Freedom, Jesus, and the American Way
A talk by Anthony D. Baker, Interim Lecturer in Theology, given at the University of Texas Episcopal Student Center on September 28, 2005

Saint Paul offers us, in the Letter to the Galatians, an interpretation of the word freedom that ought to strike us a just a bit strange. Listen:

6 -- I am astonished that you are so quickly deserting the one who called you in the grace of Christ and are turning to a different gospel

7 -- not that there is another gospel, but there are some who are confusing you and want to pervert the gospel of Christ.

8 -- But even if we or an angel from heaven should proclaim to you a gospel contrary to what we proclaimed to you, let that one be accursed!

9 -- As we have said before, so now I repeat, if anyone proclaims to you a gospel contrary to what you received, let that one be accursed!

OK, so that doesn't sound too freeing. Isn't that the opposite? Wouldn't real freedom be to shrug off the classification this mouthy aristocrat gave us, and start from scratch? Later on he says that the members of the church who are turning from the "straight and narrow" to so-called "other gospels" must be "bewitched." That's apparently the only reason he can imagine that someone might take the "highway" over "my way."

But then he tells us that this is what he means by freedom: to be baptized and thus set free by Christ alone, so that you can join Paul in saying "I have been crucified with Christ; and it is no longer I who live, but it is Christ who lives in me."

So where does Paul get off shackling the rest of us to his confining notions of freedom?

I said that his interpretation of the word freedom "ought" to sound strange to us-especially "us Americans," and I meant it. Left-leaning Episcopalians -- and I am one-have a way of flying past Paul the harsh exclusivist ("We are all one in Christ Jesus") to get quickly to Paul the champion of diversity ("there is no longer slave no free, male nor female, Jew nor Greek"). So let's be honest: Whatever he is, Paul is no champion of a milquetoast religious pluralism here. He's telling us that only through baptism into the death and resurrection of Jesus can we really be free. And that's strange. Why is that so strange?

I'm not a fan of Tim Burton. I think that his films could be used in screenwriting classes to show how no amount of visual effects or even interesting plot devices can amend for bad dialogue and underdeveloped characters. But that's neither here nor there. There is an image in his film "Nightmare before Christmas" that may tell us something about why Paul sounds so strange. (Props to my friend Doug -- who does like Tim Burton -- for noticing this.)

Jack, a pumpkin-headed skeleton who lives in Halloweentown, has been the organizer of the Halloween party every year for time out of mind. It's a ritual that is the center of the life of all the ghouls and ghosts who live among the graves and haunts of the land. But Jack is beginning to wonder if there is any purpose to the annual monotony of the party, and to their entire scare-o-centric culture. And then, while wandering through the forest, he comes upon a grove of trees, each with a little door that bears its own unique painted symbol, and all of them are foreign to Jack. A turkey, a decorated fir tree, a bunny with some eggs.

What Jack discovers in the grove is that the world is bigger that Halloweentown. When you enter the doors, you enter Christmastown, or presumably Eastertown and Thanksgivingtown. It's the Christmas door, and he arrives in Christmastown just in time to see Santa Clause distributing gifts. "This is it," he thinks. It's what we're missing back in Halloweentown!" He runs back and calls everyone together to preach to them the truth of his new revelation: People can celebrate peace and goodwill, and give gifts, and anticipate the coming of a great fat man with rosy cheeks.

But, of course, they don't understand at all. "What's so scary about that?" the want to know. So then Jack changes tactics, and persuades them of the importance of his new discovery by telling them about how Christmas and Sandy Claws are the scariest things they've ever imagined.

That image of Jack standing in the grove is a wonderful photograph of our common understanding of freedom. That kind of freedom makes sense to us. We want to be iconoclasts who can burn all the flags of tradition, and reclaim ourselves as blank slates, standing in front of a series of doors. By choosing (freely) a door, we will redefine ourselves as the individuals we want to be, not as a member of the herd whom a tradition tells us we are.

But Jack's little experiment fails, because he never stops being Jack from Halloweentown, even when he's standing there in the grove, making his "free choice." That particular tradition called Halloween turned out to be less flammable than he thought-it still had a grip on him, through the habits of understanding that he shares with his friends back home. And Christmastown was another tradition, just as complex as his own. Plundering bits of Christmas treasure to carry back home to Halloween like pirates did not, actually make Jack free. His new hybrid and pluralistic Holiday Land was, in the in the end, more suffocating than the original had been.

The idea that freedom means our rights to make unbaggaged choices as solitary individuals is as deeply rooted within contemporary conservative America as it is among liberal Americans. And when employed as a strategy for finding us tree freedom, it's just as doomed to failure as Jack's attempt to remake himself.

A tradition is a complex thing that penetrates to the core of who we are. The best ones are the most complex, the most difficult to root out. Let's talk religion for a moment: the force of Christianity, for instance, and the appeal it has to millions of believers, has to do in part with its ability to navigate all the fragmented aspects of our fragmented lives, and help us make sense of the world. It can build an ark big enough to get all the animal on, so to speak.

Here's a bit of news: traditions are better at that than individuals. By refusing all traditions, or trying to build your own with scissors and duct tape, chances are you'll find yourself over your head when the waters start to rise.

And now back to Saint Paul. I don't suppose he saw "The Nightmare before Christmas," and I imagine the sound track alone would have driven him to switch it off if he did. But his message to the Galatians resonates, and even packs more of a knock-down punch line. I would summarize his point like this:

We all are born into a world that is, to put it bluntly, obsessed with death. Yes, we kill one another at alarming rates, but we also wrestle over wealth and land and power, like two starving dogs tearing one another up over a stale piece of bread-dogs that are only willing to kill one another because they've accepted their own imminent starvation. Running from death has become the meaning of life: Death is the great enemy, and so also the altar to which we bring all our first fruits, and around which we build our great cultural citadels. "We" Galatians (meaning you and I) build businesses and universities and diet and exercise plans around the theme. "Fight off death as long as possible!" And this "as long as possible" is what we call freedom. Free to live in fear of our own impending doom, and the freedom to choose how: shall I avoid death today by joining a gym, or shall I give up all running from it and eat lots of chocolate and perhaps start up a nicotine addiction? But if the gym, which one? And if cigarettes, which brand? So many choices! So much freedom!

But the gospel Paul came to Galatia to proclaim is that death, the great enemy, has been defeated. On Easter Sunday, he says, death itself died. Now, if "I have been crucified with Christ," and if the life I lived is knotted up with the life of the Resurrected Christ, then death is simply no longer worth the trouble. We can forget about fighting over scraps, and begin to think instead about spreading the goods around, so that everyone can be free to live without fear of death.

So to find ourselves within the Christian tradition preached by Saint Paul is to reclaim ourselves as truly free: free to live like death is not the end, because the God who breathed life into Jesus' mortal body will also do the same for us. True freedom means the freedom to live like we're baptized.

And now maybe we can see his point. Choosing to live by another gospel than the one that says "death is swallowed up in victory" may seem like true freedom, standing in front of the cultural a la carte and selecting the dishes that look appealing so that we can build our own private "gospel" may seem like true freedom, but in the end it can't be anything other than a shiny new spin on the same old culture of death.

This, for Saint Paul, is why "freedom" means Christ-there is no other freedom than living towards resurrection. And that's a life we -- the death-obsessed -- can't assemble from scratch.