On Christian Liberty, or Why am I here?
Notes
Transcript
On Christian Liberty
On Christian Liberty
When I was a junior in high school (1998 for those of you keeping score), I attended a formation event through the United Methodist Church for people exploring vocations to ministry. There, Bishop Grant Hagiya of California shocked those of us gathered there by proclaiming: “If you can be anything else, don’t be a pastor!” Our denomination, in the midst of a pastor shortage, had literally paid to fly us to California from all over the country as promising future ministers. So what in the world was he doing trying to convince us it’s a terrible idea?
It turns out, becoming a pastor or missionary is a terrible idea, at least if the idea is ours. Also, it turns out, what in the world he was doing was basically repeating Paul’s words from today’s lesson, but interpreted for today.
Things go wrong when someone decides to be a pastor, sometimes really wrong. As much as I sometimes may grumble about the bureaucratic gatekeeping of professional ministry, I recognize there are good reasons to not just let anyone become a pastor. If I decide to be a pastor of my own will, no matter how good my skills and qualifications look on paper, Paul says I “have a reward”. The same word is used in Matthew to describe the hypocrites who show off their piety by drawing attention to their offerings and fasts who “have [already] received their reward”. If I personally have know multiple people who tried to be a pastor for the wrong reasons, Bishop Hagiya, a pastor of pastors, undoubtedly had seen his share too. And I know our own community has faced its own challenges along this line.
What Dr. Hagiya said was designed to shock us into listening and discerning. Because it is God and only God who calls us to share the good news as a vocation. Paul continues “if [I share the gospel] not of my own will, I am entrusted with a commission” or (from the Greek) - I am trusted with stewardship.
And it’s not just pastors - one of the key insights of the reformation is that pastors aren’t more holy than lay people - their calling just happens to be stewardship of the gifts of Word and Sacrament. Everyone is called by God and every calling is equally important.
This model of servant leadership and calling seems to fly in the face of three widely agreed-on truths:
Follow your dreams to seek your career
You can’t truly do something to its fullest unless it is done with no obligation
Every Christian should share the gospel
Today, what I want to do with you is work through each of these, what is true and what is a misconception, in conversation with Paul and Martin Luther.
Honestly, I doubt there’s a more apropos lesson in the entire lectionary for the day someone steps into bivocational ministry in a Lutheran congregation - especially since on top of everything else, one of the books most central to Martin Luther’s writings and the Protestant Reformation hinges on verse 19:
For though I am free with respect to all, I have made myself a slave to all, so that I might win more of them.
But back to what I said before, what about those truisms? Are they true? Are they helpful?
1. Follow your dreams to seek your career
1. Follow your dreams to seek your career
I teach senior seminar in sociology, so I have a class of 20 students, all of whom expect to finish a criminology or sociology degree in May and get jobs. Part of the seminar covers career skills. Their first assignment is a self-assessment to help them consider what fields and jobs they might pursue. They are asked to frankly consider personal traits, values, skills, goals, and practical needs. What I don’t tell them, at least without qualification, is “follow your dreams”.
Don’t get me wrong - having dreams is a powerful motivator and should be taken into account, but just being passionate or hopeful about something doesn’t make it necessarily a good career for a couple of reasons. First is what Paul gets at here - sometimes there are good reasons to separate following your passions and callings from earning a living.
My older sons both had phases where they wanted to be YouTube creators, making Minecraft or Domino chain reaction or whatever other kind of video, as a career - as have a significant portion of our second grader’s classmates.
But in Paul’s case, it wasn’t about supporting himself but the opposite. It was about making certain that the work he cared about most, his missionary work, was as successful as possible by putting as few barriers as he could in the way of his message. Verses 20-22 say:
To the Jews I became as a Jew, in order to win Jews. To those under the law I became as one under the law (though I myself am not under the law) so that I might win those under the law. To those outside the law I became as one outside the law (though I am not free from God’s law but am under Christ’s law) so that I might win those outside the law. To the weak I became weak, so that I might win the weak. I have become all things to all people, that I might by all means save some.
There is still a reward for Paul, but it is not for Paul directly but for the gospel itself. Verse 23 reads:
I do it all for the sake of the gospel, so that I may share in its blessings.
I do it all for the sake of the gospel - not just because of the gospel but in order to make the gospel itself manifest in the world. A closer translation of the second half of the verse is “in order that I may come to be in fellowship with and through the gospel”.
Per Frederick Buechner:
The kind of work God usually calls you to is the kind of work (a) that you need most to do and (b) that the world most needs to have done. If you really get a kick out of your work, you've presumably met requirement (a), but if your work is writing TV deodorant commercials, the chances are you've missed requirement (b). On the other hand, if your work is being a doctor in a leper colony, you have probably met requirement (b), but if most of the time you're bored and depressed by it, the chances are you have not only bypassed (a) but probably aren't helping your patients much either.
You may have heard the shorter version of this quote that your call is “where your deep gladness meets the world’s deep need”. Either way, neither Jesus nor Paul nor Buechner in any way suggest that your vocation (that is, your calling from God) has to be something you get paid to do - whether as a traditional job or as part of today’s “hustle culture” where every hobby we’re good at is greeted with the question “why don’t you try and make money doing that?”
2. You can’t truly do something to its fullest unless it is done with no obligation.
2. You can’t truly do something to its fullest unless it is done with no obligation.
This leads us to the second truism - that the only truly meaningful and complete acts are those done freely and without any kind of obligation. It’s kind of a flipside of the previous - maybe if it’s our “job” in some way, it’s not the best it can be.
The paradigmatic example here is romantic love. I remember dating and the butterflies when I found out Alena had taken Japanese without telling me (while I was studying in Japan) just so she could connect to what I was doing. It was done freely and without expectation so it felt more special.
But does that mean it’s impossible to love someone fully after you’re married to them? After all, the core of the marriage service is the vows where we voluntarily give up some of our own freedom by promising to support our partner for better or for worse, in sickness and in health, ‘til death do us part. In that act, we pledge our stewardship of the gifts our partner in turn has given us, and in my experience, that matters - because in the course of a marriage, there are bound to be times we don’t feel like voluntarily taking our partner’s needs and desires into account. Marriage doesn’t end romance, but it does begin a different kind of commitment.
When the Bible says the church is Christ’s bride, this is part of what it means. Again, verse 19 is at the core of this passage:
For though I am free with respect to all, I have made myself a slave to all, so that I might win more of them.
Luther’s On Christian Liberty (often translated On the Freedom of a Christian) was published as a short book or long letter addressed to Pope Leo X to clarify why he was opposed to things like penitentials and indulgences.
Luther summarizes his argument succinctly:
The Christian individual is a completely free lord of all, subject to none.
The Christian individual is a completely dutiful servant of all, subject to all
We can neither deserve nor destroy God’s gift of new life and therefore are free to live out our lives without fear. But it doesn’t stop there. Later, he says:
For the inner person—conformed to God and created in the image of God through faith—is joyful and glad on account of Christ, in whom all good things have been conferred upon such a one. Because of this, that person has only one concern: to serve God joyfully, with boundless love and with no thought of earning anything.
Yes, the obligation exists - the Christian is a steward of the good news, the ultimate gift that provides hope and new life, now and hereafter, to people in a world filled with reasons to despair and let go. But like the marriage partner, we do not lament the obligation but celebrate the opportunity to share the gifts we have received with others.
Which brings us back to verse 23:
I do it all for the sake of the gospel, so that I may share in its blessings.
“…so that I may share in its blessings” in this context isn’t seeking after a personal reward. The root word of sharing is from koinonia, Christian fellowship, and in the original text, the word “blessings” doesn’t appear at all - it is that I may come to share in its [that is, the gospel’s] fellowship. Just as the best marriages are grounded in a voluntary submission to mutual service, so the life of faith is grounded in the voluntary mutual submission of Christ to us and ourselves to his message of good news.
3. Every Christian should share the gospel.
3. Every Christian should share the gospel.
By this point, I hope it is obvious to you that I don’t think Paul is arguing that sharing the gospel is an activity limited to professionals or even those who (like Paul and Barnabus) receive no compensation but are still more or less formal, titled, volunteers.
Sharing the gospel of necessity includes telling God’s story and telling about God’s role in our own stories, giving our testimony. While fulfilling our duties and loving others show the fruits of the good news, it is still in fact “news” that needs delivering. And those we care about cannot fully share in its blessings without recognizing from whence those blessings come.
Each of us has the opportunity to live out that universal “vocation” (beruf, vocatio) of sharing the gospel in the midst of our “positions” or “roles” (stand) as they are. Are you married or a parent or a child or a sibling? Show love by and in the midst of being a family member. Are you a teacher or a fry cook or a member of the military? Be the best teacher or fry cook or member of the military you can be, while also lifting up the needs of those around you. And when you have the opportunity, share how your story is tied up with God’s story, how you have made it through struggles (or maybe are right now) through the freedom that comes with an assurance that your fate does not rely on picking the right option or being the right kind of person but on having received a gift that will never be revoked.
God calls us to share the gospel not because he needs us to, but so that we can join in its fellowship. As Wingren writes,
vocation belongs to this world, not to heaven; it is directed toward one’s neighbor, not toward God. In his vocation one is not reaching up to God, but rather bends oneself down toward the world (Luther on Vocation, Introduction).
God, through OSLC, has called me to be a minister in this place and time. I followed Bishop Hagiya’s advice and did “anything else I could” before taking this step. I’m not suddenly better at Jesus-ing or bored of my day job. But God does not call us without providing the means to succeed.
I don’t know what God has in store for me going forward. But I do know that I am not the minister at OSLC. If you look at the front of your bulletin, I am listed as the “Synod Authorized Minister” - someone approved to as a custodian of the gifts of Word and Sacrament for this time and place. But who are the ministers? We, the People of Our Saviour.
So fellow ministers, let’s share in Christ’s meal, the sign of God’s gift, the sign of our freedom from slavery, and the sign of our obligation to one another. Let’s rejoice together in our annual meeting about the many ways our congregation is part of our community and how we can support our ongoing mission to “serve God’s community through worship, outreach and fellowship.” Let’s have a party and celebrate our cultural heritage and how that contributes to our diversity and gifts.
We’re in good company on this journey of vocation. In today’s Gospel, Jesus healed and cast out demons for many people where he was staying, then went to a secluded place to pray.
When they found him, they said to him, “Everyone is searching for you.” He answered, “Let us go on to the neighboring towns, so that I may proclaim the message there also; for that is what I came out to do.”
So let us go out and, like Jesus, bend ourselves down toward the world with empathy, compassion, and love as beneficiaries and participants in the fellowship of the good news.
Thanks be to God.