Freedom for Neighbor

Scripture: Luke 4:14-21; Luke 4:1-13; Isaiah 61:1-2; 1 Corinthians 13:1-4; James 1:22-23 Series: 2022

Closing sermon in a Freedom series: Jesus’ wilderness temptations (Luke 4) reveal three false worldly freedoms (to have whatever you want, to rule, to escape consequences/death), all of which Jesus rejects. True freedom, declared in his Nazareth reading of Isaiah 61, is freedom for the neighbor: self-giving love rather than self-satisfaction. Pruitt closes by inviting Bee Creek UMC into deeper local service, from the Farmacy Garden to the Bee Creek Village project.

Illustrations: chuck-e-cheese-urban-air, lyle-lovett-if-i-had-a-boat, retirement-retreat-etymology, grand-inquisitor, bitcoin-apple-superbowl, leaders-think-about-constraints, bee-creek-village-survey

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January 23

Freedom for Neighbor

Jesus returned in the power of the Spirit to Galilee, and news about him spread throughout the whole countryside. He taught in their synagogues and was praised by everyone. Jesus went to Nazareth, where he had been raised. On the Sabbath he went to the synagogue as he normally did and stood up to read. The synagogue assistant gave him the scroll from the prophet Isaiah. He unrolled the scroll and found the place where it was written:

The Spirit of the Lord is upon me, 
 because the Lord has anointed me.
He has sent me to preach good news to the poor, 
 to proclaim release to the prisoners 
 and recovery of sight to the blind, 
 to liberate the oppressed, 
 and to proclaim the year of the Lord’s favor. He rolled up the scroll, gave it back to the synagogue assistant, and sat down. Every eye in the synagogue was fixed on him. He began to explain to them, “Today, this scripture has been fulfilled just as you heard it.” Luke 4:14-21

Chuck E Cheese is a very strange establishment. It is a pizza place where the mascot is a giant rat. Humans have to get in this giant rat costume at least once an hour while the store is open. Kids are given stamps on their hand when they enter and, really, they are not allowed to leave without their adults who also have the same stamps. There are games and pizza and arcades and loud noises and tickets. It is a lot of stimulation.

Inside Chuck E Cheese, if you give them money, your kids are free, Free to do what they want. And what do they want? They want to have fun.

Urban Air, in Lakeway, has a similar vibe minus the being trapped inside. Kids run around. Jump. When you pay the entrance fee, they are free to do what they want in a modestly safe environment.

Kids just want to have fun. Freedom in Urban Air and Chuck E Cheese is about maximizing fun. What about everyone else. What do we really want?

My friends, we’re finishing our series on Freedom, on our quest for true freedom. We began by talking about the Covenant Prayer of John Wesley. And then we looked at the freedom. Christ offers us from sin in baptism. Last week, we talked about our freedom in Christ, the giftedness we were given in Christ, how it may not seem equal at first, but God did not offer us a spirit of competition but a Spirit of Love.

And what does that look like? That’s what we have for today. Freedom is a concept that cannot exist in itself. You are free for something. If you are unfree, you can’t do things. If I am currently being constrained, if I am strapped down in a chair or in a straight jacket, I am not free to do what I would like to do. But when those straps are removed, we become free to do what we want to do. What do you want to do in life? What would you most like to do? The older we get, the harder the question becomes because we see more clearly the constraints we have in our life. It’s not just the limitation of our gifts. It’s the material constraints. If I could do whatever I want, I might be on a mountain somewhere. As Lyle Lovett said, if I had a boat, I’d go out on the ocean. If I had a pony, I’d ride him on that boat.” Riding a pony on a boat feels like freedom. If I didn’t have obligations to other people. It’s funny how quickly, when we think about what we want, our obligations to other people come up. Obligations to people in our family, people we like, or we don’t like, obligations in our community. And with obligations, we just don’t feel as free.

Well, let’s imagine that for a minute. If you didn’t have any obligations to anybody else in your life, does that look like freedom? If you didn’t have to go to school. If you didn’t have to work. If you didn’t have to do anything. If you had all the money you needed to do all the things you would want to do: is this freedom? The world says it is. This is the kind of freedom that we are presented in our culture. Save enough money so that you can do what you want. For a lot of people, that may be their goal in life. But what it ends up looking like is a grown-up Chuck E cheese or a grownup urban air. This kind of constrained circumstance where you don’t have to think about the outside world. Where you can blissfully say to yourself, “I don’t want to think about it. I don’t want to think about sad things. I don’t want to think about negative things. I just want to do I want to do.” This may be desirable from time to time. And there’s definitely a place in the Christian tradition for retreat, for getting away, for having space to clear our head. The word retirement, a word that some of you experience and many of us plan for, comes from the French word for retreat.

The Wilderness

Jesus goes on a retreat right before this passage. He goes into the desert. Jesus does not get himself ready to go back into the world. He faces a different challenge. You see, for many of us today, this idea of what we want as freedom from want, as ability to fulfill all of our desires, is entirely a lie. It is as false a reality as assuming that the inside of a Chuck E cheese is the real world. And if you get enough tickets, you did good. Christ did not become flesh so that we would have a kind of freedom that lets us do whatever we want. The freedom to do what we want looks a lot like sin. Our desires in themselves are distorted and without grace, they only go back towards ourselves. Christ came to break us out of this loop of self destruction. To show us freedom in how he lived, but also to give us, through the Holy Spirit, the freedom for something more than self-satisfaction. After his baptism, Jesus goes into the desert and he is tempted by the devil after fasting for 40 days and 40 nights, He does not eat for 40 days and 40 nights. The end of his fast is not a moment of great weakness, as we would often think about it. We may think, “oh my gosh, he’s so hungry. He can’t think of anything else but food.” And yet, fasting does not offer weakness. It offers strength. Christ strengthens himself for temptations to come by fasting. And when he’s ready, he’s offered these three questions that sum up the challenge of the world. Dostoevsky, in his great novel, The Brothers Karamazov hinges the entire book on the prose poem Ivan tells his younger brother, Alyosha. It is called the Grand Inquisitor. Jesus comes back to Seville, Spain, in the 16th century, during the Spanish inquisition and he, Jesus, arrested for interfering in the work of the church. The Grand Inquisitor talks to Jesus about his time in the wilderness. The Inquisitor says,

“was it possible to say anything more true than what (the devil) proclaimed to you in those three questions…For in these three questions all of subsequent human history is as if brought together into a single whole and foretold; three images are revealed with will take in all the insoluble historical contradictions of human nature over all the earth.”¹ The first question is, since you are the son of God, command this stone to become bread. In other words, make whatever you have into whatever you want. If you are so powerful, do that so that you will never be hungry. So that you will always have what you want. Is this a goal for us, to always have what we want? Wouldn’t it be great to be able to turn stones into bread? Wouldn’t it be great to turn lead into gold? Wouldn’t it be great to have bought Bitcoin when it was selling for a hundred dollars or bought apple when it was selling for two? Wouldn’t it be great to have that? Wouldn’t it be great to know who’s going to win the super bowl and bet the odds. Wouldn’t that be great. If you’re the son of God, don’t you want to do that? If you had all the bread you wanted, you could be free. But then Jesus says, “as it is written, one does not live by bread alone, but by every word that comes from the mouth of God.” The bread does not make us free. The material resources do not make us free. God makes us free. Next, the devil takes him to the top of a mountain and shows him the world and says, “I will give you all of this if you worship me.” And through these temptations, we should think about Jesus being asked, but also what would happen if we were asked the question. Would you worship the devil if it could make you king of the world? It is not a simple question. You would have absolute power over all the places on the earth: you could reorder the world however you see fit. You could be in charge of the country. You could be in charge of all of the resources. You could do all the things. Wouldn’t that be great? If you had the power, gosh, if Jesus had the power, the world would be a better place, right? Maybe get the people we like in power. Everything will be better. And yet Jesus responds again in the negative, “As it is written. You shall worship God and serve only him.” Power is not freedom. Many of are it have been people in authority over others. In my experience, people in authority, whether they be CEOs or Senators or Bishops, think a lot more about what they can’t do than about what they can. Finally, the devil takes Jesus to the top of the temple and says, “since you are the son of God, jump down from here and your angels will come and rescue you.” And then the devil quotes scripture to Jesus, which is important to remember. The devil quotes scripture. Just because someone is quoting the Bible doesn’t mean they are of God. What the devil is offering is immortality. You wouldn’t have to die. Wouldn’t that be great? We can freeze your brain. We can extend your life forever. You don’t have to suffer any consequences in this world. And then Jesus responds, do not put the Lord, your God, to the test.

Ultimately, in the temptations, Jesus is offered three forms of freedom, first, the freedom to have whatever he wants (turning stones into bread), second, the freedom to rule and have power over whomever he wants, the freedom to control, and finally, three, the freedom to not suffer the consequences of his own actions, the freedom from death. This is not why Jesus came. This is not what God offers us in baptism. This is not the covenant Christ gives us in that the early Methodist movement claimed in the covenant prayer. After the temptations, after he has left the wilderness, Jesus starts to proclaim and to heal. And he goes to the synagogue and he’s given the scroll of Isaiah. And he goes to Isaiah 61 and he reads this passage and here we see what holy freedom looks like. It’s not freedom for ourselves and our desires. It is not freedom for people who look like us. It’s not freedom for our family and curses for others.

“The Spirit of the Lord is on me,
 because he has anointed me
 to proclaim good news to the poor.
He has sent me to proclaim freedom for the prisoners
 and recovery of sight for the blind,
to set the oppressed free,
 to proclaim the year of the Lord’s favor.”

Christ offers us the freedom to love our neighbor, to really do it, to really give of ourselves. We are given freedom for our neighbor. Freedom is not for ourself, for our savings, for our storage, for our talents, but for others.

The freedom of Christ is nothing if we don’t love, it’s like a Paul says in first Corinthians 13,

If I speak in tongues of human beings and of angels but I don’t have love, I’m a clanging gong or a clashing cymbal. If I have the gift of prophecy and I know all the mysteries and everything else, and if I have such complete faith that I can move mountains but I don’t have love, I’m nothing. If I give away everything that I have and hand over my own body to feel good about what I’ve done but I don’t have love, I receive no benefit whatsoever. 1 Corinthians 13:1-4

Or James says,

You must be doers of the word and not only hearers who mislead themselves. Those who hear but don’t do the word are like those who look at their faces in a mirror. They look at themselves, walk away, and immediately forget what they were like. James 1:22-23

We are offered this freedom to love our neighbors fully, not in a kind of charity way, not in a kind of NGO way, in a Christ way. Christ rejected the worldly notions of freedom in the devil’s temptations and Christ offers us a heavenly notion of freedom. You are free not to have as much me time as you can, but to be the child of God you were created to be. You are free to use your gifts, not in competition with others, but out of love for others. So what can that look like? What are you doing for other people in your life right now? That’s what it comes down to. That’s the question of, of this passage with Luke. That’s the question of first Corinthians 13 That’s the question of James: what are you doing? Do you realize that you are free to do more? Do you realize that you are free to love more. James or Jesus aren’t asking us to stretch ourselves thin but to go deeper. And when we go deeper, instead of being draining, service becomes even more life-giving.

One of my great joys of ministry is connecting people to meaningful service opportunities. Ways of giving of yourself more. We have a number of those opportunities at the church from helping at the Farmacy Garden on Tuesdays and Thursdays and a few Saturdays a month. Or helping with the prayer team or Visitation Team that works as the hands and feet of Jesus. We have service opportunities within the church on Sunday morning in worship behind the scenes running power point or AV. There is also opportunities for greeting and ushering, for volunteering with our children’s and youth ministry and in the nursery.

Each of these ministries is friendly and accessible and eager for more people to help out.

If you were with us at Christmas Eve, you heard me talk about Bee Creek Village. And I am going to keep talking about it. It is a dream to offer a community here for those in need of those struggling and for all of us. We gave our Christmas offering to Bee Creek Village to help get some surveys done. Over Christmas we raised $9608forthisproject.Whenwereceivedabidforasurveyofthelotsthebidcamebackfor$9600. We are just getting started and we want all of you to be a part of it. We don’t want to go across the world to build something together. We want to do it here. We don’t want to go across the world to give people a chance to start over, we want to do it here.

We are ready and free to go deeper together, but we need you. I need you. God needs you to take that step into the freedom of love this season.

Let us pray, Heavenly father, thank you for Jesus. Who came to set us free. Help us to step into the heavenly freedom of love willingly and excitedly. May we risk greatly for your glory. In the name of the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit. Amen.

http://youtube.com/channel/UCGQEILBeB0znhR-kcZzp4w/live

Footnotes

1. Dostoevsky, The Brothers Karamazov, 251-252. ↩