The Declaration of Dependence

This weekend, as the sun goes down behind Pikes Peak, the skies over Colorado Springs, like tens of thousands of other towns from California to New York, are going to fill up with that familiar noise and smell and sight that happens every 4th of July. It’s the sound of a free people celebrating the day they stopped asking permission from the royalty across the pond.

I love it. I love this country and I love celebrating the 4th of July. I want to say that up front, clearly, before I say anything else, because what follows is going to take an unexpected turn, and I don’t want you to think I’m complaining about anything related to being an American. I’m a very grateful citizen of this remarkable country. When our founding fathers signed their names to one of the most important documents in the history of the world, declaring that we are endowed by our Creator with certain unalienable rights, they were doing something the world had, for the most part, never seen. They were declaring their independence. Freedom from something, from a king and from a tax and from a distant crown that presumed ownership. Not anymore, we said. And I love that mentality.

And then there’s that bell, the Liberty Bell. You know the one, the one in Philadelphia. Around the crown of the bell is a line from the Bible that, believe it or not, comes from the book of Leviticus. Proclaim liberty throughout all the land unto all the inhabitants thereof. That’s the jubilee verse, the old command to forgive debts every fifty years, free slaves, and return land. Everyone is given a clean slate and sent home. Our founding fathers heard freedom in it, and they were right to do so.

There is something about that bell that is obviously just a coincidence, but I can’t help weaving it into this evening’s blog. The Liberty Bell is cracked. The most famous symbol of American liberty is cracked, and consequently it cannot ring. Let freedom ring. The very instrument that was chosen to proclaim freedom is split right down the middle, and apart from what’s written on it, it doesn’t proclaim anything, not vibrationally anyway. And I don’t think that’s an embarrassment so much as I think it’s a sermon opportunity, or a blog opportunity.

I’m going to come at this the way a physicist would, because, after all, I am the Physics Pastor from the Santa Cruz Mountains. In my secular line of work there is a phrase, degrees of freedom. It’s the number of independent ways something is able to move. A free object floating in space has six degrees of freedom. It can slide back and forth, up and down, left and right, and it can turn three ways as well. Those are the ways a scientist talks about an object’s freedom, as if it’s answering to nothing, totally independent, with maximum freedom as far as the engineer is concerned.

Einstein once said that the happiest thought of his life was the realization that a man in free fall does not feel his own weight. That made him very happy. Step off a ledge, then for one infinitesimally small moment you are weightless. You are utterly free. There’s no floor pushing back at you. It’s as if you have no burden and nothing holding on to you. Except, of course, something is. Gravity still has you completely. You have never in your life been more thoroughly held by any force than in the instant you feel most freed from it. The freest feeling state in all of physics is the state of total surrender to the very thing that owns you. You stop resisting the pull, and the pull becomes the thing that carries you. That’s a form of freedom. And of course I can’t help myself, I see another opportunity to say something about the cross of Christ.

There are two kinds of freedom, and the 4th of July can only hand you one of them. The first freedom is freedom from something. It’s when you break the chain or throw off the king, declaring your independence and standing on your own two feet. It’s a real freedom and a great one, and a lot of wonderful people have died so that you and I can stand in it. I will salute the flag this weekend with a full and grateful heart for those people. I will also notice what the 4th of July does not do for us. It cannot reach inside and do anything about the chain that binds us within. You know the chain I mean, the one no fireworks can touch, the resentment you cannot quite set down, the habit you swore off in the spring and were imprisoned by again in the fall. No declaration ever signed has freed a single human being from himself.

For that kind of freedom, you need somebody else. For freedom Christ has set us free, Paul writes. Stand firm, then, and do not submit again to a yoke of slavery. If the Son makes you free, you will be free indeed. And this is where the whole thing, for me, turns inside out. If you’re familiar with the Necker cube, or the drawing that is both a young wife and an old mother-in-law, or even the image that is both a duck and a rabbit, here is where I call on one of those images. The liberty that actually reaches the bottom of your soul, that unties the Gordian knot at the center of who you are, was not won by somebody declaring his independence. It was won by a man declaring the opposite.

Go back to the garden the night before, the Garden of Gethsemane, and listen to the freest human being who ever lived, the one nobody could arrest unless he allowed it, and hear his prayer. He prayed some of the least independent words in all of human history. Not my will, but yours, be done. He prayed it knowing exactly what the morning would cost, and he prayed it with you somewhere in his mind, because love is the one freedom that always looks, from the outside, like surrender. Then he walks out and lets them nail his hands and feet, anything but freedom, securing him to a beam and taking away every last degree of freedom. Jesus can’t move up or down, left or right, forward or backward. He cannot slide or turn or swat away a fly. The freest man alive was held fixed in place. That is very much like that instant of free fall. It is the happiest thought in the mind of Christ. He stopped resisting the pull of the Father’s will, and that pull became the thing that carried him, carried him and you and me and all of us all the way down through death and back out the other side of it.

The Liberty Bell cracked in its proclamation of liberty. The Son of God did his own version of that as he broke clean, clean in half, doing the exact same thing. This is my body, broken for you. And somehow it is precisely in the breaking, in the cracking, in the failure to ring out liberty the way we imagine it, that the clearest expression of our dependent independence, or to say it the other way around, our independent dependence, is manifested.

Enjoy the fireworks this weekend. More importantly, mean every single word of the anthem you sing, because freedom from something is worth celebrating. But don’t stop there, because Scripture won’t let you. You were called to freedom, Paul says, and then he immediately says, do not use your freedom as an opportunity for the flesh, but through love serve one another. Freedom from something is for the sake of freedom for something. We have been sprung from the old yoke, not so we can wander loose, but so that we can be placed into a better one, the easy one, the kind one, the lovely one, the only burden in the universe that makes you lighter the moment you step into its gravitational field. Where the Spirit of the Lord is, there is liberty. This weekend this great free country will declare one more time its glorious independence, and quietly, underneath all the noise and celebration and barbecuing and fireworks, an empty tomb will go on declaring something stranger and deeper and better and more universal, namely, that the truest freedom any of us will ever taste came out of the most dependent act there ever was. A man who let go, who fell, and rose again. I’m Frank Balgeman, the Physics Pastor from the Santa Cruz Mountains. Have a wonderful 4th of July.