Romans 6:12-23
When Disneyland opened in 1955, the Tomorrowland section of the park was futuristic, if a little kitsch. After all, Sputnik was still in the future, and the few computers that existed took up entire rooms. They most certainly did not fit in our pockets.
It was intended that Tomorrowland, both the California version and the later iteration in Florida, would always point to the future, would have to be updated constantly. That didn’t happen. They added things here and there, but those are iterations of the company’s intellectual properties, showcasing Buzz Lightyear or Stitch. It would not be surprising to see an “I Like Ike” button in the crowd, though prices are exponentially higher.
Maybe technology just moved too fast for them to keep ahead. Or maybe our tech-future is just too terrifying for children. Terminator 2, when the A.I. SkyNet goes to war against humankind, just doesn’t give that family fun vibe, if you know what I mean. Hasta la vista, baby.
While science fiction and futuristic classics look almost comical as the years pass, a few continue to hold their own. One of those is Neal Stephenson’s “Snow Crash,” a 1992 classic novel in the genre of techno-futurism called cyberpunk. Some of the imagined technology has come to pass, sometimes wonderfully and sometimes horrifically. Fortunately, the ability of a computer virus to infect our own wetware hasn’t happened, though maybe it has, since social media has been the carrier of mass psychosis.
But it is the social commentary that seems especially prescient. In “Snow Crash,” the government has largely faded into irrelevance. Instead, our daily lives are carved up into competing corporate franchises, and gated enclaves. It is a capitalist utopia, where humans exist solely for the purpose of the bottom line, where tribe is pitted against tribe, and people spend way too much time down the rabbit hole, because the virtual is better than the physical.
This is some people’s idea of freedom, a daily “Battle Royale.” No wonder the winner-take-all video game “Fortnite” spread like wildfire. The competitive violence in the game reflects the values so many kids hear at the dinner table, or more likely, in the backseat while eating their “Happy Meals,” a zero-sum world where you can only win if someone else loses, preferably fatally.
And I am not okay with it. I don’t accept that the biggest jerk wins, Congressional elections aside.
I went to the carwash recently, and they tried to sell me a subscription. A subscription to a carwash! I do not want a subscription to the carwash. I’ll get my car washed when my car needs to be washed, thank you very much. I do not want shampoo auto-shipped to my house. When does convenience turn into consumer bondage?
I do not feel free when every sixty seconds for the last hour, a voice has reminded me that “Due to high call volume, there may be delays. You may continue to hold, or complete your business online.” If I could do it online, I wouldn’t have called!
I’m not sure this is what they mean when they say “freedom.” Though apparently freedom does mean a bunch of wanna-be theocrats imposing their doctrine on everyone else and “Moms for Liberty” openly embracing Nazi ideology. I’m not kidding. One local chapter put a quote from Hitler at the top of their newsletter recently.
So maybe, as we blithely go along as billionaires and corporations make the worst dystopian science fiction into a reality, we might take a moment to think about freedom, both theologically and politically.
Freedom is at the heart of the Judeo-Christian trajectory. In the Abrahamic myth, Abraham is free to enter into a covenant with God. Moses is the head of a divinely-sanctioned insurrection that liberates slaves in Egypt. Even as the Israelite culture consolidated power in a monarchy and a priesthood, there was still enough freedom for the prophets to operate, albeit sometimes on the run.
John the Baptizer invited people into the repentance community. It was a free choice, as was following Jesus. In return, Jesus offered freedom from the sins that were weighing on people, from the categories that made people other, outsiders. Your sins are forgiven. Now take up you mat and walk. You don’t need to live in the cemetery anymore. The voices in your head are gone.
Easter is a bold declaration that even the worst brutality of a militaristic state is no match for God’s will to liberate.
Freedom in Christ is the freedom to voluntarily enter into covenant, with one another, and with God.
This has always been in tension with institutionalization, with the effort to impose order on our lives, control over the lives of others, so you can find texts that bind, but if you read the whole Bible, you will find that freedom is holy.
And just as in scripture, so too in Christian history, and especially in the Reformation, where the liberation of knowledge through the printing press created space for religious liberty. I’m not kidding. For all we credit the Enlightenment and Christian Humanism, it took someone with a mechanical mind to create the tool that made our form of faith possible.
Though we are the theological heirs to Zwingli and Calvin, one a fierce advocate for a state church, the other preaching the bondage of predestination, the Anabaptists actually got it right. You are only a follower of Jesus if you choose to be a follower of Jesus. You have to be free to choose another path as well. That is why, while we sometimes practice infant baptism, that baptism is provisional until confirmation, for confirmation is fully named confirmation of baptism, and is meant to be where will meets tradition.
That freedom in Christ is freedom to be in community. It is expressed in our understanding of church, as a community of people who have freely chosen to enter into covenant, who commit to mutuality and accountability. It is human community, so it can be messy at times, and we always have to fight our own tendency to institutionalize everything, to regulate and control.
Religious freedom was at the heart of the Great Awakening movement that would take the name Christian, and that would be part of the shared heritage of the United Church of Christ and the Christian Church (Disciples of Christ). It is from that movement that we inherited the right of Christian conscience, the belief that we each decide what to believe, again, in consulting the scripture made accessible by the printing press, and in the practice of prayer, itself a form of freedom. For what is prayer but an admission that we did not call ourselves into being, we are not in control, even when we think we are in control, and the world is charged with holy mystery.
Our faith starts in freedom. Sadly, and despite the patriotic rhetoric, freedom was not a founding principle of our nation. Slavery was hard-coded in the Constitution, and while the Founding Father Alexander Hamilton was both a womanizer and a womanist, women were only semi-free, and then only if white.
The raging lunacy that manifests in efforts to control sexuality, reproduction, and gender is based on fear, though fear of what I don’t honestly know, even though it is old as time.
And that isn’t even the worst of it, because there is that subscription to the car wash and an empty chair at my sister’s table thanks to the Sackler family. For corporations have been given the rights of persons without the responsibility, and a society that celebrates and idolizes greed, that elects bullies is undermining its own freedom.
The struggle for real freedom, which is also real justice, where everyone has the same opportunity to thrive because we have the same access to our basic needs, nutrition, housing, healthcare, education, access to the outdoors and to recreation, a space for creativity and the arts, this struggle is not over and part from our spiritual freedom, for the spirit that does not have these things is not truly free.
Our Tomorrowland may not be colonies on Mars, robotic dogs, and flying cars. But a Tomorrowland where we are truly free? Gee willikers, that sure would be nice. May we, a free people gathered in the name of Jesus, dream it into reality. Amen.