6th Sunday after Pentecost

Grace be to you and peace from God our Father and the lord and Savior Jesus Christ. Amen.

Every time we read today’s section from Paul’s letter to the Romans, I have to think of my mother-in-law. She always referred to this text as the “I-do-and-I-don’t-and-I-don’t-and-I-do” text. Paul is wrestling with the frustration of knowing what is right and good, and wanting to do what is right and good - and yet finding himself not doing it.

This is a frustration I am well familiar with. In my head I know how I should behave, what I should and shouldn’t eat, how much sleep I should be getting, how generous I am supposed to be with what God has given me, how forgiving I am to be in honor of the forgiveness I myself have received from Christ, how joyfully I should meet all people because they are also created in the image of God, how open I should be towards meeting God’s wisdom in unexpected places, and on and on; and yet, I constantly fail at it. I-do-and-I-don’t-and-I-don’t-and-I-do. So frustrating!

Perhaps you, too, know this feeling?

Paul ends his section with this quite emotional outburst: Wretched person that I am! Who will rescue me from this body of death?

And he immediately gives the answer: Thanks be to God through Jesus Christ our Lord! Christ rescues us from this wretchedness, from our failures, from our sins, from our guilt and shame and self-loathing. Christ loves us, loves us so much he died for us, not because we are so wonderful and perfect, but because Christ is wonderful and perfect.

In light of our nation’s 250th anniversary of independence yesterday, I couldn’t help but ponder what this biblical teaching would say to us as a nation. Paul’s frustration of the “I-do-and-I-don’t-and-I-don’t-and-I-do” applies not only to individual people, but also nations.

When this nation was founded, we had glorious ideas for what we would become. A city on the hill. Liberty and justice for all. All men are created equal. Life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. Let freedom ring. These are values we cherish. These are goals we aspire to.

And many times in our history, we have lived up to these values. When the Civil War was ended in such a way that it didn’t split the nation in two. When we helped fight fascism in World War II and defeated communism in the Cold War and helped the Berlin Wall to come down. When we opened all jobs, including that of president, to people of all races. When we made public education free so all children had a chance to learn. When Social Security provided safety and dignity to our seniors. This nation did some awesome things!

This nation also did some things that were horrible. When we expelled Native Americans from their tribal lands. When we enslaved black people. When we put Japanese Americans into internment camps. When we enforced Jim Crow laws. When we engaged in wars that ended with a big mess and a lot of pain.

“I-do-and-I-don’t-and-I-don’t-and-I-do”. That’s us as a nation.

What could help us grow closer to our ideals? Again, Paul’s answer is Christ.

Let’s look at the gospel for today. This is what Jesus says to the crowds: “To what will I compare this generation? It is like children sitting in the marketplaces and calling to one another, ‘We played the flute for you, and you did not dance; we wailed, and you did not mourn.’ For John came neither eating nor drinking, and they say, ‘He has a demon’; the Son of Man came eating and drinking, and they say, ‘Look, a glutton and a drunkard, a friend of tax collectors and sinners!’ Yet wisdom is vindicated by her deeds.”

Jesus tells the crowds that they act like petulant children. They are never happy. Jesus and John the Baptist both tried to bring them closer to God through repentance, and both brought a message of compassion into their communities. But both were rejected. People criticized John for his abstinence and ascetic discipline, and Jesus for eating and drinking with social rejects. As one commentator put it, the “cancel culture” of their day found any reason for quashing their message.

The part they really wanted to quash was the call to repentance. Jesus warns certain cities that their unwillingness to repent will lead to their downfall. He did amazing things there, healed people, fed people, showed people compassion, preached God’s love, welcomed folks from all walks of life into the reign of God. All these blessings should have changed them. All these wonderful acts should have brought them closer to God.

That’s what repentance really is: recognizing the truth that a change would lead to something better, something godlier, something more blessed. But those cities weren’t willing to go there. And in the end, Jesus says, that will hurt them.

It is interesting that Jesus is addressing whole cities here. Repentance is not only something a person does individually. It is also something a whole community does. I grew up in Germany during a time when my home country did a lot of repenting about the atrocities of the Nazis; we admitted what we had done and we did our best, through education and legislation, to make sure something like this never ever happens again. As a nation, we repented, and it brought healing and justice, hope for renewal and better relationships with our neighbors.

Jesus doesn’t mince words here. He is calling us to repentance. Let us resist the temptation to tune him out or to cancel him. Let us instead listen to his voice and examine what we might need to repent of.

This will require a certain amount of humility. Repentance acknowledges that we are not perfect, that we don’t own the truth, that our way of doing things is not the only way of doing things. Admitting this will set us free, free to wholeheartedly embrace all that is indeed great about this nation, and free to explore ways to make the rest better.

Freedom is one of the big values we celebrate on Independence Day. This freedom is not a free-for-all, however. It is regulated by something. Whenever communities have tried to live in complete freedom, people eventually rose to the top who imposed their will on others. Think Survivor. Think ‘Lord of the Flies’. Think cults. It never ended well.

As Paul writes today, there will always be some law or other guiding us. The question is what kind of law that will be and whom it is benefiting. When we are ruled by laws that grow out of greed or lust for power, then a few of us will get rich and the majority will suffer. When we are ruled by public opinion and the judgy nature of social media, some will be stars and the majority will have diminished self-esteem. When we are ruled by the idea of ‘survival of the fittest’ and ‘everyone is responsible for his or her own fate’, then some will be very successful and countless others will be pushed to the margins.

How different our life together would be if we were ruled by the law of Christ, the law of love for God and neighbor. Jesus offers us his yoke today. He wants us to join him in the way of life together that he modeled. His yoke is easy, he says, better translated as kind, pleasant, beneficial. His yoke isn’t hard or painful, but, as one pastor wrote, as gentle as the when a person you love lays his hand on your shoulder to encourage you, to lead you gently and lovingly where you should go, to that place where you can flourish.

Jesus wants each and everyone of us to flourish, and he wants us as a nation to flourish. Jesus is the way and the truth and life that can lead us there when we accept his yoke and follow his guidance.

Freedom is one of the values we celebrate on July 4th. It is also a value of faith. We are grateful because Christ sets us free from sin, guilt, and shame. We are free. But this freedom is not a total free-for-all. In his treatise “On the Freedom of a Christian”, Martin Luther explores at length just what this freedom of a Christian is and how it is lived.

Luther begins his work with this paradox: A Christian is an utterly free person, lord of all, subject to none. A Christian is an utterly dutiful person, servant of all, subject of all. This is how Luther explains this paradox:

Through Christ’s death and resurrection, through faith and grace, we are set free from the power of sin and death. We do not have to do certain good works in order to be saved, do not have to be perfect in our obedience to God’s law, do not have to worry about any judgment, neither God’s nor that of other people. We are free.

However, this grace of God fills our hearts with such love and gratitude that we feel the need to express it in the way we live. Love binds us to God and to one another. Love makes us want to serve God and other people. Love makes us want to work towards a world where all people are fed, sheltered, safe, cherished, and feel like a beloved child of God.

In this, we follow the example of Jesus himself. Jesus was Lord of all, yet he loved the world so much that he became a human being, a little child born to poor parents, an itinerant rabbi with no home to call his own, a messiah who made those in power so angry that they killed him. In love, Jesus bound himself to humanity, became a servant unto death, to win our salvation.

Likewise, we are free yet also bound to our neighbor in love, serving other people with the compassion and love we ourselves have received from Jesus Christ. We claim our freedom in Christ by submitting to the gentle yoke of our Savior.

As we celebrate this country’s freedom and give thanks for all the marvelous things God has done for us in this nation, may we cherish our freedom and use it yoked with Christ: to both find and give rest and kindness, hope and renewal, so that this nation and everyone in it can flourish. Amen.