11 June – God’s terrifying freedom, and ours
Pentecost 2
11/6/2023
Genesis 12:1-9
Psalm 33
Romans 4:1-12
Matthew 9:9-13
In a sentence:
God is free so that we might be; God’s call to us is a call to be free to be ourselves and that others might also be freed
Of spiders, fear and freedom
On Tuesday night, I hopped into the car in preparation to pick up our boy and some his friends from volleyball training, when there ran across the outside of the windscreen a medium-sized ‘huntsman’ spider, silhouetted against the twilight sky. Most of us can be reasonably sensible about spiders; this is less true with the huntsman. Essentially harmless to humans, their size makes them fearsome-looking and fast. It isn’t going to hurt you, but it could end up anywhere in no time – in particular, up the leg of your trousers or sleeve of your shirt – and no one wants that!
I was inside the car, and the doors and windows were all closed, so I wasn’t worried. I wasn’t worried, yet. But I know from previous experience that these critters can hold on pretty tight, so after picking up the kids from training, I didn’t, as usual, open the windows or sunroof – which is usually necessary when you have several teenagers in a car after 90 minutes of vigorous exercise. The last thing I needed at 100km/hr on the freeway coming home was arachnophobia erupting in the back seat, or the front!
God’s terrifying freedom
You probably didn’t notice the spider in our readings this morning, but there was a big, fast, hairy one there, which we usually call “God”. ‘Go’, God says, ‘…[and] So Abram went’. Perhaps we are so familiar with the story that we miss its terror. But consider: Abram and Sarai are just getting on with their lives and minding their own business when, out of the blue, God commands: Go.
The problem here is surely God’s capriciousness. The command is unexpected, unfathomable, unreasonable and untameable. The last thing any of us needs in our relatively stable and comfortable lives is a big, hairy spider-like God dropping into our lap and running up the front of our T-shirt.
The only possible justification for an approach like this from God is that it matches – accords with – true human being. That is, it only makes sense for God to act this way, and for us to be interested in such an approach from God, if this is the kind of expectation from life necessary for our fullest, most authentic human existence.
Our reading of God has to do with our reading of ourselves. Do we have to be like Abram (and Sarai) – free in the way that God is free – in order to be happy? The invitation in the story of the call to Abram and Sarai is to ask ourselves: Are we better when we are as free as God? In the story, God’s freedom to command ‘Go’ is met by Abram’s freedom to respond in the way that he did: ‘So Abram went…’ Is this what we need to be?
Faith as openness to freedom
Notice how our understanding of faith would have to change if this were so. Faith would not be ‘believing in God’ but the suspicion that the freedom of God seeks our freedom. God is free, and we can be too. God is big and hairy and fast, and we should be too.
The freedom at stake here, however, is not an abstract anything-you-want liberation from all constraints. A promise is attached to God’s call to Abram and Sarai: “Through you, the nations will bless themselves” (or “Through you, the nations will be blessed”). That is, Abram’s freedom will bear forth the world’s freedom.
Abram and Sarai’s story, then, poses a two-pronged question: Is there a God who is spider-free, and does that God’s freedom set us free?
But how do even we answer a question like this? How do we “prove” there is such a God and that we should be such people? We can’t do it “theoretically”. That is, we can’t argue ourselves or others into radical freedom.
We prove, rather, it in the old sense of the word, which is to test it or, to probe it (“probe” and “prove” are closely-related words)
And Abram and Sarai do probe God, and God continues to probe them. And Abram doubts, going so far as effectively to prostitute his wife to save his own skin. And Sarai also doubts, which is enshrined in the changing of her name to Sarah. But God prevails – proves to be up to the probing.
But let’s now skip across to what St Paul says about Abraham in today’s reading from Romans. Paul’s argument hinges on the conviction that what is the case for Abraham is also the case for us. The presenting problem is circumcision, but this is a passing surface question. For Paul, it is crucial that Abraham’s response to God is a heart-thing and not a law-thing. That is, Abraham doesn’t earn God’s favour by jumping through some moral hoop. Instead, Abraham ‘believes’. For Paul, this means Abraham trusts. And God counts that trust as enough.
For Abraham to have done the right thing and earned God’s favour would be for Abraham to have bound God: Here’s my ticket, you owe me now, let me in. But instead, Abraham sees, accepts and acts as if there is a future in God’s command to “Go”, and this is the basis of his relationship to God. Paul’s concern is the kind of relationship we have with God – whether it is a bound relationship or a free one. Are we good with God because we are bound by what God commands, or are we good with God because God simply loves us, and we act within that love? Put differently, are we slaves to God and the gods, bound to do what is required, or are we as children who act not out of requirement but from the love of God?
Our freedom in God’s freedom
Our being free or bound is something each of us needs to prove – to probe – at a personal level. When and where do we feel ourselves bound, and by what, and what are the possibilities of freedom? Where are we acting for the wrong reason when acting for the right reason would set us free?
I’d like us to think together for a moment, however, about our shared life as a congregation and where we find ourselves now. There is a strong sense in which the move we’re about to make to the CTM is not free. Were it not for our building woes, we almost certainly would not be considering moving, although that might still have been a good idea. Nonetheless, we are moving because we must; we are bound to move. This is not freedom, and it’s less than God’s intention for us.
What, then, does freedom mean for our move? One thing it means, as I’ve said before, is that freedom is a stance towards what is unavoidable. In our case, that stance will look like a “leaning in” to our future at the CTM rather than a leaning back. This is not to say that we can’t regret or be sad about the need to move; this also matters. But it is to say something about how we must face the future, as individuals and as a congregation.
For this reason, our Church Council has decided that we will move in six weeks’ time, perhaps before we actually have to, simply in order to demonstrate to ourselves that we are moving to a place where we expect to live, and not a place to die. There is, then, no reason to lean back in fear of what’s in front of us. You lean back from death but forward into life. Everything dies, but it only dies properly after it has lived, and we still have plenty of life in us.
Precisely what our new life together will look like is difficult to see and, so far, we’ve really only guessed and speculated and fantasised. As with the story of Abram and Sarai, there are many things – for better and for worse – yet to unfold.
But let’s consider the promise to Abram and why it matters that we choose to live freely: In you [God says], all the families of the earth will be blessed. That is, Your freedom will lead set others free. Paul’s point is that this promise is also made to us: be free, that others might also be free.
We don’t know how this can or will be so. Abraham and Sarah died in the “promised land” without the promise yet being fulfilled. But we are here today because God’s freedom elicited from them enough imperfect freedom that we still tell and reflect and act upon their story 3500 years later.
We might, then, dare to pray that, 3500 years from now, people might be found who are reflecting on our story. The gospel is that this is as likely for us now as it was for Abram and Sarai back then.
And we should not merely pray this way, but we must act as if it will be so: choosing tomorrow freely, without fear, sons and daughters of Abraham and Sarah, testifying to the freedom of God, for the blessing of the freedom of all the world.
God. Can. Do. This.