So you are no longer a slave, but a son, and if a son, then an heir through God (Galatians 4:7).
Throughout chapters three and four of one of the earliest books of the New Testament, the Apostle Paul is at pains to describe the solidarity and shared history of both Jew and Gentile as we were drawn to Christ and the salvation He brings.
One commonality is that we were all united in a common slavery to the ‘elementary principles of the world.’ In ancient Greek thought, it generally stood for the base elements: earth, wind, water, and fire, a usage the classically trained Paul would have well understood, but in chapter four of Galatians, Paul deploys it to illustrate the simple or beginning nature of all of our theories and beliefs about the universe. He can include everything from the law of God to the worship of idols to the best scientific theories of how the natural universe works and keep all these fundamental features of how humans live and understand their place in the world in the category of a grammar school. After all, how does our incomplete knowledge of reality stack up against the God whose will constructed the world from nothing. As we read in chapter 55 of Isaiah: ‘For my thoughts are not your thoughts, neither are your ways my ways, declares the Lord. For as the heavens are higher than the earth, so are my ways higher than your ways and my thoughts than your thoughts’ (Isaiah 55:8-9). It cannot be any other way, for the God big enough to worship or hate must be big enough to operate in ways that are mysterious to a people who drive off with their coffee cups on the roof of their cars. The good news is that we should strive to understand the beautiful and complex universe God has created; we are designed to question and grow in knowledge, but to pretend that our comparatively 1st grade understanding of the vast universe’s complexities somehow gives us the right to pronounce judgement upon its creator is just as laughable as a 6 year old trying to convince you that storks deliver children.
And yet, that is exactly what humans do. We establish our own set of elementary principles, click the lock on the shackles, and throw the key as far away from us as we can. Usually, and most insidiously, this process occurs through the perversion of some good thing. The great example Paul calls upon here is the divine law given to the people of God upon being set free from the shackles of Pharaoh. The law was meant to serve as a guardian and a teacher: to reveal to men the will of God specifically constructed to mold a sinful, rebellious people into a vehicle for saving the world—a holy nation through which peace between man and his Creator might be forged. Unfortunately, Satan, our great enemy, the great despiser of humanity, took this good law and twisted it to his own evil purposes. Like an evil teacher who abuses his authority and harms the children temporarily under his care, the Evil One used the law to emphasize the sin of men and drive us to deeper and deeper pits of despair and self-loathing. This same process occurs in all the other elementary principles men hold dear. Whatever bedrock understanding one thinks he has about the universe and about our place within it, whatever common knowledge or folksy wisdom someone think trumps the Word of God, whatever erudite tome or peer reviewed paper one cling to for justification of his beliefs, all of these are the slave master’s title to our very being whenever they prevent us from loving God with our whole heart, soul, body, and mind.
We don’t have time to examine all the anti-biblical principles the average self-identified Christian clings to, for they are legion, but one of my favorites, told to me by sincere person after sincere person, is ‘I’m not going to take my child to church because I want them to grow up and pick their own religion.’ Of course, the parent does not have this attitude about arithmetic; after all, math is important, and their little darling won’t be able to get a good job without math. And there, without saying another word, this person has revealed their elementary understanding of the universe and their place within it. They have decided, for their child, that the primary purpose of human life is to get a job. What does Jesus say after the disciples try to keep children away from Him, ‘…whoso shall receive one such little child in my name receiveth me. But whoso shall offend one of these little ones which believe in me, it were better for him that a millstone were hanged about his neck, and that he were drowned in the depth of the sea’ (St. Matthew 18:5-6). So, for our Lord, those who keep children from Him at church—the place we are promised to meet Him in Word and Sacrament—for those people it would be better to drown. Yikes. Are we allowed to tell that to people? Are we allowed to tell people that it would be better for their children to miss every single class of arithmetic than miss one summit between man and the divine creator whom we hear and touch whenever we are in this room together? If I said that, I would be laughed at by most folks. I would be laughed at because I dared to question the elemental principles by which the vast majority of our countrymen live their lives. We are taught that our faith is the frosting on our lives, a chapter in our book, a spice in our flavored coffee; which means it isn’t really anything important, for we must remember, if our Christian faith isn’t the most important thing in our lives—measured in the precious time we sacrifice—then our replacement rituals of cultural conformity and divine rebellion are not changing anything about God or the universe or even ourselves really, we are simply declaring to all whom we meet that we like being slaves to an enemy that hates us. An enemy who knows that every second he can keep us separated from our God—ignorant of His majesty and blind to His glory—he adds to the misery and pain and confusion he loves.
But, as St. Paul tells us today, it doesn’t have to be this way. The apostle considers the faces of the Galatian church, the men and women who lived hard lives beset at all times by the urgent need to survive, and he knows that by all accounts he is making their day to day lives harder by introducing them to the truth; he knows the alienation and sacrifice that will come from being a follower of Christ—he’s living it, and it will eventually kill him—but he also knows that he must tell them the truth. What is the truth? For those truly in Christ, the God who created us has redeemed us and adopted us. It is simple, beautiful, and true, but what does it mean?
First, to understand redemption in our modern context, we should imagine a man captured by rebel forces in a third world country. This man is fed and clothed, as he is valuable to his captors, but they will not let him leave until his ransom is paid. Over time, the prisoner strangely begins to love his captors, a disorder known as Stockholm syndrome, which makes sense since all the happiness in his life comes from these men and the camp they’ve built. Many years pass, but eventually, another man comes: a man whom the prisoner had wronged on countless occasions in the past; this enemy pays the prisoner’s ransom by taking his place in his prison cell. As the former prisoner leaves the camp, baffled by the incomprehensible generosity of this enemy turned redeemer, he hears his new savior yell to him through the bars of his former home, ‘Follow back the path I have taken to get here, follow the path to my Father, and he will accept you as his son. My brother and his servants are waiting for you along the path to guide you to your new home.’ And with these words, the newly freed man first hears of his adoption. He now learns that his savior has not just freed him from prison, he has also given him an inheritance greater than he ever could imagine, and that this inheritance will be made sure and true by someone who knows exactly what it cost to procure it—what it cost to make the prisoner a son and an heir.
What would we think of the liberated man if he spit on the brother and ran into the woods screaming about his freedom? Or, what if the man complained to his redeemer’s brother about the length of the journey or all the free time he had to himself in prison? We might know very little about the man freed from prison, but we would know that he was certainly ungrateful for what he had received. What if the man pretended he was still in prison and acted like nothing had changed? What if he began walking back to the work camp, propelled by a sad, misplaced love for his slave masters? We could feel nothing but pity for this confused man, unable to imagine a world better than the work camp from which he was liberated, unable to trust in anything other than his own memories.
We don’t need to look very hard to see ourselves within this analogy, but blessedly, we don’t need to look very hard to find our salvation from its needless madness either. Where this analogy breaks down, of course, is that God the Son—our enemy turned redeemer—breaks out of that prison camp and burns it to the ground, and God the Holy Spirit is not just our guide, to be ignored or followed; no, the Holy Spirit makes real in our hearts what Christ has accomplished through His sacrifice; the Holy Spirit drags our pathetic, sin-laden bodies down the narrow path because as St. Paul tells us, ‘…I am sure of this, that he who began a good work in you will bring it to completion at the day of Jesus Christ’ (Phil. 1:6). God will have his new world, and He will fill it with His faithful servants. Neither you or I or the Devil is strong enough to stop the God who has already shown Satan’s powerlessness in the resurrection of Jesus Christ. That perfect man who crawled into hell and pulled out victory will not let our weakness derail the new earth, and He is even now calling out to us, through the Holy Spirit, to rise up as sons and daughters of promise.
Let me be clear: I am not asking you to try harder. I am asking you to be free. I am asking you to recognize that you need not fear that you are missing something or that other people will judge you if you fail to participate in our world’s counterfeit liturgies. Who cares what your neighbors think, would any of them die for you? Who cares what your boss or co-workers or school friends think, have they seen the Devil’s face and laughed? Who cares what anyone thinks about you other than the God who became man that men—flawed, ignorant men—might inherit the universe. You are a Christian; the earth is your inheritance. Let no devil or man make you his slave.