By Rev. Dr. Charles J.
Tomlin, DMin.
Flat Rock-Zion Baptist
Partnership
Pentecost 13, August 30th, 2015
At a
university over in Englanda psychology professor recently conducted a rather
interesting sort of experiment. In the faculty lounge at that school they have
coffee and other drinks available. But instead of having someone stationed
there to collect the money for those beverages, they simply have a price list
posted and a box sitting there for people to put their money into.
So here’s
what that psychology professor did. Each week he would post a new price list.
But the prices never changed. The only thing that changed was a small picture
that he put at the top of the price list. Some weeks he would put a picture of
some flowers on the price list. But other weeks he would put a picture of a
pair of human eyes at the top of the price list. Well, guess what? On the weeks
when those eyes were watching, the people using that break-room put nearly
three times the money in the box.
We don’t
always do what we’re expected to do, but we usually do what we’re inspected to
do. In other words, when we know that
someone is watching and when we know that at some point someone is going to
take a look at what we’ve done and pass judgment or that we’re going to have to
face the consequences, we tend to make more of an effort to do the right
thing (From a sermon by C. Ed ward Bowen, entitled “Sow What?, 2010, at www.goodpreacher.com).
However
you look at it, freedom is not free. Freedom
comes with a cost, with conditions, and with consequences. Even as the Church was set free from having
to live under the Law of Moses, this did not mean that now they could live
without any rules whatsoever. To receive
and keep the gift of Christian freedom, those who follow Christ must now live under
Christ’s own law.
FREE TO BE RESPONSIBLE
In Paul’s
concluding words about freedom, he wants the church to know that ‘freedom” is built upon two ‘pillars’ of
human responsibility: caring and bearing.
As are set free by Christ’s love and forgiveness, we become responsible
to ‘bear each other’s burdens’ just
as we must continue to ‘carry our own’.
The
Christian life of freedom carries within itself the call of human ‘responsibility’ for the sake of others
and for our own sake too. Interestingly,
the word ‘responsible’ has at its
root the understanding that a person lives their whole life in ‘response’ to the grace God has given to
us. Paul’s words coincide precisely with
Jesus great commandment that life is lived to return love to God and to give
love to neighbor (Luke 10: 15ff) . According
to Luke’s gospel, Jesus then gave the story of the Good Samaritan to remind us that
our ‘neighbor’ can be best imagined
not just as helping another Christian, but even as finding a perfect stranger who
is in need our compassion and care. In
John’s letter pastoral letter, our human responsibility to bear and to care is summed up in one single line: “We
love, because he first loved us.” (1 Jn. 4:19).
The aim
of all this ‘caring’ and ‘bearing’ for the sake of ‘God’s love’ is the
Christian message. This is the ‘good
news’ that we have to “be”, not just that we have to ‘share’ or ‘speak’: “My
friends, if anyone is detected in a transgression (or sin), you who have received the Spirit should
restore such a one in a spirit of gentleness” (6.1). Did you detect the heart of the Christian
faith, when Paul writes about ‘you who have received the Spirit”? Here is the most important part of our
Christian responsibility. We are to see
to ‘restore’ those who have fallen into sin with a ‘spirit of gentleness’. Our
responsibility to ‘love our neighbor’
and to ‘treat our neighbor’ as we
would treat ourselves is our work to bring the hope of restoration, redemption,
and grace even into the worse of situations and to the most difficult of
persons.
Recently,
when the Boston Bomber suspect was on trial, the nun who became famous because
of the movie “Dead Man Walking” (Sister Helen Prejean), visited the bomber
Dzhokhar Tsarnaev to give him a chance to repent. It was of course, controversial, because
most people think he doesn’t deserve even that.
But what Sister Helen Prejean
said in response to the criticism of her is exactly what Paul is saying here,
when she told CNN, “I don’t concern
myself with a person’s guilt or innocence.
It’s easy to forgive the innocent, but it’s the guilty who test our
morality.’ (http://www.cnn.com/2015/05/07/us/tsarnaev-dead-man-walking-nun/index.html).
I would
say that Sister Helen’s primary concern is the concern of the apostle
Paul. The Christian faith and message
rises and falls on how God and how we ‘treat
the guilty’ because it is how the ‘guilty’ are treated that gives us all
the hope of God’s restoring love.
FREEDOM HAS CONSEQUENCES
But don’t
misunderstand the offer of God’s grace as an excuse to live without thought to
the consequences. Freedom
also has consequences. This is what Paul
means when he says: “Don’t be deceived;
God is not mocked for you reap whatever you sow.” Paul reminds us that the
freedom we have is great, but it is not without limit or without boundary.
As humans
who live from the ‘garden’ of the earth, we are most familiar with this final
line that says, “you reap whatever you sow.”
If you want beans, you must sow beans.
If you want corn, you must sow corn.
You cannot get beans from corn seeds and you can’t get corn from bean
seeds. This is something we all know to
be obviously and absolutely true. You
only ‘reap whatever you sow’. This is a fact of farming, a fact of
gardening and a fact of life. You can’t
dispute it, but you can only learn it and know it and live it—if you want to
eat and live.
Why is
Paul giving us this agricultural lesson?
Paul is a making for us a visual picture of the invisible, moral and
spiritual world through the visible, natural and physical world. He wants to reminds us about this ‘moral’ law
of life because it is not always as evident.
While you can sow and grow a crop in one single season, the season for
knowing the results of our moral and spiritual sowing are seldom so quick or
fast. There is a reason for this. We call it ‘grace’. God has built in room for change, for
repentance, for turnarounds, for life-lessons, and for second chances—and more. God is not a moral tyrant who zaps us from
heaven when we make mistakes. He loves,
he forgives, he redeems and he wants to restore.
I loved
the news story from NBC on the last Sunday evening in May. It told of a man who robbed a bank, but was
given a second chance to change his life.
It seems the man was down on his luck, homeless, jobless, and in
desperation, he went out and robbed a
bank of 1,000 dollars, handing the bank-teller a note demanding the cash all in
small bills. Then, he walked out of the
bank, set down on the curb, and waited for the police to come an arrest
him. He told the judge, “I’ve had to sleep in the woods before, and I
just couldn’t do that again. The thought
of that made a jail cell look good.” It
was then that the judge set out an appeal in the papers that someone please
give this man a job. They did. He was gifted at Welding and a Welding
Company took a chance on him and gave him a chance. The last scene of the news spot showed him
welding and then they cut to him in an interview with him saying, “I want to work for this company for the rest
of my life….” “I want to be loyal to
them and give them everything I’ve got.”
That’s what it means to say that God’s moral laws cuts us all some
needed and necessary slack. (http://www.bing.com/videos/search?q=man+given+second+chance+after+robbing+bank+nbc&qpvt=man+given+second+chance+after+robbing+bank+nbc&FORM=VDRE#view=detail&mid=A423B29FB980F3903C12A423B29FB980F3903C12).
But here
is the one ‘mistake’ we must not make.
We must not think that because God gives us leeway, breathing space and
wiggle room with his moral and spiritual laws that he will change them just for
us. This is what Paul means when he says
that “God is not mocked”. We
must not deceive ourselves in to mistaking God’s acts of grace, love and
forgiveness to give us freedom from our sins as an excuse to misuse our freedom. Even though we can have God’s forgiveness
without conditions, this does not undo the consequences of how we have lived
our lives. The very serious words of Peter also reminds
us of this, when he wrote: “The Lord is not slack concerning his
promise, as some men count slackness; but is longsuffering to us-ward, not
willing that any should perish, but that all should come to repentance. BUT the day of the Lord will come as a thief
in the night… (BUT) …the heavens will pass away with a great
noise…. (BUT)…the elements will melt with fire… BUT … the earth and everything
done on it will be disclosed… So,
Peter concludes with a question that follows; “What sort of persons ought you
to be?” (2 Pet. 3:9-11). Just
like the natural world has physical laws that govern the universe, so the
spiritual world has moral laws that will govern the heart, the soul and our
human destiny. In giving us freedom, God has put ‘destiny’
into our own hands with only one control
which gives life its own potential.
God rule is this: ‘You will reap what you sow’.
FREE TO FOLLOW CHRIST’S RULE
Of
course, there is something ‘sobering’
about realizing that your life and your destiny is in your own hands. Sometimes, in this world, when we are pushed
and pulled from so many different directions, that we can feel like it is the
opposite. We can feel that we have no
real choices. We can feel that we can do
nothing. We can feel as if we have no
power whatsoever to change anything. We
want to give up.
But Paul
wants us to know that we do have power.
We do have influence. Our choices
do matter and they do make a difference, even if we don’t always see it in the
very next moment. Again, he wants us to visualize it like sowing
seeds in the garden and waiting for the coming of the future “harvest time” (v. 9). You will, when that time comes, eventually
get what you sow. “If you sow to your own flesh, you will reap corruption from the flesh;
but if you sow to the Spirit, you will reap eternal life from the Spirit
(v. 8). His point is that our desires,
our wills, our choices and our decisions which we make in life, will not always
remain hidden or uneventful, but that every action points us in the direction
of how things will actually turn out.
If we remain on the lower level of living, we will eventually ‘reap’ nothing but a life lived toward
the ‘corruption’ or the ‘end of our
flesh’ which is lived one day and gone
the next. But if we live our lives on a
higher, spiritual, enduring level, then we will ‘reap eternal life’ which only comes ‘from the Spirit’ (v. 8).
Because
Paul believes that you and I will ‘eventually’
reap what we sow, he reminds us ‘not to grow weary in doing what is right’
and he also encourages us that ‘whenever
we have an opportunity’ we should ‘work
for the good of all, and especially for those of the family of faith’
(v.10). This is exactly who we are when
we ‘sow to the Spirit’ the seeds of
the Spirit, which bear the lasting, eternal, spiritual fruit of love, joy,
peace, and so on. We sow these kinds of
‘good works’ because we believe in
the faithfulness of God and in the integrity God has established in this
world and in life itself. But to believe
these kind of things, just like planting a garden, we must have faith and we
must act upon that faith.
Last
spring, when the young 26 year-old humanitarian relief worker from Arizona,
Kayla Mueller, had her life end tragically in Syria last February, we did not
and still do not, and may never know all the details. We know that she was captured and held by the
Islamic State of Iraq, ISIS. We know
that she had already worked in many dangerous places in other countries, like
Africa and Tibet. We know that she had
a deep sense of justice and compassion for those suffering in the world. We also know that it was claimed that her
captures that she was held in a building hit by a Jordanian bombing raid. But what we didn’t know until most recently,
is that while some others working with Kayla, along with Kayla were given a
chance to be release, Kayla refused because she would not leave her weak
cellmate behind. In the last
hand-written note from Kayla to her parents she wrote: …I have a lot of fight left inside of me. I am not breaking down + I
will not give in no matter how long it takes….'Please be patient, give your
pain to God. I know you would want me to remain strong. That is exactly what I
am doing. Do not fear for me, continue to pray as will I + by God's will we
will be together soon.” (http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-3095320/U-S-aid-worker-Kayla-Mueller-sacrificed-attempt-escape-ISIS-didn-t-want-leave-weak-cellmate-behind.html).
Kayla’s
life was an ‘act of faith’ that will not go unanswered forever. Her seed will grow, in this life too, and not
only in the life to come. In that prison,
and even in her mysterious death, she was free and set free in ways most of us
have not yet experienced. Acts of faith like
this, based upon God’s love, resulting in deeds of love for others, is what it
means to be free in Christ.
This is
the last thing Paul wants us to know, as he concludes his words about Christian
Freedom. Human acts of caring and bearing are the
primary ‘works of faith’ that are display our true freedom as share in God’s love and trust in God’s faithfulness. We are
made free in Christ as we follow Christ’s law.
And in his letter to the Colossians, Paul explains that following Christ’s
law is nothing more and nothing less than rightly responding to God’s eternal
love as it is revealed on the cross (Col. 1.20). Since Christ
was in God when God created all things (Col 1.16) and that God was in Christ (2 Cor. 5: 19) when God reconciled ‘to himself reconciled all things’ (
Col. 1: 20); since it was only in Christ
that ‘all the fullness of the God was
pleased to dwell’ (1.19) and it is
in Christ that ‘all things together “(1.17), then it follows that that there is
only one true freedom: “If the Son makes
you free, you shall be free indeed.” (Jn. 8.33).
I know that
having Christ and his cross of love as the source of true freedom is not now obvious
to everyone. I know that not all know
nor are yet able to follow his rule until it comes to this world fully and finally.
Only God’s love, justice and mercy can
judge what happens to those live between the times or appear to ‘fall between
the cracks’ of truth, before the truth is completely and fully known. But none of this changes one iota Christ’s
law of love nor does it change God’s moral law that ‘we reap what we sow.’
Everyone may not yet name the ‘only
name that is above every name’ (Acts
4.12), but I must conclude as Paul concludes,
“As for those who will follow
this rule—(the rule of God’s love through Jesus Christ), peace be upon them, and mercy, and upon the Israel of God….(Gal.
6.16). Amen.
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