On Christian freedom
Southwell Minster - Queen’s Birthday Service
Sunday 17th June 2007
Micah 4:1-7; 1 John 4: 16b-21
Understanding language
The story is told, although I cannot vouch for its truth, of a young Welsh girl who had, as they say, got herself into trouble – though how she managed it herself, I’m not quite sure. Never mind. She had travelled all the way to London to seek out the best possible medical care, and found herself in Wimpole Street, at the door of a good Welsh-sounding name, Dr Ralph Vaughan Williams. Her ring at the doorbell met with a brusque reply from the housekeeper: without an appointment she couldn’t possibly see the Doctor. She walked away dejectedly, finding it hard to believe that the doctor was so busy he could not see her. She plucked up her courage, retraced her steps and rang the doorbell again, but again got a dressing down from the housekeeper. “Oh I didn’t expect to see him”, she said, “merely to find out what made him so busy that he cannot see a poor Welsh girl who is in trouble.” “If you really want to know” replied the housekeeper, “I’ll tell you…He is upstairs just now orchestrating the Men of Harlech.” “Just my luck” opined the girl, “if only he’d done that three months ago I would not be in my present trouble”.
Language. How easy it is for us to hear words and misunderstand them, or to assume that we understand when actually the speaker is using them in quite a different way. I remember being completely mystified and not a little concerned the first time I boarded an American aeroplane to fly to New York, to hear the Captain helpfully announce that we would be in the air momentarily. Who has never momentarily flinched when the Prayer for the Church Militant from the Book of Common Prayer prays that the Queen’s whole council ’shall truly and indifferently minister justice’. Language, however it may seem, is not necessarily easily understood across cultures, across history or across disciplines.
Human freedom and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights
In this year in which we are rightly celebrating the ending of the transatlantic slave trade, 200 years ago, it is a good opportunity to reflect on a word that seems to have many different connotations for different people – liberty or freedom. A pretty fundamental word, I would guess, in our vocabulary. Everyone believes in freedom. Of course we do.
We all agreed, across the world in 1948, that we believed in freedom. Listen to the Universal Declaration of Human Rights:
- Article 1: All human beings are born free and equal in dignity and rights…
- Article 2: Everyone is entitled to all the rights and freedoms set forth in this declaration, without distinction of any kind…
- Article 3: Everyone has the right to life, liberty and security of person.
- Article 4: Noone shall be held in slavery or servitude; slavery and the slave trade shall be prohibited in all their forms.
- Article 18: Everyone shall be entitled to freedom of thought, conscience and religion….
- Article 19: Everyone has the right to freedom of opinion and expression….
I could go on. Its amazing, is it not, what we can all agree to in the wake of appalling, worldwide oppression and the destruction of a global conflict? Wonderful, transforming commitments to the welfare of the human race, absolute clarity about what makes us each truly human – freedom.
There are a number of people sitting below me here on whose lips the words ‘You are free to go’ must be transforming, or should be at least, for those to whom they are addressed. Accused of straying outside accepted boundaries, they are liberated to rejoin society.
J.M.Synge, writing about early twentieth century rural Ireland described, with wonderful, romantic lyricism, the freedom of the tramp and the tinker in the Wicklow Mountains ‘little troubled by laws, living in out of doors conditions that keep him in good humour and fine bodily health’. So freedom for him is being beyond the constraints of ordered living in a community, free from the shackles of the law.
The Statue of Liberty, that great symbol of the Land of the Free, beckoning all those searching for freedom from oppression, has engraved at its feet the immortal words of Emma Lazarus:
Give me your tired, your poor,
Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,
The wretched refuse of your teeming shore
Send these, the homeless, tempest-tost to me,
I lift my lamp beside the golden door.
The irony would not have been lost even on the long queues of contemporary migrants who landed at Ellis Island to be subjected to the most random judgements of suitability; and how much more so today in a society so profoundly divided by race and language and economic success and failure. Freedom defined by others, controlled by the powerful, bestowed upon the poor.
Freedom - as we look around and listen to the world today, it is an opaque, almost incomprehensible concept. A lofty aspiration for all, but, just as with the ending of slavery – which took a long time from when the trade itself was outlawed – an actuality which is strictly controlled and limited by those in whose interests the defence of freedom lies.
Can freedom and justice co-exist?
So, can there be freedom for all? Is the Universal Declaration of Human Rights worth the paper it is written on? Was it ever more than an international placebo of promises and high sounding intentions agreed at a time of great vulnerability in the world? Was it just a huge advertising hoarding behind which the realpoliticking of the cold war and the new power blocks could legitimate their trampling across the weak and vulnerable of Africa and Asia and Latin America in a desperate fear of the ‘other side’ and the vengeance it could wreak? Can liberty and justice hold hands together? It might appear not. Karl Marx came up with a philosophy for justice for all. Lofty aspirations indeed, but state communism soon showed itself to be just as susceptible to human weakness and temptation as any other political creed. And those whose watchword has been liberty for all have just as many searching questions to answer as the crushing poverty and sickness of millions in Africa and Asia continues unabated – not only continues but is ruthlessly exploited by ‘the free.’
The promises of God
But the promises of God are different:
And he shall judge among many people, and rebuke strong nations afar off and they shall beat their swords into ploughshares, and their spears into pruning hooks….For all people will walk every on in the name of his god and we will walk in the name of the Lord our God for ever and ever.
God is love; he who dwells in love is dwelling in God, and God in him…In love there is no room for fear; indeed perfect love banishes fear.
O God who art the author of peace and lover of concord, in knowledge of whom standeth our eternal life, whose service is perfect freedom.
We are called to serve the God who is love, the one who casts out fear, in whom there is nothing that is not love, whose life literally is spent bringing good news to the poor, releasing the captive, restoring sight to the blind, liberating the oppressed. How fearful is that? God loving us, freeing us, restoring us to the point of giving up his life for those whom he loves, that we may see and know the truth that sets us free. The first and only call of true love is the freedom of the other. On that path lies the true bond of peace.
We celebrate today the life of duty and service of our monarch, a woman who, constrained by the trappings and expectations of a particular way of life as she has been, has yet given unstintingly of herself not just for this nation, but for the life of the world, and who knows at what cost to herself as a human being. The world recognizes and honours that life of dedication. And she stands as a light to all those who wear the trappings of power and leadership in the world today, inspired as she has always been by her faith in the God of love, that it is in the service of God and of God’s creation that we discover perfect freedom.
Some here will remember, forty six years ago, that extraordinary inaugural speech made by John F Kennedy as he took the reigns of power.
Man holds in his mortal hands the power to abolish all forms of human poverty and all forms of human life. And yet the same revolutionary beliefs for which our forbears fought are still at issue around the globe – the belief that the rights of man come not from the generosity of the state, but from the hand of God….Let us join in creating a new endeavour…where the strong are just and the weak secure, and the peace preserved. All this will not be finished in the first 100 days. Nor will it be finished in the first 1000 days, not in the life of this administration, nor even perhaps in our lifetime on this planet, but let us begin.
How right he was. Steps forward have been made and many steps back. And still we do not have faith that ‘love conquers fear’, that the promise of God is that he will love and will love and will love until that perfect love does cast out fear, that in God and in the service of God, justice and freedom embrace; and, in the words of another great American proclaimed just two years after Kennedy’s speech,:
Let freedom ring. And when this happens, and when we allow freedom ring, when we let it ring in every village and every hamlet, from every state and every city, we will be able to speed up that day when all god’s childrenm black and white, Jews and gentiles, Protestants and Catholics, will be able to join hands and sing in the words of the old negro spiritual, “Free at last, free at last. Thank God almighty, we are free at last.”
(Martin Luther King)
God’s promise is clear. It is unequivocal. There can be no confusion over its meaning. All it needs is for us to open our eyes, to see the truth, and to hear the words ‘You are free to go’. Oh…is that all?