Midweek meditation from Pastor Dave July 3, 2024

As we celebrate our nation’s freedom this week, I cannot help but think of the freedom that we are invited to experience in and through Jesus Christ.

My thoughts turn in particular to that energetic epistle of Paul to the Galatians, where he expounds on the nature and purpose of our freedom in Christ. “For freedom Christ has set us free,” he asserts at the start of the fifth chapter. “Stand firm, therefore, and do not submit again to a yoke of slavery,” by which he means the kind of overly legalistic dietary and circumcision requirements for which some were advocating.

He picks up this theme again a few verses later, when he reasserts, “for you were called to freedom, brothers and sisters” (Gal 5:13). Freedom is our collective calling in Christ. But he goes on to advise, “only do not use your freedom as an opportunity for self-indulgence, but through love become slaves to one another.”

The Greek word translated “slaves” here is douleuo, which is related to the word doula for those who serve and support birthing mothers. So an alternate translation here is “through love, serve one another.” We are to exercise our freedom in Christ through loving and serving others like Christ.

“For the whole law,” Paul clarifies, “is summed up in a single commandment, ‘You shall love your neighbor as yourself’” (Gal 5:14). For Paul, freedom in Christ is not so much freedom from the awfulness of the law but freedom for the lawfulness of love. Our love for others fulfills the law of God.

Paul closes this passage with words that can seem a bit out of place: “If, however, you bite and devour one another, take care that you are not consumed by one another” (Gal 5:15). This strange verse suggests the degree of conflict that was taking place among the factions in the Galatian congregation, to whom Paul was calling to a unifying freedom in Christ. It also seems to resonate with the conflict that is taking place among the factions in our nation and world today, especially here in the US in this election year. Instead of loving one another, like Christ commanded us, there seems to be a lot more biting and devouring one another. We can pray, like Paul, that we are not, in the end, consumed by one another.

I am reminded that Abraham Lincoln presided over a nation rent by great and terrible conflict. But in his famous address at the cemetery in Gettysburg in November 1863, Lincoln envisioned “that this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom.” I don’t think he was thinking about Paul’s letter to the Galatians when he wrote that. But I can’t help but think that part of our calling as disciples of Jesus today is to be the kinds of doulas that can help bring about a new birth of freedom in Christ, a freedom that forsakes self-indulgence and biting and devouring others, for the greater freedom found in loving and serving others.