Freedom, Choice, Trust

Sermon for Street Parish Church 19 March 2006 at 6 p.m.

Last Thursday an ad in Yellow Pages caught my eye. I think it was for an appointments firm, about getting a job, but that's not what interested me. What I noticed was the slogan, three separate words in heavy type arranged in the centre of the ad: FREEDOM, CHOICE, TRUST.

I don't know what those words had to do with the service being advertised. Perhaps they didn't have much to do with it at all. Perhaps they were simply chosen as hurrah-words, words that you only have to slip into a political speech to get a positive audience reaction – you hope. President Bush loves to lard his public comments with the word 'freedom'. Our own political parties are united in elevating 'choice' to be one of the chief virtues. And as for 'trust', well that's chiefly used now in the context of loss of trust, loss of that good thing. A politician says “Trust me” and we think “I wish I could.”

These three buzz-words, freedom, choice, trust, need to be reclaimed. We must allow them to have their proper meaning, and not be mere vague hurrah-words. Because they are important words. And they are at the heart of human living, the way Jesus showed us how to do it. And we may find when we look at these words that their real meaning is not quite what we thought.

So let's begin with freedom. And let's begin with a man sinking into squelchy mud at the bottom of an almost dry well-shaft. Remember him? Our first Bible reading told part of the haunting story about Jeremiah. He was living through an anxious time in the history of the northern kingdom, Israel. In fact, he was almost the only person who saw how serious the situation was. He was almost the only person who knew that this was the end for Israel. The enemy, the Babylonians, were at the gates of Samaria. The government were taking what measures they could to resist. They looked back, perhaps, to the time when another powerful enemy, the Assyrians, seemed equally threatening, camped outside the gates of Jerusalem down in the south, the time when the king, with Isaiah the prophet, laid the matter before God and God brought a miraculous rescue. Surely God will do the same for us!

And Jeremiah was the only person with the clear sight and the courage to tell the king: “Don't resist. Surrender.” It was an unpopular message. Jeremiah was treated like a present-day whistle-blower. What happened to the man who exposed corruption in the EU? If I remember, the anti-corruption commissioner, Neil Kinnock, had him sacked and tried to discredit him. What happened to the present-day Israeli who told the truth about Israel's weaponry? He was sent to prison for a very long time. What happened to Jeremiah? He was brought into the inner court of the palace and put down into that almost dry well. Like an oubliette. Remember what an oubliette was? It was an underground chamber in a castle, where the only entrance was a hole in the floor above; once an unfortunate prisoner was down there, he stayed there with no hope of escape. If his captors forgot to throw food down to him, he starved to death.

Freedom must have seemed a very precious thing to Jeremiah down at the bottom of the well. Let's leave him there for a minute.

Did you notice that our second Bible reading was a letter written from prison? St Paul wrote:

The Roman guards and all the others know that I am here in jail because I serve Christ.

Both Jeremiah and St Paul were prisoners of conscience, Jeremiah for telling the true political and military situation, St Paul because he served Christ. The problem hasn't gone away. In today's China there are many such prisoners of conscience; in Muslim-dominated countries like Pakistan with its blasphemy law there are many Christians imprisoned, the reason, whether directly or indirectly, being their faith. There is something we can do about it. Some Christians in this country support Amnesty International; some prefer to support the Barnabas Fund. Whichever organisation we support, we can write letters; people's letters make a difference.

But back to Jeremiah in the well. He can't have known what negotiations were going on the the palace above, while he was sinking down further into the mud, but there came the wonderful moment when a friendly black face appeared looking down from the well mouth, and several other men with ropes came too. The black face belonged to an Ethiopian friend of Jeremiah's, Ebedmelech, who had persuaded King Zedekiah to bring Jeremiah up to ground level again. They threw down a load of old rags for Jeremiah to put under his armpits to stop the ropes cutting into him, and they hauled him up. It wasn't complete freedom; Jeremiah was still kept prisoner in the palace courtyard; but compared with the well it was liberty.

What about St Paul? Was he set free? To be honest, I'm not sure. If it was really our St Paul who wrote the letters to Timothy and Titus, then it seems that he was set free. But there is a very strong Christian tradition that he was beheaded in Rome. What I do know is that he wrote about Christian freedom, like this:

Christ has set us free! This means we are really free. Now hold on to your freedom and don't ever become slaves of the law again. (Gal 5.1)

In that context St Paul was thinking of freedom, not from imprisonment but from slavery; and he said that Christ has set us free. He thinks of life without Jesus Christ as a sort of slavery, even a sort of prison. Why should that be? Isn't it rather the other way round? Isn't religion a kind of slavery? Haven't we heard many people looking back on their strict religious upbringing with horror? Don't they think of the moment when they cut the ties that bound them to that religious home as a moment of liberation?

Well, exactly! St Paul was brought up in a strictly religious home, too. He never said “Religion has set us free.” He said “Christ has set us free!” What is more, he told the Philippians:

Now hold on to your freedom and don't ever become slaves of the law again.

Religious regulations enslave, St Paul is saying. Jesus sets free.

May I be quite straight with you? Many people who have been brought up to go to church and to follow strict rules of conduct have still to experience the liberty that Jesus brings. That could be true of someone here. If there is someone like that, Jesus is saying to you, “Step out of the prison that has been holding you all your life. Take my hand and walk into freedom.”

But that's not all that St Paul tells us. He also writes:

My friends, you were chosen to be free. So don't use your freedom as an excuse to do anything you want. Use it as an opportunity to serve each other with love.

Walking out into freedom with your hand in the hand of Jesus doesn't mean walking into a moral no-man's land.

We can see a misuse of freedom in Iraq. The people of Iraq were freed from the capricious tyranny of Saddam Hussein. The vast majority of them, I'm sure, are using their freedom sensibly; but the ones who have made the headlines are using their freedom to destroy, to murder, to incite civil war. That is an illustration of freedom without Jesus. St Paul might write to those Iraqis,

So don't use your freedom as an excuse to do anything you want. Use it as an opportunity to serve each other with love.

So what does it mean to walk out into freedom with your hand in the hand of Jesus? It means having the freedom to be spontaneously loving, the way Jesus was. 'Love', as a great Christian put it, 'and do what you like.' If you heard the Bishop's wonderful talk on jazz last Wednesday, you may be thinking of his description of what it's like to play improvised jazz, all the musicians expressing themselves freely, while they are all listening to each other, so that together they make the music.

To finish the story, let me come back to those two other hurrah-words, choice and trust.

Choice, I said, has been elevated to the status of a first-flight political virtue. We are supposed to be delighted at being given a choice of school for our children, a choice of hospital when we break our leg, a choice whether to drink all day and all night or not, a choice whether to become addicted to gambling in new super-casinos or not, a choice whether to shop from Monday to Saturday and allow the shop-assistants to have Sunday as a family day of rest, or to insist on shopping on Sunday and deny others the right to a common weekly day of rest. These are all choices that our present government has presented to us, saying that because there is choice involved the new laws must be a good thing.

Big business has jumped on the same bandwagon. Just recently I heard a spokeswoman for the food producers say that children in schools should be given the choice whether to eat unhealthy food and become fat slobs or not. Well, she didn't put it quite like that, but that was what she implied.
The big supermarket chains are asking for still further freedom from Sunday trading regulation, so that Sunday becomes exactly like any other day. Their justification? Do they say that it's so that they can make even bigger profits for their shareholders and bigger bonuses for their fat cats? Not exactly. They say it's to give the consumer more choice.

A guest expert on Woman's Hour last week spoke of the difficulties that children have to face these days, and among them – so many choices!

I'm sure none of us wants to return to wartime conditions when the choice was National Margarine or nothing. But multiplying choices indefinitely will not make us any happier, and it may obscure the few really important choices that we should be making. If children believe that the important choice is between different expensive makes of trainer, Reebock or Nike or whatever, it obscures the more important choice: Should I spend so much money on shoes at all?

Bring it down to the basics: if the media and advertising and our friends convince us that the choice is what we should buy to make our lifestyle the best it can be, then it obscures the key choice: Shall I go along with the world and seek happiness in possessions, or shall I follow the Man who said “A man's life does not consist in the abundance of his possessions”?

That kind of choice goes hand in hand with stepping out into freedom. St Paul put his own choice in even starker terms, terms of life or death, in our second lesson:

If I live, it will be for Christ; and if I die, I will gain even more. I don't know what to choose. I could keep on living and doing something useful. It is a hard choice to make.

Hard, yes. And more important than the choice between Maxwell House and Nescafe – or even Cafe Direct (which is the choice we ought to be making).

So to our third hurrah-word, trust. What we choose will depend on whom we can trust. That's clear in politics. A widespread feeling, right or wrong, that no politicians can be trusted has led to a poor turnout in elections. In a general election one of the key questions is “Can we trust this person, this party?” If we think we can, then we may commit the country to their care for the next 4 or 5 years.

Jesus asks us to trust him. “Don't be worried!” he said to his disciples, the ones who had chosen to follow him. “Have faith in God and have faith in me.” Committing our country for 4 or 5 years is an important decision, but committing your whole life, for now and for eternity, to Jesus is an even bigger one. Before making that decision you will probably want to find out as much as possible about Jesus and his past record – and the four Gospels are the place to do some serious research. Is this the kind of man I can trust? Then you'll probably want to ask people who have trusted him for a long time, whether they have found him trustworthy; you might look at some testimonies from the past, too, like Justin:

Fourscore years have I served him, and he has never done me wrong.

Or like David Livingstone, who wrote in his Bible, opposite one of the great promises, the highest commendation a Victorian could think of:

“The word of a gentleman.”

But the best way of all to find whether Jesus is trustworthy is to begin to live as though he is, begin to trust him, and test whether it works.

Freedom, choice, trust. These three words highlight some of the greatest aspects of Christian living. Perhaps as we've thought about them together they have come to mean more; if so, good. But they will mean everything when we put them into effect, and Jesus becomes our liberator, and the object of our choice and our trust. Glory be to him. Amen.