Marilu Thomas, “Freedom of a Christian”

The comedian Nate Bargatze, during his special “Hello, World!” talks about growing up with “’80s and ’90s Christian parents.” “Well, that’s the most Christian you can ever get,” he says. “My parents grew up Catholic, but I was raised Baptist, so I have all of the Catholic guilt, without any of the fun of Catholic, and then just the strictness of Baptist. Which is the most strict! Not as much now. But when we were growing up, Baptist was the most ... they could get disappointed real fast at you…I still feel like I could get in trouble. Jesus had more fun than I did!” Ok- I’ll admit I was an 80s and 90s Christian parent. Veggie Tales, Focus on the Family, Amy Grant, and Steven Curtis Chapman, the whole thing. My kids complain that I was schizophrenic about Halloween, depending on which church we were going to. 

Does this sound familiar to anyone? Christianity is all about the rules and being nice. You can disappoint people real fast just by being you. 

What is a Christian? My friend Barb, a professor of statistics and far smarter than I am, told me she was sure being a Christian meant just being a good person. I remember thinking that sounds simplistic, but then I worried if God thought I was a good person. I hadn’t murdered anyone- yet, I went to church, I was a mother, wife, and pet owner. I followed the rules. Used dental floss, paid my bills, and went to the PTA. That’s a good person, right?

Think to yourself, “What is a Christian? What makes you a Christian? What’s the point of being Christian? Are you Christian enough?” 

I googled “What makes a Christian?”

Even the names of the websites made me anxious- Active Christianity, Saintly Living — and their answers were a bit terrifying. 

“Someone who brings his life into complete harmony with the word of God. 

He is righteous when all others are unrighteous. 

He is patient when all others are impatient. 

He is diligent where others are lazy. 

He is exact when others are in exact.”

According to any of these measures, I am not a Christian. All the action is done by the person, not Christ. I have no idea what you would need Christ for if you could do all that by yourself. Not only that, I can be impatient, inexacting, and somewhat lazy. 

Dave Zahl, in his new book The Big Relief, writes this,” For years I have watched Christians flail about trying to answer these questions… Conservative Christians pitch family, values, and personal piety as bulwarks against cultural vacuousness… Progressive Christians focus so much on the church’s prophetic witness in matters of social justice, they lose the transcendent. The burdens each camp lays on their adherents are different in substance, but not weight.” 

All of these explanations put me at the center of my own Christianity. If I’m a good person, if I go to church, if I do the right things. Rachel Held Evans spent a year trying to be a good Christian woman, captured in her book A Year of Christian Womanhood. She was exhausted. All that weaving, smiling, and being wise. Is that what Jesus died for?

The four gospels of Mark, Matthew, Luke, and John tell us who Jesus was, and St. Paul, in his letters to the early church, tells us why Jesus came. In his letter to the Galatians today, we hear liberation from the do-it-yourself-be-good life in the very first line. “For freedom Christ has set us free.” 

For this reason, Galatians was a key book in the reformation because of its emphasis on freedom. Luther wrote in his Commentary on Galatians the “the definition of a Christian [is] not someone without sin or cannot feel sin but trusts God knows and forgives…The Christian is a child of grace, under no law, freed with Christ from death.” Martin Luther called his wife Katie, “My Galatians,” because of the impact her love and care had on his life. (She was also a first-class vintner and beer maker, so that might have had something to do with it, too.) 

A Christian is someone who admits he or she needs help and has become convinced that spiritually, she can’t help herself. Luther wrote in his treatise Freedom of a Christian, “A man is compelled to despair of himself, to seek the help which he does not find in himself elsewhere…being truly humbled and reduced to nothing in his own eyes, he finds in himself nothing whereby he may be justified and saved.” 

Our ideas about being Christian are upside down.  A Christian is not a good person by definition, but someone who finds that being ‘good’ doesn’t keep you from hurting when suffering inevitably undoes you. A time-stopping illness or accident, a death in the family, a hospital trip, a breakdown or break-up, depression or panic. A fog descends on our brains, and life slows to a crawl. The hospital room, the funeral home, the therapist’s office, and midnight driving in your car are where the Freedom of the Christian is found. There is only One God, and that is the One you need to trust. This trust is not even yours but has been given to you in the dark. Trust is faith. It’s not your faith but the faith of Christ given to you in your moment of despair. You can’t gin up your faith; it is a gift to you to live in the world God made rather than the world you want to make. You are not enough to live in this world without the love of Christ.

Timothy Snyder, in his book On Freedom, breaks freedom into two types—negative and positive. Negative freedom is the absence of something. Removing an obstacle or restraint. Freedom from a power. Positive freedom is freedom for something, not against. Freedom for a power. Christ has freed us from the restraints of self-centeredness, seeing myself as the answer to my problems. Christ has freed us for the love of others by being loved by Him. Love frees us to love. “For the whole law is summed up in a single commandment, ‘You shall love your neighbor as yourself.’” 

Christianity is not a set of rules but the love you need to be free to love without the restraint of self-centeredness. I’d like to close with the poet Mary Oliver because she expresses the longing we have to be good, coupled with the reality that we are creatures in need of love.

You do not have to be good.

You do not have to walk on your knees

For a hundred miles through the desert, repenting.

You only have to let the soft animal of your body

Love what it loves.

Amen.