Romans 7:15-25a
Two hundred and fifty years ago yesterday, fifty six white men signed a declaration of their independence from another white man, the King of Great Britain.
Those original signers held a range of beliefs, as would be expected given the religious diversity even among those first thirteen colonies. But most were nominally Christian and Protestant. Among them were twenty five from our Reform Christian tradition, twelve Presbyterians and thirteen Congregationalists.
There is a particular irony in Reform Christians of that era declaring themselves to be free. After all, they believed in predestination, the idea that God, because He (and God was a He to them)… because He knew everything, He must already know who would and would not be saved, and therefore must have predestined all for either salvation or damnation. Not much freedom there, and a reprehensible theology to boot…
One of America’s great myths is that religious freedom played a major role in the nation’s founding. That claim is a bit exaggerated. Both antecedent movements to our Congregationalist tradition wanted the freedom to practice their own religion and to impose it on others. This was never really a practical thing for the Pilgrims, but was a reality for the Puritans in their Boston-based colony, at least for awhile. Their plan was to create a continental theocracy.
Farther south, the first wave of Virginia settlers came for largely economic reasons, because England was and still is an oligarchy, and while there is some small room for advancement today, there was none in the 17th century. Younger sons who would not inherit and the great mass of the poor were more than willing to take their chances with starvation and disease in a new land. The second wave of English immigrants to Virginia were Cavaliers fleeing after the Puritans won the English Civil War.
Only in Pennsylvania was religious liberty important, a core value for the colony’s founder, the Quaker William Penn. Religious freedom would eventually find its way into the Bill of Rights, for there was that diversity to deal with, and holy wars in Europe were not such a distant memory back in those days, just as holy war remains in the living memory of most of us today, after the sectarian wars that have been raging in recent decades.
If many of us have thrown off predestination as bad theology, we have fallen into a far more modern form of determinism, the growing understanding of just how much genetics plays a role in social behavior. We’ve all seen enough “Law and Order” episodes to know about genetics and crime. We tend to think of that sort of thing as an outlier, but twin studies demonstrate that even something like religiosity has a genetic component. Genetics doesn’t determine which religious tradition, but does accurately predict whether someone will be religiously active. Alas, there is no DNA test or database we might use for evangelism.
Changes to our brain can radically alter our personality. Most of us know or have known someone who had a stroke, traumatic brain injury, brain tumor, or dementia. Often, the person they are with a rewired brain is not the person we loved, though love is often strong enough to carry over into that uncertain future. Even a change in our gut biome, the symbiotic micro-organisms that keep us alive, can change our emotions.
And if all of that were not enough, there is the simple fact that you did not call yourself into existence or choose the situation into which you were born. Poverty, lead in the water pipes, influenza during pregnancy, all have correlated mental outcomes. Yes, some escape this determinism, but grit, too, seems to have a genetic component.
So are we free?
And this is just the micro-application of the question, the universe of one single being. The macro-version of the question is equally if not more troubling.
Homo sapiens evolved as a collective species. Communal activities like cooking, which dramatically increases the efficiency of eating, made us who we are. These giant energy-hungry brains allow us to transmit knowledge. For all of the insanity spouted by Libertarians and others from the cult of Ayn Rand, the reality is that every single one of us is here this morning is a result of collective action. And I truly appreciate the fact that my meat was inspected, my milk pasteurized (Thank you, Louis!), and my wiring is up to code. God forbid something should catch fire, there is a fire department to call.
In fact, while I appreciate the role of individual action, I tend to think like Elizabeth Warren, who said in 2011:
“There is nobody in this country who got rich on his own — nobody. You built a factory out there? Good for you. But I want to be clear. You moved your goods to market on the roads the rest of us paid for. You hired workers the rest of us paid to educate. You were safe in your factory because of police-forces and fire-forces that the rest of us paid for. You didn’t have to worry that marauding bands would come and seize everything at your factory — and hire someone to protect against this — because of the work the rest of us did. Now look, you built a factory and it turned into something terrific, or a great idea. God bless — keep a big hunk of it. But part of the underlying social contract is, you take a hunk of that and pay forward for the next kid who comes along.”
Even on the scale of this church… we didn’t build it. Not the building, not the ideas.
Friedrich Schleiermacher, a German theologian you’d likely never have heard of had you not been in these pews and I not been in the pulpit, pioneered a new way of thinking about Christianity. He influenced a Scottish philosopher named John Morell, who introduced those new ideas to the English-speaking world, and shared them with a Congregationalist minister named Horace Bushnell, who happened to be traveling in Europe. Bushnell returned to Connecticut, where he quickly started cranking out the first truly American liberal theology while spending time with a young high school principal named Thomas K. Beecher. Yes, that Thomas K. Beecher.
We don’t get “Practical Christianity” without a chain of improbabilities. And a hundred and fifty years later, I take an otherwise terrible class from a visiting professor that introduces me to the work of Schleiermacher, while also studying from brilliant 20th century scholars, and begin preaching “Practical Christianity” long before I know that term or receive an email from the New York Conference encouraging me to submit my Ministerial Profile to The Park Church for consideration.
Maybe that’s a little woo-woo to you, but you know… it is all a little woo-woo.
Genetics, environment, culture, all help determine who we are, all close off some potential paths and open others.
Then there is economics, the reason all those second-sons crossed the sea to the Virginia colony. Health care is not considered a human right in end-stage Neo-liberal capitalist America, but is tied to exploitative employment, so that you cannot quit your job lest you literally die, and bankrupt your children in the process. Never mind the student loans.
You are not totally free and I am not totally free.
Freedom was originally hard-wired into our faith. The first Gentile followers were not born into Christianity, and the Jews who followed Jesus opted into his Jewish reform movement. And that is what it was, a jewish reform. A wealthy and righteous young man came to Jesus, a man who was generous in business. When Jesus challenged him to donate the rest of his wealth to the poor, he walked away, and Jesus let him, free to belong. Or not.
Christianity would end up as a state religion, a partner in empire, a horror today’s white Christian nationalists seek to restore, both empire and state religion. Christianity became about death instead of about life, insurance against mortality. But this was not the Way of Jesus.
Jesus preached that the Kin-dom of God was co-existent with the world in which he lived and taught, and that one could choose to live in that kin-dom. That is what his followers were freely choosing. He freed people from sins without demanding holocausts, freed them from disability which was tied to sin in that primitive context, sometimes even the sins of their parents, multi-generational blessing and curse.
Were they truly free? Those Roman legions were not there for entertainment.
Are we free?
And we turn to the founding moment, for this nation, for this expression of the faith. Islam played a catalyzing role in the start of the Enlightenment, as classic texts lost to Europe but preserved in the Near East inspired a renewed interest in democracy. As often happens, this zeitgeist, this “spirit of the age,” spread into religion. Though the Puritans tried to build a theocracy in the Americas, Congregationalism would evolve into a form of voluntary association known as covenant community. With the “establishment clause” barring the creation of a state religion, even in colonies with a distinctive religious identity, faith became a matter of free choice. Yes, religious leaders still used fear, but just as in the time of Jesus, you were allowed to choose religious community, or choose no religious community.
We in the UCC are one of the more extreme forms of that religious freedom, a religious democracy as we point out at the start of our service. You choose to be the church, and you make the church. There is no top guy who speaks for God, not the denomination we call the United Church of Christ, not The Park Church, not even this knucklehead in the pulpit. We use the term “covenant” to describe the commitment we make to one another, the commitment I have with you as the congregation, the commitment our congregation has with other congregations in the Susquehanna Association, the New York Conference, the United Church of Christ, and across our many ecumenical partnerships.
Free and not free. Determined and determining for ourselves. Some may call freedom a delusion. If so, I am happily delusional.
I make choices every day, and I think many of those choices are freely made, that I am an agent not just a victim. Nature and nurture together lead me to choose the hard work of love, maybe not of the “leaping upon the mountains variety,” after all, these knees are no longer under warranty, but certainly of the “do justice” variety, of the breaking bread together variety, of the kind that has always been the best of us as a nation, not “me-first” MAGA, but coming together, to clean up a neighborhood after a flood or maybe just the bleachers after a Little League game, to fight data centers or fascism… though those are kind of the same thing. To be free to believe and see God’s kin-dom being born into the world, to act as midwives of the might yet be, for our local community, for these United States, for this exuberance we call life. Amen.
PRAYERS OF THE PEOPLE concluding with the Lord’s Prayer
Let us pray.
Most Amazing God,
they were thrown off of boats,
thrown down cisterns,
thrown out of the country,
thrown into the lion’s den,
these women and men we call prophets,
hated by queens and kings,
often loathed by priests as well.
They said again and again
that You do not want burnt offerings,
just justice,
just fidelity.
We know a thing or two about burnt offerings.
Out planet is on fire,
our offering to our own greed,
our fear.
We pray for the people of Ukraine
and the countries of the Persian Gulf,
for the innocents in Iran and Russia,
for those who have survived the Gaza genocide
so far.
We pray for those working in this heat,
the first responders,
and those we dubbed essential workers
back when pandemic raged,
essential to capitalism.
We pray for the elders at risk
in old homes with no air conditioning
or no money to pay NYSEG.
We pray
and then we dare to do,
to live into your kin-dom.
We pray for your will,
the will seen in the balance of creation,
as we say together:
Our Father…