You Are Free!

Hosea 1.2-10; Psalm 85; Col 2.6-19; Luke 11.1-13 

When Paul wrote to the Colossian church he did so in order to address a familiar problem.  It seems that there were a number of people from the church who, having begun in the life of faith through their baptism into Christ, were now failing to go on with it.  They were forsaking their new lifestyle and returning to the way of life they had lived before they became Christians.

A bit of background on that.  Before coming to believe in Christ and his ways, most of the Colossians had been good people after the Greco-Roman way.  Colossae was a colonial town.  Though most of its citizens were not Roman by birth, they had long lived under the yoke of the Roman Imperium.  So, even though the population was ethnically mixed, even cosmopolitan in make-up, most people—by either choice or necessity—lived like Romans.  In practise, that meant a number of things.  Because Roman culture was strictly hierarchical, life could be pretty hard if you were not one of the few male aristocrats.  If you were a child, a woman, or a slave you had to obey the patriarch of the house in all things, and you could be put to death if you didn’t.  What this meant, for most households, was that life was run according to a distinct economic code.  It was the patriarch’s prime duty to improve the family’s fortunes, and one could only do that by two means: by sucking up to someone else, another man, who was higher up the hierarchy than oneself; and by exploiting those who were below you in the hierarchy.  This economic code meant that pretty much anything was permissible with regard to the way a man treated his inferiors.  He could ask them to do anything, and they had to do it in order to gain his favour.  On the other hand, that man was usually, himself and his household, at the beck and call of his own ‘betters’, and therefore little more than a slave himself.

Now, in amongst all that, many Roman households could follow a pretty strict religious life.  There were plenty of philosophies and religious ideas on offer in the Colossae marketplace, and they were taken up in great numbers.  Usually by men who wanted some kind of respite from the bondage of their economic duties, or by women who were seeking refuge from the extremely circumscribed nature of their slavery to male conceit.  Many of the philosophies upon offer prescribed strict diets and ascetic techniques to discipline the body and its appetites.  Others prescribed a rather extreme permissiveness with regard to the body and sexuality.  In either case, it is clear to modern observers that most of these body-centred religions may be understood as grabs for freedom: where, in social and economic life, one was bonded to a master’s will, at least one could attempt to control one’s body—whether that be by limiting it’s appetites or by giving oneself over to a permissiveness that went far beyond what was socially acceptable.

Now, this Roman way of life was so deeply inscribed in the hearts and souls of the Colossians that it was clearly very difficult for them to stick with the new, and radically different, way of life offered by Christ.  Having been bonded for so long to human masters and to economic necessity, the message of Christian grace and freedom at first seemed exactly the remedy.  For grace promised to break through the power of the economic and moral codes, nailing them to the cross with Christ.  In the preaching of Paul, the Colossians heard that because God loved and accepted them, they were free to be all that they could not be under the yoke of social duty and expectation.  They were free to love as Christ loved them.  They were free to disappoint their betters, but they were also free to release their inferiors from obligation.  In time, however, this all freedom proved rather difficult to live out in practice.  One could lose so very much of what one had gained socially and economically.   One could lose one’s reputation and status.  If one was left with Christ alone, or with his community, would that be enough?

And that, I think, is a question that haunts the many people you and I know who began with faith in Christ, but then seemed to slip away, back into the mainstream of modern Western life and culture.  Is Christ enough, or do I need to realise the expectations of my parents, my social class, and my friends as well?

Well, obviously, as a preacher of the gospel, I believe that Christ and his community are indeed enough.  I believe that it is the crushing weight of social expectation and consumerism which is killing us all.  You’ve heard me speak of such things before.  In contrast to all that, what Christ offers is love, unconditional acceptance, which has the power to free us for joy, peace and the practise of a genuinely hospitable love towards others which is not about the need to either impress them, or to persevere oneself against them.  Neverthleless, it is indeed difficult to live according to this gospel when all around people and advertising and parental figures and God-knows-what-else are telling you exactly the opposite.

Which is why the early church invented what is today known as ‘the catechumenate’.  The word ‘catechumenate’ is derived from the Greek word ‘echo’, which means to imitate or ‘echo’what one sees and hears from a teacher.  The catechumenate was, and is today, a Christian education process by which an explorer learns how to be a Christian through a process of action and reflection which can last for up to three years before one is then baptised or confirmed as a member of the church.

Now, the catechumenate was put aside for many hundreds of years, those years in which the church gained ascendency in society, and became the official religion of kingdoms and empires.  But we now live, again, in a situation much like that of the early church, where the way of Christ is very difficult to live out because it is so radically counter-cultural.  In circumstances such as these it is not enough to preach the gospel and expect that everyone will understand what we are talking about.  Neither is it enough to baptise children willy-nilly and hope that their parents will be Christian enough to raise their children in the faith.  We can no longer be so naïve.  Like the early church, we must recognise that the Christian way is difficult to live.  That in order to live this life, we must immerse ourselves in a really very foreign and counter-intuitive system of ideas and practices.  That in order to accomplish this successfully, we need to be de-colonised, we need to be re-educated with regard to the values we inherit from family and society.  And that takes time, effort, and a great deal of moral support from others who already live this life faithfully.  The catechumenate is a period of preparation in which people are invited to explore and learn the faith of the church over an extended period of at least 60 weeks; and only then, having immersed themselves deeply in the diverse practise of Christian theology, prayer and mission, would they be invited to respond to Christ’s call upon their lives by being baptised.  For baptism, as Paul understood, can only ‘stick’ if people are given a thorough preparation.  The catechumenate is the church’s way of teaching candidates about the freedom offered by Christ.  It has been rediscovered and re-embraced by many churches since the mid-sixties, including and is finally becoming denominational policy in the Uniting Church.  I have been pleading for its introduction for many years, and I will be pleading for its introduction into this church community from the beginning of Lent next year.

Baptism, you see, is about putting away the basic values and principles of the world around us—dying to them—in order to embrace the new way of Christ.  It is about putting of the old clothes of our worldly habitus and putting on the new clothes of Christ’s way of life instead.  Baptism marks a radical break with the old way of life in favour of a whole new outlook and being which may be learned from Christ alone.

I invite you to talk with me about what that might mean for us.  Because unless we can show people how to be free, with our lives and with our words, people will never learn how to be free  in the way that Christ intends.

Glory be to God—Father, Son & Holy Spirit—as in the beginning, so now and forever.  Amen.