness.” (6:17-18) Paul is saying that life lived in the gospel is not a life of doing whatever we want regardless of the consequenses, of striving to win above all things, but rather a life lived in righteousness—in service—service to God, and service to others.

“Freed to serve.” This will be the theme of the 2011 ELCA Churchwide Assembly coming up in August in Orlando, Florida. Jesus frees us for service so that we can freely keep our promises, our responsibilities, our obligations and our callings. This is not a glamorous, popular or heroic path. It's not a path of instant gratification, or a path to “success.” But it is the path that follows in Jesus’ footsteps. It is a path that leads out into the world and into all of the relationships in our lives. Service, the life of righteousness, is the path that freely joins us to the pains of this world, as inexplicable as they are, to reveal that freedom finds its fulfillment in serving God and others.

Colbert concluded his address by making a connection between the servant life and a life of integrity. I think the apostle Paul would say that such life can reflect the steadfast love of God. “In my experience, you will truly serve only what you love, because, as the prophet says, service is love made visible. If you love friends, you will serve your friends. If you love community, you will serve your community. If you love money, you will serve your money. And if you love only yourself, you will serve only yourself. And you will have only yourself. So no more winning. Instead, try to love others and serve others.”

So for a moment let’s think about an obligation or commitment that you have freely chosen to serve, because fulfilling these obligations is not easy. Perhaps it is a commitment that you may be struggling with, or need support to continue living into: it could be to a friend, a partner, your children, to you parents, to your work, to this congregation, a commitment to the poor, or someone or something else. Write one down or just think about one for a moment... Let’s pray for them: God, today we invite your Holy Spirit to help us embrace obedient service, a joyful obligation we get to be a part of. Come and help us embrace your freeing Word of life spoken to us this day, that we do not have to win yours or anyone else's favor. Give us faith to share the freedom you have already won for us in the holy obligations we have been entrusted with. Help us to serve others, rather than our fleeting desires. May we freely follow in Jesus' footsteps of making your love visible, both this day and all our days, that finding our fulfillment in service, that you may be given glory, honor and praise...in Jesus name we pray. Amen.