The Liberator proper seven year c

The only liberation Elijah could see was the one inspired by Jezebel's sword and that threatened to liberate him from this earthly life, but the word for today says that God is the liberator and will liberate us from fear, from alienation and division, and from oppression.

But first God had to talk Elijah (God's prophet) out of the cave in which he was hiding. Jezebel had threatened to abruptly end his life and when Jezebel threatened to abruptly end your life you took it seriously because it was something she had proven she was pretty good at.

It is interesting to me how fear comes up in all the readings today as the nemesis of human life. Fear certainly does change the quality of life and unfortunately we are not dealing with an abstract idea here. We know fear. Fear grips our world just as it gripped the heart of Elijah and the more subtle fear of the first generation of Christians to trust the freedom offered in Jesus from a legalistic understanding of religious life and our plain and simple fear of each other reflected in Paul's letter to the Galatians, not to mention the minds of those who saw up close and personal the unsubtle power of the liberator Jesus in action in the strange account of the healing of the one crazy that cost the deaths of a whole herd of pigs.  

There is today it seems to me a widening gap in the Christian community if not in every religious enterprise between those who see religion as following the rules and those who see religion as breaking the rules. This becomes complicated by the confusion around what the rules are but the gap is really not about what the rules are but how we respond to the idea of rules in general and what it means to be faithful. For some faith is the rules and ones' faith is faith in the rules and the rules are clear and unambiguous and simple to understand. For others faith is what liberates us from arbitrary rules and makes us responsible to love which further complicates things because the rule of love and the rule of law are very different rules and to further complicate matters the law of God and love are the same so that the problem becomes how we use the law of God and how much we are willing to trust love especially when it seems to conflict with the rules. Furthermore we have to deal with the possibility that in religion and in life nothing is as it seems. It is all very simple and very complicated, very confusing and very clear. From my point of view faith is not what we know but what we are willing to trust in the end. Faith is not what we have figured out but rather is the willingness to go on trying to figure things out trusting that things can be figured out and if they can't then that isn't what mattered anyway and what does matter will be revealed. If we seek we will surely find but what we find may not be what we thought we were seeking.

Rules come from the fear that there are no rules and if there are no rules we will tear each other apart which I am not going to attempt to refute but what if the rules rather than being enforced were embraced? The problem with liberation is not just who needs to be liberated but who wants to be liberated. I think that was what scared the onlookers in the gospel this morning. Who wants to be liberated if it's going to cost us a whole herd of pigs. This could not have been good for the economy.

We human beings can become quite comfortable in our slavery. The problem with being liberated is that we have to be responsible for ourselves. They never tell you this when they promise to set you free. Who doesn't want to be free? But who wants to be responsible? I suspect that the observers in the gospel this morning who it says were seized with great fear saw that Jesus really had the power to change people and strangely enough even the most miserable don't like to be changed. Our natural inclinations are more like Elijahs' who sought self-preservation in a cave. It may be that Elijah sought not only to escape Jezebel's sword but the demands of God. In the cave he was relatively safe from the wind and the earthquake and the fire but he was not, it turned out, safe from the silence that followed him in and never left him alone. We carry that silence with us whether we ever listen to it or not. How often do we hear of or bemoan the silence of God in the world today without realizing that God is present in that very silence. The change that they saw in the power of Jesus and that frightened them is the power that brings us from the miserable but relatively comfortable cave out into the light of day where we have to face our own demons and also take some responsibility for the sad state of the world and for others we don't even know. It is no wonder that we make so much noise (like this: illustration of holding ears and going lalalala while someone is speaking to us) We like noise so that we will not hear the silence for it asks much of us.

The world is oppressed by fear. It is fear that alienates us and divides us. It is fear that keeps us from changing, from becoming the people God wants us to be. It is fear that writes the rules. Paul writes to the Galatians who are apparently arguing about what rules must be followed before one can join the community. There are those (in the words of Buechner - the killjoys, the phonies, the nitpickers, the holier-than-thous, the loveless and cheerless and irrelevant) who say all the entry requirements of the old status quo must be met for entrance into the new status quo as if it were the rules themselves that constitute the substance of the community but Paul says that the new community is one in which we are free of the rules, free indeed of the old assumptions about who is who and what is what. It was then that he said the impossibly radical idea that in Christ we are not defined by our previous categories. Things are not as they seem or as we have made them. The common denominator is not that we are different but that we share the same humanity. Human relationships are not meant to be adversarial but mutual. It doesn't matter anymore if we are a Jew or not a Jew, whether we are a man or a woman, whether we are a slave or free (whether we are American or not American, straight or gay, rich or poor, old or young, happy or sad, strong or weak, good looking or not so good looking, cool or uncool, tall or short, fat or thin, smart or stupid, where does this list end?) for we are all one in Christ, equal in value sharing a common purpose of mutuality in love where the rule is simply love one another, love God and do what love demands. Sound scary? Maybe it is scary. Where will love take us? How much will it cost us? What fears will have to be overcome?

It seems to me in the final analysis that the liberator promises to change everything but if there is one thing we fear more than love it is change and so we resist the liberation even as we long for it. And we resist because we are afraid and we are oppressed by what we fear and most of all we are afraid of each other.

Buechner says evil is defeated by being named for what it is.  Maybe that's what we are afraid of because that is exactly what the liberator does. He calls it by name even as he calls our name. the promise of the liberator and the gospel is that there is a bright shining light outside the darkness of our caves and it there waiting for us when we hear in the silence that never ends the voice of God saying : Go out and stand in the light, be not afraid of what you fear and be changed for ever and tell the world wherever you are what God can do.