Sermon: The Freedom Loophole and the Anabaptist-Takeover of the World
This sermon was given by James Brenneman on July 9, 2023.
Jeremiah 34:8-14 (NRSVUE)
8 The word that came to Jeremiah from the Lord, after King Zedekiah had made a covenant with all the people in Jerusalem to make a proclamation of liberty to them, 9that all should set free their Hebrew slaves, male and female, so that no one should hold another Judean in slavery. 10And they obeyed, all the officials and all the people who had entered into the covenant that all would set free their slaves, male or female, so that they would not be enslaved again; they obeyed and set them free. 11But afterward they turned around and took back the male and female slaves they had set free and brought them again into subjection as slaves. 12The word of the Lord came to Jeremiah from the Lord: 13 Thus says the Lord, the God of Israel: I myself made a covenant with your ancestors when I brought them out of the land of Egypt, out of the house of slavery, saying, 14 “Every seventh year each of you must set free any Hebrews who have been sold to you and have served you six years; you must set them free from your service.” But your ancestors did not listen to me or incline their ears to me.
Galatians 5:1,13-16a (The Message)
1Christ has set us free to live a free life. So take your stand! Never again let anyone put a harness of slavery on you. . .13-15It is absolutely clear that God has called you to a free life. Just make sure that you don’t use this freedom as an excuse to do whatever you want to do and destroy your freedom. Rather, use your freedom to serve one another in love; that’s how freedom grows. For everything we know about God’s Word is summed up in a single sentence: Love others as you love yourself. That’s an act of true freedom. If you bite and ravage each other, watch out—in no time at all you will be annihilating each other, and where will your precious freedom be then?16aMy counsel is this: Live freely, animated and motivated by God’s Spirit.
Introduction
This seems like a good season to talk about freedom. We just celebrated Juneteenth, followed by Pride Sunday, followed by July 4th — all celebrations of emancipation, deliverance, and freedom from tyrannies of control over bodies, souls and minds. There’s also a sad irony to talk of freedom these days. Lately, the word “freedom” seems to me to be every politician and red-white-and-blue Christian’s favorite word. Freedom seems to be the catch-all response for almost any argument, especially those a person otherwise has no reasonable answer for. “Senator, what’s your opinion about the deficit? Freedom! Governor, what about gun safety? Freedom! Banning-books? Freedom! Global Warming? Pot-holes? World Wide Wrestling? Freedom! Fries? Freedom fries!
Far too many – including some on the Supreme Court — fear genuine freedom, the actual full-bodied emancipation of black and brown and women and queer and indigenous and poor bodies, souls, and minds as just too much freedom for any country or church to bear.
Early in my childhood, in the apartheid South, I heard an old preacher once say, “There is no such thing as a little freedom. Either you are all free, or you are not free at all!” Wow! I thought. Am I really free to be that free? Scar-y!
Let’s take a few minutes this morning to wrestle with such a generous notion of freedom found in five short-stories:
First, a story from 350 years ago
There was a time when Christians throughout Europe and in the early Americas believed that Christians should NOT be enslaved or enslave others. There was a “catch” however, a loophole in that understanding. Since Africans were considered “heathens” and only 3/5 human (according to Article I, Section 2 of the U.S. Constitution), it was okay to enslave non-Christian heathens. Well, given that criteria, wouldn’t you know it, the enslaved black folk of the early Americas out-loopholed the loophole. They became Christians and got baptized! Recorded in church annals of the time was the admission that the “Negroes” had outwitted the white church folk, by getting baptized, with the “worldly and perverse aims that [. . . ] they wanted nothing else but to deliver their children bodily from slavery. . .”[1] Imagine that! Baptism meant freedom!
In the late 1600’s, clearly understanding the implications of the necessary link between baptism and freedom, the Virginia State Assembly ratified a law which declared “that the conferring of baptism does not alter the condition of a person as to their bondage or freedom.”[2] The white slave-owning Christians apparently “cared more about saving slavery than saving souls.”[3] Slave-holding-Christians decoupled baptism from freedom so that they could now proselytize freely without fear of losing their slaves. Too much of that kind of proselytizing is still going on even today – the decoupling of the social gospel from the “winning” of souls.
Ninety-six-year-old Opal Lee, the “grandmother of Juneteenth,” spent most of her life trying to get June 19 recognized as a federal holiday. By her own testimony, her faith in the God of freedom kept alive for her the hope of getting our nation to acknowledge this national holiday when the last slaves were finally set-free, two years after the Emancipation Proclamation of Abraham Lincoln.
Story number two, 500 years ago
In 1525, our foreparents in the faith, early anabaptists, declared themselves free from the State-Churches of the time be they Catholic, Lutheran or Reformed. They insisted on the inherent right of adults to decide for themselves to believe or not, the free choice to believe ratified by baptism. This defiant act got them killed. This “baptist” or “anabaptist move” was not simply a radical move to the left of a Catholic-Protestant magisterial continuum as so many history books tell it. Many historians call this, “the left-wing or radical wing” of the Protestant movement. Rather, IMHO, it was more or less sui generis, nothing less than a fissure in the whole hegemonic enterprise of the time — a move based upon these folks reading the New Testament, as well as being influenced by the scientific revolution of the time.[4] One might call this the great “anabaptist” coup of the world! And I mean that seriously, spiritually and politically!
This radical movement would start an ideological shift in the whole Western democratic experiment writ large. Two-hundred and fifty years before any Western democracy wrote these inherent freedoms of the individual and its corollary, the separation of church and state, into their constitutions, these early 16th century anabaptists had proclaimed these truths to be self-evident. They were way ahead of their time. Countless anabaptists of this period paid dearly with their lives, as recorded in the Martyrs Mirror,[5] first published in 1660, to ensure the freedom to freely believe or not to believe without state-church compulsion.
One young believer of the time, Anna of Rotterdam,[6] was twenty-four years old when she made the decision to be baptized into a “despised and illegal company of radical Christians,” a decision that changed her life dramatically. A neighbor heard her and a friend singing so-called anabaptist freedom songs and reported her. She was arrested and burned at the stake. She gave up her son, Michael, to a baker-friend for protection, who later became the mayor of the very city that killed his mother. Anna’s testament to her son is among the most beloved of the many letters from prison included in the Martyrs Mirror:
My [beloved] son, do not regard how great the multitudes are, nor walk in their ways. But where you hear of a poor, simple, cast-off little flock, which is despised and rejected by the world, join them; for where you hear of the cross, there is Christ…Honor the Lord in the works of your hands, and let the light [of freedom proclaimed by] the Gospel shine through you. Love your neighbor. Deal with an open, warm heart to all. Give your bread to the hungry, clothe the naked, and do not tolerate having two of anything, because there are always those who are in need. [For freedom, Christ made us free.][7]
Story number three, 2600 years ago
The prophet Jeremiah, in our reading this morning, issued his own “emancipation proclamation” to the enslaved Jews in Jerusalem under their Jewish King Zedekiah’s rule in a “covenant of release” or “of liberty” (Jer. 34:8-14).[8] The overwhelming significance of this freedom story in the sweep of biblical stories about freedom is manifold.
First, Jeremiah is hearkening back to the biblical origin story of freedom when God freed the Hebrew slaves from Pharoah in Exodus. Jeremiah further underscores the biblical precedence to his proclamation by reminding would-be slaveholders of his day that the laws of Jubilee in Torah required the release of slaves from bondage as a matter of course every seven years (Deut. 15:1-18). Indeed, in this account Jeremiah issues this proclamation to elite Jews in Jerusalem who, after having released their own slaves in accordance with the law, re-enslaved them for reasons not explained in the text, though likely the same reasons slaveholders anywhere want their slaves back when they escape or otherwise are granted freedom. The economic benefits to the slaveholder are just too good!
The greatest irony of all in this story is that Jeremiah’s proclamation to his fellow Jews happens at the very moment when Jerusalem as a city is under siege by King Nebuchadnezzar of Babylon and they are all about to become indentured exiles under foreign imperial power not unlike their ancestors long ago in Egypt. Worse still, Jeremiah uses his proclamation in an upside-down argument of sorts as both a judgment on slaveholding Jews of Jerusalem as to the reason for their recall into imperial enslavement under Babylon and, simultaneously, as reason why King Zedekiah should submit to Babylon for a period of years, knowing of God’s ultimate will and power to free them at some future time. Bottom line, inside and out, for Jeremiah, freedom is in God’s nature. The manumission of slaves, the act of distributive justice for the disempowered, the cause of freedom for all past and future captives of whatever type, and the ongoing scriptural grounding of all future emancipation proclamations was once again rehearsed here by the prophet Jeremiah.
Story number four, 2000 years ago
Some have called the Apostle Paul’s letter to the Galatian church an “emancipation proclamation” of its own.[9] Others have called it the “Magna Carta of Liberty.” Indeed, Paul’s comments in chapter 5 are so far-reaching, so liberating, so absolutely radical, and so truly anabaptist (anachronistically), that it comes with a warning:
1 “Christ has set us free to live a free life. So, take your stand! Never again let anyone put a harness of slavery on you.” [Paul will go on to elaborate on what he views as these harnesses of slavery, namely, laws about circumcision or any other rigid legal requirements of the time that hindered the emancipatory liberation found in the message of Jesus]
13-15 “It is absolutely clear that God has called you to a free life. [Here’s where Paul offers his warning. He knew that this freedom God was calling us to was clearly being heard in such emancipatory and radical ways, as it should be in such a repressive world, that he issued this caveat:] “Just make sure that you don’t use this freedom as an excuse to do whatever you want to do and destroy your freedom! Rather, use your freedom to serve one another in love; that’s how freedom grows. For everything we know about God’s Word is summed up in a single sentence: Love others as you love yourself. That’s an act of true freedom. If you bite and ravage each other, watch out—in no time at all you will be annihilating each other, and where will your precious freedom be then? 16a My counsel is this: Live freely, animated and motivated by God’s Spirit.
For the Apostle Paul, the only truly guiding principle regarding regulatory control on this wild and crazy freedom offered in Christ was that of “love!” — specifically, loving others as you love yourself. In these liberating words, I hear echoes of Opal Lee echoing Anna of Rotterdam echoing St. Paul echoing the words of Jesus echoing Jeremiah echoing Moses in the Torah that such radical freedom requires radical responsibility for others: “Love others as you love yourself. This is an act of true [or ultimate] freedom.”
Story number five, July 9, 2023 and beyond
Most of you by now have heard about the rise of “nones” (the religiously non-affiliated, who call themselves “spiritual but not religious”): Millennials, Gen X and Gen Zers. I’m not in that demographic group, but I sure can resonate with their sentiments at times. The “nones” are now the second largest and fastest growing spiritually inclined group in the U.S., behind only evangelical Protestants. In many ways, they are “canaries in the coal mine” of the relentless downward trend over the past several decades of the younger generation fleeing the church in droves. I do not wish to belabor that point.[10]
I do want to belabor some positive trends that have emerged as a result of this post-post-modern, post-Christian, post-institutional trend among the religiously unaffiliated and also among those still committed to a faith tradition. Turns out, according to 3-4 surveys (Pew, et al), these “nones” and Gen Zers value freedom, service, community, social justice, non-hierarchal, voluntary free choice in shaping their own spiritual formation. In addition, they insist on diversity, inclusion and belonging as integral to any “spiritual” experience worth consideration. And many hold these core values without any sense of needed reference to the Divine or to Jesus. In short, the self-description of the so-called “nones” and emerging generations, unknown to most of them, largely aligns with the very historic “anabaptist” freedoms I am pointing to this morning.
Martin Marty, the great Lutheran historian, once wrote: “the anabaptist style, posture, spirit, and attitude that pervades anabaptist thought and action represents the most dramatic shift in power as it relates to the Church and style on the Christian scene in our time.” He calls this the “baptistfication” or “anbaptistfication” of U.S. society at its best.[11] [Note: he doesn’t talk about anbaptist doctrine, but practice, style, spirit as it relates to power shifts!]
In an irony of ironies, in a mystery of mysteries, in a ‘hidden’ revelation often undermined by our very own faith family, there still is, in my opinion, a holy loophole to all spiritual loopholes: the possibility of an ongoing “anabaptistfication” of the world. Freedom of thought, freedom of speech, freedom of choice, freedom to believe or not, soul freedom, Bible freedom, church freedom, religious freedom, freedom to love others as themselves (JC’s second commandment) all together, offer a great and liberating spirituality attractive to the next generation of would-be believers according to their own self-described values. Like so many others before us who have proclaimed such generous wide-open freedoms – Mennonites (we), have also, too often, backslid into trying to control by dogma and restricted interpretation, rather than to allow love be the ultimate guide to belonging.
So, let us hold on to the anabaptist core values, even if we no longer need to use such baptisty-or-anabaptisy language to describe ourselves. Being followers of Jesus, the great liberator, who has set us free to love one another may just be the best gift we give to those longing for true emancipation and freedom. For whom Christ has set free, is free, indeed.
Conclusion
In summary, if you are an LGBTQ person, celebrating Pride month or Pride Sunday, halfway between Juneteenth and the 4th of July, the word “anabaptist” ought to say to you, “Live free, never let anyone put a harness of slavery upon you. For whomever Christ set free, is free, indeed.” If you are an indigenous person, or person of color, still struggling to claim the liberating principles of the U.S. Declaration of Independence for yourself, the word “anabaptist” ought to underscore the truth that “all men [and women] are endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable rights: life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.” “For whomever Christ has set free is free indeed!” If you are an unbeliever, the word anabaptist ought to mean to you, you are free, NOT to believe. “For whomever Christ has set free, is free indeed!” If you are a person feeling belittled and bound by voices of oppression and bondage of any kind, whether in your psyche, soul, against your body, or by the voices of political or public institutions, the word “anabaptist” ought to mean to you that “Christ has set you free to live a free life. So, take your stand! Never again let anyone put a harness of slavery on you. . . For whomever Christ set free, is free indeed!”
Song of Response
When Terri and I first returned to California, one of the first invitations we received was to the home of now 90-year-old beloved friend, Rev. Dr. Dale Edmondson and his wife Alice. A few years back, to celebrate the full inclusion of LGBTQ believers into the church, something he and Alice had been advocating for some 45 years, Dale penned different words to the old familiar tune, How Firm a Foundation. This hymn, for me, captures the spirit of freedom, the holy loophole of grace, that guides us into a hope-filled future where everyone, by their own free choice, can become part of God’s beloved community:
Affirmed by our Maker, we come without fear,
for Jesus invites us to find welcome here.
As part of a stream of great prophets long past,
who told of God’s justice and peace that will last.
When churches condemn us and parents cast out,
we cling to the good news – God’s love conquers doubt.
We come to the table where friendship is found,
forgiveness is known and our praises resound.
The way of our Maker we now celebrate,
with welcome and blessing to banish the hate.
The many-hued fabric, God’s wisdom has made
is woven of people no longer afraid.
[1] Ibid, 28
[2] Ibid, 43
[3] Ibid, 28
[4] Gilland, David Andrew, “Anabaptist Influences on American Religious Pluralism,” American Studies Journal, No. 63, (2017), http://www.asjournal.org/63-2017/anabaptist-influences-american-religious-pluralism/#
[5] Van Braught, Thieleman, Martyrs Mirror, Scottdale, PA, Herald Press, 3rd English Edition, 1886, Fifth, 1950.
[6] Ibid, 453-454
[7] Ibid, 454.
[8] Keown, Gerald L., Pamela Scalise, Thomas Smothers, Jeremiah 26-52 Word Biblical Commentary, Vol 27, TX: Word, 1995, 181-190.
[9] I have deliberately chosen the English translation of The Message version because it provides a dynamic equivalence to the original and symbolizes the challenge to make the Bible relevant to a new generation.
[10] https://www.pewforum.org/2019/10/17/in-u-s-decline-of-christianity-continues-at-rapid-pace/
[11] Marty, Martin, “Baptistification Takes Over,” Christianity Today, Sept 2, 1983, 33-36.
