Sermon:
March 1, 1998

Scripture:
John 8:31-36

In the year 1833 a most significant event took place on the island of Jamaica. Some time before, the British Parliament had voted to abolish slavery in all the Crown Colonies, and on the official day of emancipation hardly a slave was reported to have slept a wink. Instead, they dressed in their finest clothes and streamed up the mountainside so that they could catch the first glimpse of the dawning of the new day. When light did begin to streak the horizon, these people erupted in unrestrained ecstasy and on that day a new spiritual was born. It goes like this:

"Free at Last, Free at Last.
Thank God Almighty, free at last!"

These words have become famous in our own time and for good reason, because they embody one of the loftiest dreams of the human spirit. Who of us has not longed for this...to be fully and genuinely free? After all, the condition of slavery is not just confined to the political situation of being a piece of chattel property. We are all, women and men, in one degree or another, enslaved to something and our spirits long to be delivered out of this and to move deeper and deeper into the experience of freedom. I am assuming this morning, as we celebrate Women's History Sunday, that there is something within each of us that resonates to the hope, "Free at last. Free at last. Thank God Almighty, free at last!" So I ask you to join me in looking closely at the relation of the Christian faith to this yearning of the human spirit.

I trust you already realize that the central thrust of biblical religion lies in this very direction. The religion of the Bible has always been a religion of liberation. Its foundational event was the setting free of a tribe of slaves down in Egypt, and this event set the tone for all that was to follow. The struggle of the Scriptures has always been against that which enslaves and toward that which emancipates human beings, and therefore it comes as no surprise that the central figure of this document, Jesus of Nazareth, imaged himself in the role of a Liberator and a Deliverer. This is exactly the pose he struck when he returned to his home in Nazareth and went into the synagogue that had nurtured his faith. He deliberately turned to the words in the prophecy of Isaiah, which read:

"The spirit of the Lord is upon me, because he has appointed me to preach good news to the poor. He has sent me to proclaim release to the captives and recovery of sight to the blind; to set at liberty those who are oppressed, to proclaim the acceptable year of the Lord."

This is just the thing we want most in our lives; namely, to be fully and genuinely free. And this is precisely what is offered to us in the Christian religion, but it raises one practical question. Exactly how does this happen? It is one thing to make a verbal claim about liberation in Christ, but precisely how does this occur amidst the actualities of daily life? Here we are, middle-class American citizens in the last years of the twentieth century. How can this Jesus go about setting us free? What is the secret that will enable us to join in singing, "Free at last, Free at last? Thank God Almighty, Free at last!"

Where to begin? Perhaps by pointing out that the crucial word in the text is the word "truth." Jesus promises to set us free if we will continue in his word and become his disciples; that is, allow him to lead us into the truth. Ah, there it is. It is coming to terms with truth that sets us free, and it seems to me that there are at least two forms of truth that are crucial.

The first of these is the truth about ourselves, or more specifically, the truth about our limits and our loyalties as human beings. If you analyze the situation for a moment, you will see that these are the two vital components that affect everyone's experience of freedom. One of these is the limits or the shape of one's nature. There is no such thing as total or absolute freedom, not even for God. We are only free to be ourselves, to actualize what has been given to us as potential, to become what it is our nature to be. For example, I am a human being of the female gender, which means I am not free to be male. When my first born, my son Josh now 21 years old, was about four, I came upon him deep in thought. When I asked him what he was doing, he told me he was thinking about what he was going to be. I assumed he was running through choices like fireman, policeman, cowboy. He surprised me when he said, "I've thought about being a dog, or a cat or a bird, but I've decided, Mama, I'm going to be a boy!" This is obviously an extreme example, but it makes the point that is so essential for personal freedom. Namely, we start with a given nature, a specific actuality, and our freedom is only within that circle and never apart from it. I am free to become what I am, but never free to become something else.

This is a lesson some people never learn which leads to a tragic form of bondage. In high school didn't you have to read Arthur Miller's famous, "Death of a Salesman"? There's an example of someone who tried to be something other than that which he was. Willie Lowman, the central character, is the personification of the myth of unlimited possibilities. He was an ordinary, one-talent, small-time salesman type, yet he dreamed of being something altogether different. He wanted to be "big" in the sense of having great wealth and power and prestige. He desperately longed for a certain kind of esteem from his fellowmen, but he did not have the capacities to evoke this. To be sure, there were many good qualities that he did possess, and there were several things that he could have done, but Willie failed to actualize any of them because of his bondage to an illusion about himself. At the end of the play he committed suicide out of sheer frustration, and the drama ends at his graveside with his son summing up his life in the words, "Poor Willie. He never really knew who he was."

This then is the first factor in the process of personal liberation. We have to come to terms with the truth about ourselves, our limits and our natures. The only freedom anyone ever has is the freedom to become what is in one to be. The "truth that sets one free" begins at home with the truth about ourselves.

In addition to this, however, there is a second component of freedom, and that is the loyalties we establish in our lives. Here is another facet of existence that has a great effect on our freedom or bondage. Every one of us has some hierarchy of values. We organize our lives in relation to some point of reference, some reality that is of central importance. In a functional sense, this is our "god," and the truth of the matter is that this "god" ultimately controls our behavior. My old bishop, Kenneth Goodson, used to say that the only freedom we humans really possess is the freedom to pick our "god." Once we have done this, a process is set in motion.

For example, if a woman decides that succeeding in business is ultimately the most important thing in her life, when she comes to Thursday evening and must decide between going to a Cub Scout meeting with her son or taking a client to dinner, she is not really free at that moment. What she will do has already been determined by the choice she made at the higher level of commitment. We humans are free to decide what will be the most important thing in our lives, but once that is done, a process of cause and effect begins and this has tremendous bearing on the question of freedom. What kind of "god" do you serve? How much or how little freedom does this functional "divinity" allow? This is a crucial question to ask.

There's another great example of this in the Scriptures. Remember the story of Jesus and the rich young ruler? There's a vivid example of how your loyalties can affect your freedom. This was a man who had a genuine thirst for religious reality and he sensed in Jesus something that was lacking in his own life. However, deep down in the center of his being he had made a commitment to his possessions. The things he owned, in actuality, owned him, and this functional "god" would not free him to develop the spiritual side of his nature. "He went away sorrowful," the Scriptures say; that is, he was in bondage to something that prevented him from doing what he really wanted to do, and this rooted back to the area of his ultimate loyalties.

But the illustrations aren't just in the Bible. Think of people right here in Birmingham, or Bloomfield Hills or Troy who you know who are enslaved to the particular value commitments that they have made. Do you want to hear one that I see often, very often? How about persons to whom what other people think is given the highest priority? In the back of every decision is the haunting question, "what will other people think?" Be very sure about it, this is a type of bondage, for it affects every aspect of a person's life - what you wear, how you spend your money, the kind of house you live in, the books you read, the "gods" we commit ourselves to.

Don't you think this is why Jesus spoke so forcefully about the importance of one's master? He was much more concerned about what we belonged to than what belonged to us. "No person can serve two masters," he used to say, "only one." And no single decision is any more important than determining just whom that ultimate master will be. Therefore, the first form of truth that is important to us is truth about ourselves and our real condition. What are my limits, my nature? What are my loyalties? This is the groundwork that Jesus lays for the miracle of Christian liberation.

But I said I find two forms of truth to be the "truth that sets us free." First is our nature. The second has to do with God's nature and this is what empowers the whole process. What is the truth about God that Jesus came to give? It is bound up in the image that has become totally familiar to us and yet holds the secret. Jesus sees God as Father - "Abba", he called him. There is no way to understand Jesus apart from his relationship to God and no way to describe that relationship apart from this crucial category. The One who is creator of all is Father and is the power of all being. Here it is, folks in a nutshell the heart of the Good News. If we can ever get this understanding of God within us, we will be set free.

Why do I say that? Because only as we acknowledge God as Father/Creator do we have the courage to face ourselves. The honest truth is that most of us have a deep uneasiness about learning the truth about ourselves. We are afraid we don't like who we are. We're like the patient in that cartoon that had a doctor speaking to a frightened looking patient. "Your condition is serious indeed. You seem to be allergic to yourself." So we act like Willie Lowman rather than coming to terms with who we are.

Don't you get it? Creation, your creation, was the act of a loving father and he takes delight in you, the one he created. He holds you up in his hands and says, "Aren't you wonderful? I made you and you are terrific!" That's who you are! Jesus once said, "You are the light of the world." He didn't say, "You must become the light," or "You have to work in order to get light." No. He said, "You ARE light." By virtue of what God has made you to be, you have worth. Therefore, "Let your light shine before others that they may see the good thing God has made you to be and give glory to the Father in heaven." There it is, the beginning of freedom, when one can accept her own nature as a gift from God and proceed to explore it and develop it, not in fear, but in gratitude. Want to hear the Good News? It is that God's only desire is that you and I become all God has made us to be. That's it! And we know that only in relation to the One who knows us best!

Will you hear three brief stories of persons who have discovered who they are and have been set free? Some are from the past as we celebrate Women's History Sunday, some very much in the present. On August 6, 1945, many of us know that a plane named the Enola Gay flew over the island of Honshu and on the city of Hiroshima dropped an atomic bomb. A little girl was two years old in that city at that time and her family celebrated that she was spared though six members of her family including her grandmother were among the 100,000 killed that day by that bomb. Her name was Sadako. Sadako was a happy little child, prized by her parents, bright and secure in their love for her and secure in the knowledge of God's love for her. She knew she could be anything she wanted to be, and when she was nine years old, she decided she was going to be a runner. She could run faster than anybody else, going to school, coming back, she passed everybody else. On the playground she was just like greased lightening. And then one day, when she was nine, she fell while she was running. She started to fall down more and more and she didn't feel so good and there came the day she couldn't go to school. They discovered that she hadn't been spared by that bomb at all. She had within her body the condition of leukemia, the poisoning of her blood as the effect of the radiation of that bomb. She went for her first trip to the hospital and a little friend, her best friend named Chizuko, came to see her. As she came in to see Sadako she had in her hands a piece of folded paper that she brought out, a golden piece of paper all folded. It was a paper crane. She said, "Oh Sakako, the legend says that if the person that is ill makes a thousand cranes, they will be well." And Sadako said, "Let's get started." Those two little girls sat down and Sadako was energized out of her illness as they folded and folded the paper to make those paper cranes. Oh that day they made about forty. It was catching throughout the hospital. Others were making paper cranes. They were dangling everywhere in that hospital. They were all over her room. The time came when she was in and out of that hospital but in more than she was out. But whenever she could she'd be folding those paper cranes. Her father came in one day, a day when now she'd folded 900 paper cranes. On the days that she couldn't fold them, others had folded them for her. That day the paper fell out of hands, she had no strength, and she said, "But dad, it's OK. It's OK because every time I make one of those folds I still hope and I know that God plans for me to be OK no matter what happens." She died that very day. Some of you know that on the island there is a granite statue in Peace Park and it's a statue of little Sadako holding her hand out with a paper crane and people from all over the world still believe in that tradition and send paper cranes. They're forming a wreath all the time around that little body, a little nine year old girl whose life was cut incredibly short but who understood her value and worth.

Let me tell you about a woman named Corlinda. Nancy knows her, LaVere and Zola know her, Pam knows her, Bill and Jane Pettibone, all of us who went to Tonjibe know her. She lives there in the little village of Tonjibe in Costa Rica. Corlinda is 32 years old. She was born in the village of La Fortuna not too far from where we worked, born into a family of absolute poverty, coming into the life of an unwed mother, a very young unwed mother. Her mother was 14. She, as a part of the native population of Costa Rica, was invisible because when asked if they had any problem with the native people, Costa Ricans said, "Why no, no." But you don't have any problem with them if you don't give them a vote and you don't take care of their medical needs and you don't see that school is available to them and you just leave them to live in utter poverty. And that's the way Corlinda grew up. But she was raised in a home where her mother instilled in her something very important. And so it was four years ago when finally the native population was given the vote in Costa Rica and the Costa Ricans said, "Well, we better establish a reservation and we're going to build you houses on that reservation." And so miles from anywhere, on the hottest part of God's earth, they built 32 little cement buildings that are no more than 400 square feet each and into those houses they moved these people, miles from anywhere, where there are no resources for them, no ground for them to even grow any plants, nothing. And they're up there and they're pretty much a forgotten people. When I met Corlinda I couldn't believe the smile that she had on her face. I was struck by that. She went down to the church where we were staying anytime she could. offering to help, doing what she could to bring the kids together in the morning for Vacation Church School, the women in the afternoon, wanting to do anything to assist with the program of building the school classroom we were doing, always smiling. I went to Corlinda's house, this little, tiny house where she now lives as a single mother. She has survived two abusive husbands who have died. Remember I told you she is 32 years old. In that house with her she has her six children. The oldest of her children, a 16 year old daughter, has brought her first grandson, Eddy, into the world. All eight of them live in that little 400 square foot house with nothing in the house, no furniture, nothing. I went into Corlinda's house and she looked at me with a smile on her face she always had. I thought to myself, "I don't get it." "She has nothing, nothing!" And I never figured out the whole time I was there how she kept body and soul together for those kids. She has no resources, no income. She has nothing. But I'll tell you about Corlinda, she's gotten it. She's gotten it. She understands that her value and worth is as a child of God. Her whole life is centered around this little cement church, the First Methodist Church of Tonjibe, and she's down there all the time doing whatever she can, a smile on her face radiating God's love, and in her house that day she began to sing to me in Spanish. Remember our communication was so limited, she speaks no English. And when you have passed your twenty-fifth college reunion and that's the last time you had Spanish, your Spanish isn't so good. But we somehow still communicated. And that day as I was in her house, she started singing, and I knew what she was singing though her words weren't ones I recognized. "Jesus loves me this I know for the Bible tells me so." In our eyes she has nothing, but she has it all. She's been set free.

One more. It's a little dangerous because she's sitting in this room and I'm so pleased she's here. She's not able to be with us in worship too often, but I want to tell you a little of her story. You know her story because she's lived in the midst of this church. It's a woman in Birmingham. A woman in Birmingham who is now, oh I think it's her 94^th year young rather than old. A woman whose life hasn't been extraordinary in terms of events, but a woman whose life is determined by understanding who she is. She's a saint for me, and she's a saint for a lot of you. She's lived her life in an unassuming way, but always with a smile on her face. I've never seen her when she's not smiling. I've never heard her complain. I've never heard her grumble and neither have you. One young adult in this church who grew up as a child here said when I asked about Letta, "You know the best thing about Letta? The best thing about Letta is she'll never frown at you and she'll never say anything mean. As I was growing up here, that's what I remember." She simply lived her life with a sense of joy with the relationships that give life meaning... her husband until the time of his death, then her sister and her husband, and her church family. She's got it. She's figured it out, and she lives her life free. Her name is Letta Stevenson.

The spiritual's correct. You see Letta would like the peasant in the story that Brennan Manning tells. Brennan Manning tells the story of a peasant who's kneeling praying by the side of the road when an Irish priest goes by. The priest is so impressed with the devotion of that peasant that he stops and he says, "You must be very close to God." The peasant stops his prayers and he looks up at the priest, thinks for a moment, and then he smiles and he says, "Yes, God is very fond of me."

It's that looking glass theory. All three of those women use it in their lives. You know that theory. Sociologists say you look into a mirror and you see reflected there the person that the most important to you thinks you are. Is it your spouse? Is it your boss? For Sadako, for Corlinda, for Letta, they look into that mirror and they see the person that God believes them to be. "Free at last, free at last." It will only be that we're free thanks to God Almighty. The question I leave with you is obvious. What's it mean in your life? How burning is that yearning deep down inside that you would be free to and if so are you going to allow Jesus to make that happen in your life. Will you let him show you the truth? What is the truth? It's been a secret, but now you know. The truth is that on the face of God is a smile. Can't you see him? Can't you see the face of God with a smile and you know what that smile is about? That smile is about you.