The next day, we returned to the same area, a majority African-American neighborhood. We picked up trash in a neighborhood of small shotgun houses, cracked sidewalks, shabby-looking churches, small corner stores, empty lots. Not much like Scottsdale, but not a slum. A quiet, peaceful place.
One of the revelations of a trip like this is the opportunity to interact with people from a different place. So every person we encountered, we stopped to talk, and we soon learned that the code of behavior in New Orleans is that you smile and greet everyone you see with a “Hi, how y’all doin’?” Most everyone we met wanted to know where we were from and what we were doing, and all of them smiled and said thank you, and seemed truly grateful that we cared about them and their neighborhood – glad to know that 6 years after Hurricane Katrina, they haven’t been forgotten.
One of my favorite interactions was with a man who came out to his car while we were walking by his house – he smiled, asked how we were doing and where we were from. When two girls in our group said they were from Dallas, he said “Mavericks!” and they smiled and gave a thumbs-up, and immediately we were all on common ground – basketball.
“Here’s something you need to know,” he said. “Those Mavericks, back before they won the championship, back when everyone was talking about them and saying they had no chance, that they were going to lose it all, that they were a terrible team with terrible players – way back then, they were already winners. Think about it! If you’re going to win, you’re already a winner, long before you know you’re going to win!”
So – you may already be a winner! Now I’m listening carefully to what he is saying, because of course I save up stories like this to tell you in sermons, and I’m trying to get the sermon lesson out of it. So I quickly think up two possible life lessons he may be trying to tell us: One: you may already be a winner, but does that imply that you may already be a loser too? That’s not such a heart-warming lesson. Or two: God was on the Mavericks’ side, and God decided they deserved to be winners and made it happen, like a player controlling the little men in a Foosball game (or whatever the basketball version is of Foosball). Well, I don’t believe that God controls us like puppets and decrees in advance what we all are going to do – else God has a lot to answer for, paying attention to the Dallas Mavericks and forgetting about all the suffering going on in the world.
So, working to make this into a sermon for you all, I asked him – do you mean that whatever you’re meant to be, you already have that inside you? You already have what you need to be a winner, you just need to work to make it happen? And he smiled at me, and he said yes, that’s what I mean. Now wasn’t that lovely that we created a sermon together.
So – you may already be a winner! Because what you need, you already have! Which is an appropriate concept to consider, on a day we call “Freedom Sunday.” It’s the Fourth of July holiday weekend – a time to celebrate our American heritage and the freedom we are blessed with. I want to be clear – as Christians we know that our ultimate allegiance is to our God – our allegiance to our country always comes second.
Nevertheless, freedom is a very Christian concept, one which the Bible discusses in detail. The Founders didn’t dream up the idea of freedom, they attempted to enshrine it in a governmental structure. And they weren’t entirely successful, not immediately – for long after the Declaration of Independence was signed, slaves were still being offloaded in Algiers Point. But the governmental structure the founders of our country created did make it possible for enslaved and oppressed people to struggle over the centuries for their freedom.
But the physical freedom of emancipation, liberty from tyranny, freedom of religion, speech, press, the other freedoms we take for granted in our country - this is only part of the kind of freedom Paul is talking about in our New Testament lesson. Christian freedom encompasses this kind of political freedom – we Christians believe it is everyone’s right to struggle for freedom, because the kingdom of God Jesus proclaimed is one where everyone is free. But it is more than that too – Paul, in his letter today and last week, is talking about Christian freedom from sin. In the excerpt from Romans we read last week, he says specifically that before the Roman church found Christ, they were slaves to sin. When they gave their lives to Christ, they became instead “slaves to righteousness.” Which begs the question – what is Christian freedom if it simply means trading one kind of servitude for another? If we give up being slaves to sin (yet find ourselves caught in the bonds of sin over and over, as Paul describes today), and become servants of God instead, how is that freedom?
This is the question that Jesus addresses in his famous lines in the gospel today: “Come to me, all you who are heavy-laden, and I will give you rest. Take my yoke upon you, and learn from me, for I am gentle and humble in heart, and you will find rest for your souls. For my yoke is easy, and my burden is light.” Jesus says when we accept what he offers, that we are not throwing off all yokes – we are taking a new yoke upon us, like a pair of oxen yoked together. But he says that we are yoked with Jesus himself. Yoked together with Jesus, our burdens are easy, for he carries the weight.
So what does that mean in 21st century America, the land of freedom and opportunity? For people like us who have all the political freedom we need, what burdens can we shift to Jesus, and what does it mean to take on Jesus’ yoke instead? I look around me, and we are very stressed and anxious about many things. For a group of generally fortunate people, we worry about our jobs, our school work, our crime rate, our education system, our politics, our economy. And ordinary people have such busy schedules that we often can’t make time for God, families, or ourselves – our blood pressure soars, our stress level skyrockets. Methodist bishop and preacher William H. Willimon predicted that "our age shall be known, not as the age of freedom, but as the age of anxiety. We are anxious about many things: having enough money, having good enough health, being secure and safe." In a way, we are yoked, bound, by all our cares, obligations, and anxieties.
Freedom in Christ means making the free choice to shift our attention away from ourselves to God and other people, and to live according to the law of love, the easy and light yoke that Jesus offers.
I think that taking on Jesus’ yoke is exactly what our youth did last week. By their own free choice, they took time away from their busy, stressed schedules – summer time when they could have been relaxing with friends, and used that time to help others, and to explore their relationship with God. Take my yoke upon me, and learn from me, says Jesus.
Our young people learned what it was like to give of themselves for others – in hard work like picking up trash on a melting hot New Orleans day; in everyday interactions with people on the street, like our wise preacher man; in their careful attention as we toured the Katrina Exhibit and the still-devastated areas of the Lower Ninth Ward; and in their prayers and their willingness to look for God on streets of New Orleans.
In giving up their time for the sake of God and the sake of other people, I think each of our youth discovered something new about themselves. I heard some amazing things from them as we shared at the end of each day. And I will let them tell you something about it themselves, on July 24. But what I think perhaps each of them found, in some way, was that they were already a winner – that God had already given them everything they needed to become who they are called to be: servants of Christ and servants of each other, who find their freedom as they freely learn to love and serve other people.
The same is true for all of us, whether we go on dramatic, life-transforming mission trips or not. Every time we make the choice to love God with all our heart, soul, mind, and strength, and to love our neighbor as ourselves, in action as well as in words, then we are allowing Christ to release us from a little bit more of our bondage to sin, cut the ties that bind us, re-create us from the inside out. We are finding in ourselves what was there already. Because God has already given us the gifts we need to be truly free in Christ.
