Freedom Means Love

Happy Independence Day everyone!  We are lucky, lucky, lucky to live under the freedom that the United States provides.

Sojourners sent an email today with a Scripture passage from Paul reminding us of the point of freedom:

For you were called to freedom, brothers and sisters; only do not use your freedom as an opportunity for self-indulgence, but through love become slaves to one another. For the whole law is summed up in a single commandment, “You shall love your neighbor as yourself.” – Galatians 5:13-14

The point of freedom, he says, is love.  It’s not unfettered individualism.  It’s not greed.  It’s not materialism.  It’s love.

Of course, Paul is referring not specifically to political freedom, but to freedom in Christ.  Still, his words have a certain resonance in an age where freedom is sometimes used as an excuse for trickle-down economics, environmental degradation, and an inhumane foreign policy.  The question we must pose to ourselves is this: is freedom a mere tool for achieving self-gratification, or should it empower us to serve the common good?

Martin Luther King Jr. came down firmly on the side of the common good — arguing that all of mankind is “caught in an inescapable network of mutuality”:

No individual can live alone, no nation can live alone, and anyone who feels that he can live alone is sleeping through a revolution. The world in which we live is geographically one. The challenge that we face today is to make it one in terms of brotherhood.

 

Now it is true that the geographical oneness of this age has come into being to a large extent through modern man’s scientific ingenuity. Modern man through his scientific genius has been able to dwarf distance and place time in chains. And our jet planes have compressed into minutes distances that once took weeks and even months. All of this tells us that our world is a neighborhood.

 

Through our scientific and technological genius, we have made of this world a neighborhood and yet we have not had the ethical commitment to make of it a brotherhood. But somehow, and in some way, we have got to do this. We must all learn to live together as brothers or we will all perish together as fools. We are tied together in the single garment of destiny, caught in an inescapable network of mutuality. And whatever affects one directly affects all indirectly. For some strange reason I can never be what I ought to be until you are what you ought to be. And you can never be what you ought to be until I am what I ought to be. This is the way God’s universe is made; this is the way it is structured.

 

John Donne caught it years ago and placed it in graphic terms: “No man is an island entire of itself. Every man is a piece of the continent, a part of the main.” And he goes on toward the end to say, “Any man’s death diminishes me because I am involved in mankind; therefore never send to know for whom the bell tolls; it tolls for thee.” We must see this, believe this, and live by it if we are to remain awake through a great revolution.

Self-involvement is awfully confining — spiritually, economically, and politically.  But the understanding that we are connected to something larger than ourselves — a “something” that stretches from Beverly Hills to the south side of Chicago to Sudan to Iraq to everything between and beyond — is where freedom, at its best, is supposed to lead us.