Christ Church

The Rev’d David Curry, Rector of Christ Church, preached this sermon for the Fourth Sunday in Lent, based on the Epistle: Galatians 4:26-5:1.

“Stand fast therefore in the liberty wherewith Christ hath made us free”

Freedom is one of the elusive catchwords of modernity. It signifies a quality of life which is somehow known, somehow anticipated, somehow expected and sought after, somehow claimed. But what is our freedom?

Contemporary freedom is about outward states of being. It belongs to the political and the social arenas of life. It is tied to visible and tangible forms of achievement. It is at once something restricted and something elusive. It is something always striven after but rarely enjoyed, however much it is asserted. How can what is so essential to modern identity be so restricted and so elusive? How can something claimed for as achieved be yet so restricted in achievement? The problem lies in tying the sense of freedom primarily to outward states of being. The consequence is the spectacle of the folly of human presumption. We have lost the inwardness of its meaning upon which its outward expression depends.

Christian freedom, nonetheless, underlies our contemporary notions of freedom. The idea of liberation from oppression and bondage, from inhibition and constraint, however these are described or imagined, belongs to the general notion of freedom as release from oppression. This animates the whole world of the social gospel. This is the moving force within the political gospel of liberation. There is much truth in this. That is to say, there are social and political implications to the Christian gospel. But they cannot always be tied so directly to this or that form of social and political action. Things are never quite so simple as they appear. This is the folly of the contemporary institutional church which chooses to be defined by social and political issues at the expense of the spiritual principles that animate and inform outward actions.

The point is that Christian freedom cannot simply be collapsed into the forms of political and social expression. Christian freedom is something in the world but not of the world. It signals a quality of life which we participate and enjoy in the world regardless of circumstance and situation. Yet it is not something which is dependent and contingent upon political and social expression. Christian freedom is something deeper. It is something inward and spiritual. It is something in the soul. Freedom belongs to the activity of God in the soul. Freedom is a form of grace in the sense of a threefold release: a release from oppression, a release to God, and a release in the soul. As one translation of our text puts it, “for freedom Christ has set us free.”

Spiritual freedom is primary and fundamental to all other forms of freedom. It gives force and form to them without being constrained to them or by them. Thus, it is about a freedom which exists even in the midst of the world’s conditions of unfreedom and active persecution, the sad realities of which we are only too well aware. It does not depend upon a future which is only longed after but not yet achieved politically and socially. It depends entirely upon what has already been achieved in Christ Jesus and which yet remains always to be realised more fully in us. When we lose sight of this all our freedoms become our oppressions.

Mothering Sunday, as this day is sometimes called on account of the Epistle reading from Galatians, sounds the notes of Christian liberation. It is a day of celebration and relaxation, a day of refreshment and rejoicing. “Mothering Sunday,” “Refreshment Sunday,” “Laetare Sunday,” all these time-worn epithets for this day as derived from the Scripture readings, signal the meaning of what we participate in and through the pilgrimage of Lent. Lent demands our good works, to be sure, but lest we be tempted to think that we can prove ourselves to God or that we can save the world, let alone the global economy, we are recalled instead to the presence of Christ as the one in whom and for whom we live.

“I have been crucified with Christ; it is no longer I who live, but Christ who lives in me; and the life I now live in the flesh I live by faith in the Son of God, who loved me and gave himself for me”(Gal.2.20) as St. Paul says. “Another lives in me” as Ignatius of Antioch puts it. Our works are faith works. His grace feeds and nourishes us in the way of pilgrimage. St. Paul’s Epistle to the Galatians is his great manifesto of Christian liberation. He reminds us that “Jerusalem which is above is free; which is the mother of us all.” The Jerusalem of which he speaks is above, yet present. He is not speaking of a political or a future state – a utopian ideal – but a present spiritual condition or state of grace. We are the children of promise; the promise is fulfilled in Christ Jesus. The freedom is inward and spiritual. The children of freedom are the children of Sarah, not Hagar, to give the scriptural reference.

The freedom is the release from the oppression of sin. It is a release to God and it is a release in the soul. It places us in the spiritual place of freedom. It is the “Jerusalem which is above…which is the mother of us all.” That Jerusalem is present now in Mother Church. She is the place of our life in the Body of Christ, here and now, where we live by faith, not by works, by what is inwardly and spiritually achieved for us being inwardly and spiritually realised in us. That spiritual mother would sustain us in the wilderness pilgrimage of faith. She would sustain us by the grace of Christ. It is more than a “little touch of Harry in the night” (Shakespeare, Henry V), more than a momentary comfort. It is the reality of Jerusalem in our midst. It is always more than we need.

“Gather up the fragments that remain, that nothing be lost…and they filled twelve baskets.” We live graciously from those fragments of the heavenly banquet provided for us by the sacrifice of Christ in the greater wilderness of our sin and death. We live from Jerusalem but only in and through the passion of Christ. He is our freedom and it is “for freedom” that he “has set us free.”

“Stand fast therefore in the liberty wherewith Christ hath made us free”

Fr. David Curry, Christ Church, Lent IV, ‘09