The Slavery that Frees Us for Others by The Rev. Dr. Frank Kirkpatrick
Posted on
June 29, 2014, Proper 8, Year A
Trinity Church, Hartford
The Rev. Dr. Frank G. Kirkpatrick
“The Slavery That Frees Us For Others”
Among the most morally despicable human practices is that of slavery. Slavery is a coerced relationship in which one person has absolute power over the life, fortune, and liberty of another. As such, it is a violation of one of our most precious God-given rights: the right to freely choose our own plans of life for ourselves.
We rightly resist being ‘slaves’ to anyone. We are outraged that hundreds of young girls in Nigeria have been forced into slavery by a fanatical band of zealots. And yet we as a human people have not always condemned slavery and forbidden it as a social practice. While the long arc of history has bent away from slavery, there have been long periods of time in which slavery was sanctioned and approved, often on the basis of arguments drawn from the Bible and the teachings of Christianity. People argued that it was necessary for maintaining a hierarchical social order, it would Christianize the slaves, slaves were sub-human and unprepared for freedom, it was sanctioned in the Bible, Jesus didn’t condemn it, the spiritual or moral freedom of the slave did not require his legal or civil freedom, and so on. Eventually, of course, these defenses were not enough to stave off a civil war that eventually brought slavery to an end over 150 years ago.
But why bring up slavery this morning? Because if we read Paul’s letter to the Romans, his words suggest that he is calling Christians out of one form of slavery and into another. His letter quite explicitly says that we, “having once been slaves of sin, have become obedient from the heart to the form of teaching to which you were entrusted, and that you, having been set free from sin, have become slaves of righteousness." If slavery is as morally odious as I’ve suggested why is Paul extolling a new form of slavery? What’s going on here?
Clearly he is not talking about chattel slavery: the legal possession of someone as a commodity or piece of property, forcefully made subject to the whims and desires of the master.
But being subject or bound to someone else’s will is part of Paul’s understanding of slavery to righteousness or slavery to God. In a deep psychological sense Paul knows that we are all slaves, in a sense, to those values by which we seek to live our lives. What Paul offers is a existentially new form of slavery that both affirms our free will and, contrary to most human wisdom, enables and nurtures our ultimate fulfillment. Paul offers what might seem a living contradiction: a form of slavery that brings freedom and health.
It’s not a question of whether we are enslaved to something but a question of what or to whom we are in bondage and whether we have freely chosen that paradoxical but liberating form of bondage. And he says that our present way of life, which stands in opposition to the way of righteousness, is enslavement to the way of sin. And what is sin? Basically it is the desire of the self to live by itself, and for itself, with no reference to the powers that enable it to be what it is and what it aspires to, and to flourish. It is the self-pride that proceeds on the false assumption that we are our own masters, that we owe nothing to others, that our personal interests are to be pursued without restriction even at the expense of others. When Adam and Eve put their desires ahead of God’s, they committed the first or original sin. It was the placing of the center of value in themselves rather than in God. And by extension the self as its own center of value led to a desire to be radically independent, not interdependent, on all those other persons whom God created to be our equals as brothers and sisters, not our property or our inferiors.
As many scholars have observed, the most common value held in highest esteem by most Americans is the value of freedom from and independence of others: and this means for most people the freedom to be left alone by others so that we don’t depend on them and they don’t depend on us. We desire an individualistic freedom unfettered, unrestricted, by any obligations we owe to others. That is why so many Americans hate and distrust their government: they see it as something alien to themselves even though it provides them with goods that they have not entirely acquired by their own endeavors and then requires them in a bond of mutual obligation to distribute some of those goods to others who often, in their opinion, haven’t earned them and don’t deserve them. In our political process we become, through democratically agreed upon governmental policies, obligated to help others and this obligation we often find to be inimical to our belief that each person should look after him or herself.
We resent having to contribute to the well-being of others because that intrudes upon our desire to be left alone by them. And yet, ironically, this lust for independence is a contemporary form of slavery, namely enslavement to the sin of selfishness, or the belief that no one should have any right to curtail or restrict my freedom to force me into helping them when they have need. And make no mistake about it, it is a form of slavery, even though we think of it as the ultimate form of freedom, to be so tightly wound up in ourselves and our own desires that we can only regard the needs of others as threats to our freedom. The great irony is that like the defense of slavery in an earlier time, some of the strongest voices in defense of individualistic self-centeredness come from allegedly Christian spokespersons. They have taken the true value of freedom, the freedom to choose a way of life that conforms to God’s intention for our flourishing and fulfillment in community with others, and perverted it into the freedom to live apart from others seeking only our own self-interest.
But the secret to the fulfilling Christian life is to freely choose to wed ourselves to the only power that both intends us for flourishing and well-being and in the process reveals to us that such a life is bound up with, encumbered with, deeply fulfilling bonds of relationship with others. There is only one form of slavery, if we want to continue to use that word, that makes any sense at all and that is slavery to a way of life which brings us the most complete and satisfying way of being fully human. The freedom of isolating ourselves from others, of seeking to dis-encumber, dis-embed our lives from those of others will, our faith teaches us, turn out to be in practice the least satisfying, the least complete, the least fulfilling of all ways of life. It will be slavery to everything that destroys the true God-given destiny for each and every person.
If the freedom to be unencumbered, unobligated, independent of others were really true freedom, then think about what such a life might actually look like. Any person who encounters you should first be regarded as a threat to your autonomy and independence: you immediately will want to ask what are they going to request of me? How do they want to entangle me in their lives such that I might become indebted to them? If you do accept their overture of friendship you’ll want to make it conditional on what they can do for you. You’ll at best enter into a tentative and provisional contractual relationship with them which limits their power over you. You’ll define all your relationships in instrumental terms based on the simple question: how can they serve my needs.
The one thing you will not want to happen, to be avoided at all costs, is to fall in love with them or let love be the dominant dimension of your relationship. Why? Because love erases boundaries, it overruns instrumental relationships and puts us in a position of wanting to serve the other person, even be a slave to them, because we care so much about them. So stay away from love like the plague if you desire the splendid isolation of complete freedom from others. Also be sure never to acknowledge how much the contributions of others have made and continue to make your life possible. Ignore the fact that your social security, your Medicare, your highways, your school systems, your national security, your police and fire protection, are provided to you through the contributions of others in the form of taxes and public policies. Believe, against all the counter evidence, that you solely by yourself have made yourself what you are and that you owe nothing to anyone for that. Believe that you provided your own DNA to yourself, and that you nursed and nurtured yourself by yourself growing up. Believe that the social environment in which you grew up was made entirely by you. Believe that parents, teachers, and friends contributed nothing to making you what you are now. Believe, above all, that God didn’t give up his life for you to redeem you from the sin of selfishness and pride. Believe that you have redeemed yourself, that you personally died on a cross for yourself. Believe, if you can, all these things and then proceed to live the most profound lie of all time.
But if you cannot believe all these things, then return to Paul’s wisdom: acknowledge that we are all slaves to something and choose wisely, with God’s grace, to encumber yourself to those things that truly show us how deeply we are entangled in the lives of others. Embrace that entanglement because it is God’s way of showing you that only by committing yourself to the community of other persons can you ever truly lead a life that is ultimately satisfying because it fulfills your innermost, deepest nature and aspirations. Receive the gift of your true self from God and then, recalling the words of Jesus in this morning’s gospel, become truly free and give that cold cup of water to anyone who has need of it and give thanks that you have entered into the only relationship that can give your life absolute meaning: the life of righteous service and slavery to others in God’s name.