May 29, 2005
Romans 1:16-17,3:22b-31
NRSV
Matthew 7:21-29

NRSV

Freedom and Faith: Foundation for Life
A Dialogue Sermon
First Congregational Church – Wauwatosa, Wisconsin

2nd Sunday after Pentecost/Memorial Day – May 29, 2005
Rev. Steven A. Peay, Ph.D.
Rev. Samuel R. Schaal
[Texts: Romans 1:16-17; 3:22b-31/Matthew 7:21-29]

I. Faith and Freedom

Rev. Schaal:

What is faith and what is freedom? For a brief time in my early adult years, I considered myself agnostic. During those days, I thought of faith as wishful thinking.  As something less enlightened people engaged in.

As I matured, I began to understand and to some degree experience a reality that was not always apparent to the physical senses.  The author of Hebrews says (11:1) “Faith is the assurance (the King James Version renders it substance) of things hoped for, the conviction (KJV says evidence) of things not seen.” 

The evidence of things not seen.  The evidence of an invisible God –  a divine reality in which we live and move and have our being.  The conviction that there is a spiritual basis to our human lives, and a way to live our human lives in concordance with that spiritual basis.

How I shifted from that agnostic stance to one who attempts to walk the Christian Way is a long story, but it is something that happened to me, more than something I sought.   And in this way my own experience jibes with how I understand Paul to be describing the experience of faith.

In today’s letter to the Romans, Paul goes to great lengths to illustrate how justification is a gift, not something achieved.  We are saved through faith in Christ, Paul says, and yet this doesn’t mean that we achieve our salvation through our own power. That would be boasting or works righteousness, which Paul denies.  Instead, Paul is speaking of God’s righteousness for human beings. In other words, this is God’s work, not ours.  Paul is emphasizing not the human quest for faith, but God’s radical act of love in reclaiming all humanity. 

The 20th century theologian Paul Tillich captures this in his great sermon “You Are Accepted,” when he says:  “Sometimes a wave of light breaks into our darkness, and it is as though a voice were saying You are accepted, accepted by that which is greater than you … do not try to do anything now … do not seek for anything … Simply accept the fact that you are accepted!”

So faith, perhaps, illustrates our relationship to God.  What we call faith is our response to God’s reaching out in love to us, God seeking us out.  So we come to faith more by accepting and recognizing this reality, more than by working at it, more than by achieving it through intellectual or theological gymnastics.

Faith reminds us of a God who loves us radically and completely, and calls us, constantly, into relationship.  God calls us, perhaps, into freedom.

We speak a lot of freedom, especially on this holiday.  Indeed, God ordains freedom.  God created us to be free and so God celebrates societies that are free and encourage its citizens to be free, for this helps us be who God created us to be.  But we in the free society so often abuse this idea.  Freedom is so often interpreted as the ability to do whatever we want, to believe whatever we want.   That is not freedom as much as license.

Faithful freedom is freedom within the life of God; freedom within limits. 

We have the freedom to not respond to God.  But when we choose to enter this place as God’s gathered people, we do so in community with each other and so give up a bit of our freedom.  We give of ourselves in terms of volunteer work, time spent in church governance, we give of our material supply to fund the work of the church.  These are demands on us that could be said to abrogate our freedom in little ways.  They are the demands of community.

But the benefits of community – the benefits of being with each other and the hope of experiencing the living God among us is a greater freedom that we get.  We are free, we might say, from the nihilism and loneliness of the surrounding secular society.  We are free to experience the love of God among us.

This giving up of some freedom to gain a larger freedom is illustrated by our nation’s Memorial Day holiday.  We commemorate those in our nation who have died in war.  This is a sign that our free society has costs—freedom is not free, as we so often say.  To live in this free society, you have to give up certain things for the greater good of that society – at times even to give up the ultimate, that of your earthly life – so freedom is not complete autonomy.  It is a freedom to, not a freedom from.  It is a freedom bound in relationship.

So to be faithful and free is to be, perhaps, both bound and free. To be freely bound with God and with each other.

Dr. Peay:

Memorial Day has its roots in a conflict that helped to define the American people – the Civil War. It began as a day to honor the dead of the Grand Army of the Republic and over the years spread to a day of remembrance for all of our war dead. It’s a solemn day. It’s also a day that unofficially begins the summer holiday season and says that now you can wear white shoes and a straw hat; well, at least it used to. Often the holiday aspect makes us forget what we’re remembering, so I think it appropriate that we think, remember, for a moment what it means to be a people of faith and freedom.

As the late scholar of American religion Sidney Mead put it, we are “a nation with the soul of a church.”  I came across a passage from Benjamin Hart’s book, Faith and Freedom: The Christian Roots of American Liberty that made the point pretty well:

In his essay "What I Saw in America," the great English writer G. K. Chesterton observed that "America is the only nation in the world that is founded on a creed. That creed is set forth with dogmatic and even theological lucidity in the Declaration of Independence." Chesterton was referring to the second paragraph of America's founding document which states: "We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights, that among these are life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness" (emphasis added). The starting point of the Declaration's argument was faith in man's "Creator," and is very similar to the Apostle Paul's initial proposition in his letter to the Romans: "Because that which is known about God is evident within them; for God made it evident to them. For since the creation of the world His invisible attributes, His eternal power and divine nature, have been clearly seen, being understood through what has been made, so that they are without excuse" (Romans 1:19-20).

We can say that faith is the trust, the confidence that we place in God’s existence and gracious love toward us. We can also say that we have certain beliefs about who God is and how God has acted toward us. So there is faith as assent and as trust. When you think about it, faith really defines much of how we go about living everyday life because it is the root of relationship and of scholarship – one may choose not to believe in God, but still has to put faith in the working of society or that the car will start.

Freedom, in our Judeo-Christian tradition and in our American system as well, grows out of faith.  Faith establishes the basis of a relationship, whether with God or other people, and freedom defines the way in which the relationship is conducted. It is not only a negative freedom, the absence of coercion – a freedom from, it is a positive freedom, a freedom to act, become, and grow as human persons. Freedom that is positive is not license; it works within the boundaries of relationship which is part of our growth.

The passage we read from Paul’s letter to the Romans is an attempt to explain how this freedom in faith is established. Paul uses language that is loaded with the history and practices of Israel. The images are those of blood and sacrifice, which would have been quite familiar and well-understood by people in the Middle Eastern culture of that time. Now it seems foreign to us, but we have to get to the point. All of life, which is what blood symbolizes, belongs to God who created it. God recapitulates, encompasses, and restores humanity to its fullness through Jesus who has become one with us, even to death. Our freedom, then, is bought with a price and bought by one who acted freely and out of love so that we might experience the life God intended humanity to have.

It is sad, but true, to say that freedom continues to be purchased at a cost. Such a cost makes it important for us to pause, to remember, and to renew the faith which gives freedom birth.

II. Foundation for Life

Rev. Schaal:

I suggested that through faith (which is a relationship with God) we find true freedom, not merely the nihilistic license that we see passing for freedom in our wider culture.  That our way is one of being freely bound to each other and God.

How, then, does that constitute a foundation for our life?  The text from Matthew has one of the hard sayings of Jesus, that there are those of whom Jesus will say, “I never knew you.”  Jesus says that those who “hears these words of mine and acts on them” are building on the firm rock.  By “these words,” he is referring to the Sermon on the Mount that he has just given.  So building our lives on the firm foundation means living as Jesus asks us to live in the Sermon on the Mount:  We are familiar with the comforting and sometimes challenging ideas of the Sermon on the Mount:

“Blessed are the poor in spirit … Blessed are those who mourn … You are the light of the world … Do not resist an evildoer … Love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you … do not worry about your life … is not life more than food, and the body more than clothing? … do not worry about tomorrow … do not judge … ask, and it will be given you … enter through the narrow gate…

Notice in these extractions from the sermon – and there are many more – how Jesus tells us that we are free of so many of our daily concerns.  These and all the teachings of Jesus point to one overriding reality:  that by following Jesus, by accepting the sometimes hardships of that path, one is given a freedom unknown in merely earthly society.  One is made free to the glory of God, not to the glory of ourselves, but we are free to be who we were created to be.

Today’s gospel text noted that the crowds were astounded, for Jesus had authority.  He had the authority of God and it is that authority which is our rock, if we would but build our lives upon it.  It is a life of faith, of true freedom. And it is available by merely accepting the ever-present, ever-constant, call of the Galilean Prophet:  Follow thou me.

Dr. Peay:

Matthew’s picture of Jesus is that of a teacher. Jesus is teaching the way to come to live with God and with others in right relationship. He teaches a way of faith and freedom that has its root in living out what we have been taught: love God with all your heart, soul, mind, and strength, and love your neighbor as yourself. Jesus makes a strong point that this freedom we obtain through faith doesn’t free us from accountability in the way that we live, rather if we’re in relationship with God it is going to show in the way we relate with other people. As Richard Hays points out in his book The Moral Vision of the New Testament,

To know the Matthean Jesus rightly, then, is to acknowledge his authority by obeying his word. . . . Those who obey Jesus’ teachings are like the wise man who build his house on rock, and those who disobey are like the foolish man who build his house on sand (7:24-27). Thus, while Matthew retains the Markan material that speaks of following Jesus’ example by taking up the cross, Jesus’ distinctive role in Matthew is more didactic: he becomes the “one teacher” who supplants all other rabbis (23:8). The Messiah expounds Torah in a new and authoritative way. [p. 95]

When Jesus spoke people were amazed at his words because, “he spoke as one having authority.” He didn’t speak about God, but from God. He addressed the possibility of a life of faith and freedom from the reality of his own transformation. Jesus placed himself completely in line with God and sought to live, think, and love as God desired. This is the foundation for life that Jesus talks about as “storm-proof,” if you will. All of the storms that blow through our experience, great or small, can batter us, but if we’re working on this foundation of unity with God then we can take them all – we’re built on rock.

What this faith relationship does, then, is to open us to the freedom of being a child of God. We’re able, finally, to move beyond preoccupation with ourselves and our narrow self-interest and begin to focus on others, as Jesus did. We’re able to do this because we have centered ourselves in God and not in ourselves. Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr. wrote to William James back in 1907, “The great act of faith is when man decides that he is not God.” [Quoted in Curtis and Greenslet The Practical Cogitator, p. 588] Several hundred years earlier the French spiritual writer Francois Fenelon talked about the soul who comes to the point in this way, “It begins to consider God more often that it considers self, and insensibly it tends to forget self in order to become more concerned with God with a love devoid of self-interest.” [Quoted in Richard J. Foster The Freedom of Simplicity, p. 98]

When we get to this point of living toward God we will know what it really means to be free. Rather than caring what others think, needing to be liked, having to succeed, we’re finally freed simply to be – which is what God intended for us from our creation. And, what is more, we are able to allow others to be as well and to love them there. So, at once we become free from the need to impress, or hide or whatever and free to love, care, and serve.

Jesus said that it is not all who fawn and say, “Lord, Lord” and try to identify with him that will be part of the kingdom. In other words, he is saying that we’re to put our money where our mouth is. If we really believe what he teaches, then we should live it. And, oddly enough, it is when we act in obedience – when we listen deeply, for that is the root of obedience – then we will be truly free. Faith leads to freedom and together they give us the foundation for life.