Freedom for Good [Independence Day]

The Rev. Jeremiah Williamson

Deuteronomy 10:17-21

Freedom for Good

Freedom is a good thing. I like freedom. I suspect you do too. Of course, you do. There is just something in the human soul that longs to experience freedom. In fact, one might go so far as to say that freedom is not just a good thing, but even a God thing. According to the biblical story, God has been about the work of freedom in this world since the very beginning – building it right into the system, granting Adam and Eve the freedom to violate God's will and break God's heart. And even after the Adam and Eve experiment failed, God stayed the course. God still blessed humankind with the freedom to choose even though that means a lot of poor choices. God created us with the urge to live free despite our propensity to wander. God gives us freedom and then foolishly hopes that one day we will surrender our freedom to become servants in the Kingdom of God. What can I say? God is a dreamer.

The people we encounter in our Old Testament lesson today, these people to whom Moses is speaking in the book of Deuteronomy, these people about to march into the Promised Land, they had profoundly experienced that longing for freedom, that urge to live free. Even as they came to the end of their journey, while the sweet taste of fulfillment tingled on their lips, the desert days over, the homecoming about to commence, the story of their captivity and oppression was still impressed on their souls. Freedom was their future but it had not been their past.

The Israelites had been slaves in Egypt – for generations, four centuries. Their exile in Egypt did not start that way. Initially they were welcomed – needy strangers in a hospitable land, refugees in search of a place that supported life after escaping a prolonged drought that threatened theirs. But as is too often the case, it wasn't long before the politicians and citizens of that great empire confused their difference for threat – saw them not simply as other but as dangerous. And so the Israelites were made slaves, controlled and beat down, and their children became the victims of infanticide – a holocaust to the gods of power and privilege. The Israelites were stranded in Egypt without freedom, without dignity, without a future. They were stranded in Egypt with only their tears and their prayers.

They were slaves crying out to God for freedom – the very idea we are celebrating today. That was their prayer and God heard their prayer and answered it. You probably remember the story: against all odds, God led them through the Red Sea on dry land – an impossible journey from bondage to freedom, from the land of oppression to the new shores of liberation. They had, as a people, experienced the pain and struggle of life, but the God of freedom heard their lament; they understood what it meant to live where human dignity goes to die, but God dignified them by dignifying their prayers with a response.

And so, in an instant, the nation's identity was transformed from slavery to freedom. Once again, as God has been since the beginning, God was about the work of freedom in this world.

Freedom, it seems, is a God thing – built into the system. And what God creates, Genesis tells us, God creates good. But while freedom is good, even good things can break bad. It did not take long for the Israelites to put their new-found freedom up to no good. There was the golden calf. And the countless rebellions. And the constant complaining. And the people breaking pretty much every rule, law, and guideline God puts in place. They even go so far as to bring up the “good old days” of Egypt – spitting in the face of their freedom, of their salvation, of their God.

I suppose that is the problem with freedom: we have the freedom to misuse our freedom. The book of Numbers, which immediately precedes the book of Deuteronomy from which we heard this morning, is the story of the people of Israel misusing their freedom over and over again. But it is not just their story; it is the story of peoples and nations throughout history – exploiting freedom to enslave, belittle, torture, and oppress, to start wars and spread hatred – not exclusively of course but often enough that we tell the world's history in tales of freedom misused.

Even in our own nation, we struggle with the gift of freedom. We grant the freedom of speech and folks use it to protest funerals and justify racism and bully the meek. We have free markets and the divide between rich and poor grows insurmountable, breeding resentment and despair. We see freedom of religion twisted into discrimination. We value freedom enough to grant it and protect it, but then we have to live with it knowing that folks have the freedom to do what is right, but also folks have the freedom to do what is wrong.

But God loves us and so even when freedom runs amok, God keeps calling us back and reeling us in – raising up prophets to say what God needs to say. In our text today, it is Moses who brings to the people the message from God – a prophetic message. Their freedom is fresh but already it has run amok. The issues are right there in the text: the nation favored the wealthy; the scales of justice were tipped by the corrupting influence of cash; the orphans and the widows were forgotten; and the strangers, “resident aliens” is the phrase many translations use, were suffering from a lack of care and provision. God set them free to do good but somewhere between Egypt and the Promised Land they became so fixated on their own greatness that they forgot to be good.

It's understandable. Greatness is a great temptation with which every nation in the history of the world has wrestled. We have developed many metrics that we might use to define the greatness of a nation: military might, economic growth, educational achievement, international influence. According to Deuteronomy, however, those are not the standards by which God judges a nation or a people.

There is something that means more to God than a nation's greatness or success: God wants nations and peoples that are good. In the eyes of God good is what is great. God calls for the nation of Israel to care for the most vulnerable; that is their starting point, the foundation upon which their nation would be built. More than their economic success or their military might, it was their willingness to love and clothe and feed the strangers in their land, the good that they did, that made them a great nation. It was their willingness to imitate God that made them a great nation: to do justice and to love mercy. God expects the same from each and every nation, including our own nation. God has a heart for the orphan, the widow, and the stranger – for society's most vulnerable. God's dream for our nation is that we have the same heart, that we use our freedom not to chase greatness but to do good.

Pope John Paul II once said, “Freedom consists not in doing what we like, but in having the right to do what we ought.”¹ God grants freedom not simply for the sake of freedom, but to give God's people the opportunity to choose to do what is right, to choose to do what is good. God freed the people of Israel for a reason: so that they would be witnesses, telling the story of a God who lifts up the lowly and fills the hungry with good things. They were the proof. God freed the people of Israel for a reason: so that they would be witnesses, telling the story of a God who hears the cries of the oppressed and sets them free. They were the proof.

We are blessed to live in a country in which we are granted an abundance of freedoms. But with those freedoms comes also the burden of responsibility. Freedom is good but it is also easily exploited and corrupted. In the grip of our selfishness, greed, pride, hatred, prejudice, anger, fear, and ambition, freedom becomes a tool of oppression – a gift from God that we use to oppose God's purposes in this world.

But when we loosen our grip and offer back to God that precious gift of freedom, God sets us free to do the good work of the Kingdom of God with boldness and courage. The freedom we find in Christ is the freedom to follow in the footsteps of the one who traded Paradise for a basin and a towel, who traded the glories of Heaven to wash dirty feet, who traded all of the freedom in the universe to become a servant. Our greatest freedom, it seems, is the opportunity to surrender our freedom – to live lives dedicated to service – service to God and service to those created in the image of God. Freedom is having the right to do what we ought, to live out the calling God has placed on our lives.

Freedom is a good thing – a human desire built into the system by a Creator who loves us so much that that same Creator gives us freedom for good.

1 https://w2.vatican.va/content/john-paul-ii/en/homilies/1995/documents/hf_jp-ii_hom_19951008_baltimore.html