O God, you have created us to be free. We live in a world that feels limited. Help us to believe that when we follow you, nothing is impossible. Build in us the courage to follow wherever you lead without fear of failure. Draw the spirit of liberation from within us so that we might love and serve you and our neighbors more radically. We pray this in the name of the one who came into the world so that we might be free, Jesus Christ, our Lord. Amen.

(Prayer of the Day, June 30, 2024)

Created to be Free. That’s the theme of the day in our five-week sermon series that follows the themes of the day for the ELCA National Youth Gathering that 5 youth and 2 adults from Bethlehem will attend next month. Being free – being unencumbered, unbound to anything or anyone – is a tantalizing idea. It’s also impossible. Free is not an absolute state of being. “Free” is an adjective, meaning it is always describing something else. Financial freedom. Political freedom. Freedom of movement. Freestanding. Being free is always relative.  (We talk more about what Luther says about what it means to be free in this week’s podcast.)

This tension of being relatively free is exactly what Paul tries to explain to the Galatians: “For freedom, Christ has set you free” (Galatians 5:1). We are free in Christ: free from all the ways that we try to save ourselves, from following the letter of the law (laws like circumcision and dietary considerations with which the Galatians were familiar), from all that prevents us from living fully as we are created to be. Paul continues, “Stand firm, therefore, and do not submit again to the yoke of slavery” (Galatians 5:1). Paul warns that freedom in Christ does not mean doing whatever you feel like doing, because that is the way of bondage – that yoke of slavery to our own self-centered desires. “Through love, become slaves to one another” (Galatians 5:13) Freedom in Christ means about adopting the constraints that lead us to life by becoming slaves to one another. Notice the mutuality here – slaves to one another. This is not self-sacrifice. Freedom in Christ, means being constrained by love: loving God with all our heart, soul, mind and strength, and loving our neighbor as ourselves – which includes loving ourselves, too.

The full theme identified for the youth gathering is actually, “free – to be transformed by the gospel.” And that’s the paradox Paul is trying to get at in today’s reading. We are free from sin, and free to love. Both are binding, but only one leads to the fullness of living as we are created to be.

This is not some exhortation about what we ought to do to be good Christians. This is an invitation to live the freedom we have in Christ. Paul knows – and God does too – that clinging to the poor substitutes, choosing bondage to the short-term fixes will not lead us to experience the fullness of life and love that God created us to experience.

Like the dog who has been well-trained to respect the boundaries of the invisible fence even after the power goes out and it’s no longer a threat, we are well-trained to stay constrained by the patterns and practices that make us believe that nothing will change in our lives or in this world and what we do doesn’t matter. We live out our freedom in Christ when we are brave enough to show up with an open mind and heart, willing to be challenged, when we are authentic and bring our whole selves and know that we are loved by our Creator. We are free to be transformed by the gospel, which leads us to love God and to love our neighbors as ourselves.

May God grant us the grace to be brave, authentic and free!