Sermon for the Fifth Sunday after Pentecost, July 2, 2023

Jeremiah 28:5-9+Psalm 89:1-4,15-18+Romans 6:12-23+Matthew 10:40-42

These days, we self-sufficient and independent Americans do our best to avoid slave language. I mean, our history of enslaving others should make us uncomfortable, but to ignore the word altogether is to gaslight our culpability in that, I think.

The bible – both old and new testaments, - is rife with slavery. Whether it’s the Hebrew word עבד (ébed) or the Greek word δοῦλος (doulos), our tendency to render it as “servant” rather than “slave” obscures the true meaning. We often hear that the great exodus out of bondage in Egypt was the quintessential text of liberation for those enslaved on these shores. And it is. And yet, when you dive into the story of the Israelites once they reach the promised land, it is pretty clear that any restriction on slavery applied only to fellow Israelites. Those conquered in war or from outside the family of Israel were fair game. It may not have been the kind of chattel slavery practiced in this country, but slavery is slavery: you cannot leave, you must do as you are told, you are not paid, you are subject to violence, and, if you are a woman, your body is not your own.

We get a lot of slavery talk from the Apostle Paul this morning.

Do you not know that if you present yourselves to anyone as obedient slaves, you are slaves of the one whom you obey, either of sin, which leads to death, or of obedience, which leads to righteousness? But thanks be to God that you, having once been slaves of sin, have become obedient from the heart to the form of teaching to which you were entrusted, and that you, having been set free from sin, have become slaves of righteousness. (Romans 6:16-18)

I am reminded of the Bob Dylan song that goes

But you're gonna have to serve somebody, yes indeed
You're gonna have to serve somebody
Well, it may be the Devil or it may be the Lord
But you're gonna have to serve somebody.[1]

Paul knows what it is to be enslaved to sin because he says so in his own story over and over again. He was the worst of sinners. Next week, our reading from Romans begins, “I do not understand my own actions. For I do not do what I want, but I do the very thing I hate” (7:15). The struggle is real, y’all. It’s like we are addicted to doing whatever we want, even when we know it’s going to hurt us. The old prayer of confession says, “we have followed too much the devices and desires of our own hearts” (BCP 320), and if we are following our own hearts, we are not following the One in whose image we were created. We are not enslaved to righteousness.

Jesus knew this, too. What does he talk about more than anything else? Money. He knows that we are enslaved to money. “No one can serve two masters,” he says, “for a slave will either hate the one and love the other or be devoted to the one and despise the other. You cannot serve God and wealth” (Matthew 6:24). If we are slaves to our possessions, we are not slaves to God.

But what does that even mean, to be a slave to God or to righteousness? Well, by the earlier definition I laid out, we simply do not belong to ourselves. We belong to God. In a little while, we will sing these words in our communion hymn, “Take my will and make it thine; it shall be no longer mine.”[2] The goal of the Christian life, not in some far-off heaven but right here and right now, is to be Christ in this world, to knit our wills to God’s will, to be slaves of righteousness, because we have been freed from bondage – from enslavement - to sin. That is no longer who we are. Paul would later write, “And he died for all, so that those who live might live no longer for themselves, but for him who died and was raised for them” (2 Corinthians 5:15).

In today’s gospel, we come to the end of Matthew, chapter 10, a section devoted to the sending out of the disciples. They are to take nothing with them. They are to heal and cast our demons and raise the dead. They are to be wholly dependent on the hospitality of those they meet, and as a reward, they will suffer persecutions. As we saw last week, they will be separated from their families and those they love because they have given their will, their life, over to Jesus. They have lost their lives in order to find them.

It is a hard teaching. Christians will debate rules about sex and women in church and who’s in or out until the cows come home, but we will not entrust everything we have – our money and our very lives – to follow the way of the cross. Sure, some have done so over the course of the past two millennia, but we remember the Francises and the Teresas and the Julians and the Clares precisely because they are the exceptions rather than the rule.

So where does that leave us? Right there with Paul, recognizing that “we have no power in ourselves to help ourselves” as the Lenten collect goes (BCP 218). Our liberation from sin and death comes from being slaves to Christ, slaves to righteousness. Our wages are not death but eternal life. So, if we’re gonna have to serve somebody, I think Jesus might just be the way to go.

[1] https://www.bobdylan.com/songs/gotta-serve-somebody/

[2] The Hymnal 1982, #707.