Romans 8: 12-17; John 3: 1-7

Just after Memorial Day, it seems fitting that we talk about freedom.  It’s a word public officials use a lot and that nobody seems to question ever. Sixties rock star Janis Joplin sang out many years ago: “Freedom is just another word for nothing else to lose.” She lived like it too.; Born free from a movie that warmed people’s hearts in the same decade. It was about the lioness Elsa and about a return from the wild; In this country people of different ideological backgrounds tend to emphasize certain freedoms more than others.  Some are most passionate about the freedom for women to choose what to do with their bodies. Others think that freedom is not that important, many of them men.  Some people believe that a person in the end stages of ALS should be able to end his or her life with dignity, others think that freedom should not be granted. Some people believe they should be free to stack their garages with machine guns, while others feel less free, for what if those people watch too many conspiracy theory videos or even get drunk. Some of us think the access to affordable health care makes us more free to live our lives and change jobs. I grew up in a country where you never even had to worry about that.  Others think requiring people to be responsible for securing their health care takes away our freedom. Some think tight immigration controls guards our freedom while others believe it robs hard working people of their chance at the American Dream.  The US has freed a lot of countries from dictators, including my own after World War II.  But it has never really had to worry much about other nations occupying it. My country was occupied by the Spanish for eighty years.  Later the French took it over. Finally came the Germans.

Actually the US has never really been occupied by anyone or been at serious risk of that, but yet we talk more about freedom than anyone else. So it is clear that freedom means different things to different people. Maybe freedom means above all a good legal system which ironically has the right to take people’s freedom away, because if the police and the law are corrupt the only thing that can save you is a lot of money. Believe me, I’ve seen how that works in other places. Freedom as due process then is not that bad of a definition. Neither is the freedom of want, or the freedom from fear.

But what does the Bible teach us about freedom? What’s going on in Romans?  What’s going on in the Gospel of John.  Except for the period of the United Kingdom under David and Salomon, the Hebrew people have always been under threat: from the Canaanites, the Philistines, the Egyptians, the Assyrians, the Babylonians, the Persians, the Macedonians, the Romans, the Turks. They could barely dream of full political and social freedom. Actually the Old Testament prophets did dream of the freedom of worship and the breaking of the chains of the oppressors.  But especially in the New Testament, freedom has a spiritual ring.

In John 3, a Pharisee named Nicodemus, “a ruler of the Jews” comes to Jesus and says that he Knows Jesus has been sent by God. “No one can do these signs unless God is with that person.” Jesus then answers:” Unless one is born again, that person cannot see the Kingdom of God.” Nicodemus takes this seriously, for many religious scholars if those days took things literally.” “How can that be,” he asks, a person cannot enter a second time his or her mother’s womb.” Now actually on another level this text has been interpreted very literally by many Christians who tend to take everything literally. They do know, unlike Nicodemus that Jesus is talking about a spiritual rebirth, but they think of this rebirth as one historical event rather than how we might see it: as a constant renewal of our commitments to God in Jesus Christ. In fact the verse can also be translated: “you must be born from above.”  Friends, what Jesus is doing is liberating Nicodemus from the stresses and pressures of the physical world around him and pushes him toward spiritual rebirth.  What does Paul say: “we have not been given a spirit of slavery, but a spirit of adoption.” Now Nicodemus and his colleagues would probably take that literally also, but Paul means by slavery, this time not so much slavery to the Law, but slavery to the body, the worldly things.  So both Jesus and Paul are saying that unless we can stop letting everything around us that imprisons us (our fears over our physical life, our anger and resentment and jealousy about the things we do not have, our sadness over things we could not achieve) control us, we cannot be truly spiritual. We have to rise above the world that we were born into and focus on God. None of us are there, not even close, but the texts tell us that is what we must aim for. Freedom above all is spiritual. Thanks be to God. Amen.