Leviticus 19:15-18, Galatians 5:1-6

"It is for freedom that Christ set us free."(Gal. 5:1) Paul wrote these words to the Christians in Galatia. He describes in that letter how he had gone to Jerusalem with Barnabas and Titus in order to argue with Peter and James, the brother of Jesus, for the freedom of Gentile converts from the Jewish law. Paul asserts that salvation comes through faith, as it did for Abraham, not through keeping the tenets of the law. Based on their memories of the ministry of Jesus, however, Peter and James seem to believe that Jesus had not taught freedom from the law.

Yet Paul, who did not know Jesus and writes as though he has no information about the teachings and ministry of Jesus, prevails in his argument with the apostles of the Jerusalem church. His letters are included in Christian scripture and are passed down from generation to generation. There are two main reasons for his success. First, within a decade of his death the Romans destroyed the Jerusalem church along with the Jewish temple and killed or scattered the Jewish Christians. Second, the Gentile congregations founded by Paul and others came to dominate the life and thought of the early Christian churches.

Paul argued for freedom, but it was the adoption of the canon in the fourth century that ensured freedom. Not only did the New Testament endorse Paul's letters, but it also included four gospels rather than one. Even as Paul's letters reflect his own experience and understanding, so these four gospels reflect the faith of different communities and church leaders.

For example, the Jesus of the gospel of Mark has power over spirits and nature itself and seems very much like the risen Christ of Paul's letters, which suggests a great deal of freedom in the telling of the gospel story for a largely Gentile Christian community. The gospel of Matthew reveals the struggle of Jewish Christians, despite their bitter rejection by Jews in the synagogue, to portray Jesus as the Messiah foretold by the Israelite prophets. The gospel of Luke and the Acts of the Apostles written by the same author orient Gentile Christians toward a universal ministry that will be coordinated by the church in Rome where, Acts relates, Paul spent his last days. And in the gospel of John, Jesus articulates the arguments of a Greek speaking Jewish Christian community against the synagogue that seems to have expelled them.

Christians have created doctrines and theologies to encompass all four gospels as well as Paul's letters, but the diversity of the early Christian experience is unmistakable to those with "ears to hear and eyes to see." Paul was more prophetic than he probably realized when he wrote, "It is for freedom that Christ set us free." The experience of Christ divided families, ignored lines drawn by class, culture and economic status, created opportunities for women, undermined political authority, and called men and women into new forms of common life.

Of course, by the time the New Testament canon was formed the church had the support of the Roman Empire and was crafting its orthodoxy in order to limit freedom. But the canon it created contains the seeds of freedom-in the writings of Paul and in the four gospel accounts-and these seeds were to bear fruit in the inspired lives of Catholic saints throughout the centuries and in the sixteenth century rebellion against Catholic hierarchy known as the Protestant Reformation. The struggle for freedom in the church was to inspire the struggle for political freedom both in the New and Old Worlds. And the missionary quest to bring the whole world under the reign of Christ was to stimulate both spiritual and political freedom in cultures that generally resisted both.

We are the modern beneficiaries of this astounding story. We take freedom of conscience for granted, because we belong to religious communities that have long affirmed this gospel lesson. Yet, I wonder if we fully appreciate what it means to be "set free by Christ for freedom?" We certainly enjoy our freedom, perhaps even taking a bit of pride in our defense of the right of conscience. But do we witness to the One who set us free? And do we work to guarantee freedom for others?

If our freedom is to be more than a privilege, if our freedom is to be good news for all people, then our witness must be to the free God who set us free for freedom-the God revealed in (but not restricted to) the Bible. If the word was made flesh in Jesus the Christ and that word was liberating and freeing, then the God who was (and is) in that word is the God of liberation and freedom. The good news is that nothing can separate us from the love of God that we have known in Jesus the Christ. The good news is that love is God's free gift and that only a free God could be so loving and so (for)giving.

Paul argued that we are saved by faith and not by the law, and hist argument was written into the gospels. In the gospel narratives attributed to Mark, Matthew and Luke, Jesus says over and over again that health and salvation come from faith. Of course, it is not likely that Jesus used the Greek noun for faith (pistis) or its verb (pisteuo), which Paul used in his letters. It may be that the statements of Jesus about faith, which are related in the gospels, were attributed to him after his death by Greek-speaking Gentile and Jewish Christians. Jesus may not have used the word "faith" at all in his call to embrace the kingdom of the one he called "Abba." But the call to faith is the way that early Christians, like Paul and the authors of the gospels, understood the teachings and the life of the one they knew only as the risen Lord.

Faith is the heart of the New Testament witness and links the gospel stories of the life and ministry of Jesus with Paul's letters to the early churches. It is crucial, therefore, to note that faith is not the same as belief, because in contemporary English the two words are sometimes used as synonyms. Faith, as the word is used in the Greek of the New Testament, refers to an act of trust involving the whole person. Belief, on the other hand, refers to an opinion or mental attitude. The Greek New Testament of the early churches is about faith not belief, as the translators of the King James Version knew when they rendered the New Testament into English. Faith is an act rooted in the heart. Belief is a state of mind. It is not belief in Jesus or God that is saving, but faith. It is trusting in Christ that brings one into the kingdom of God.

To avoid misunderstanding, the distinction between faith and belief must be kept clearly in mind when reading the New Testament. This is especially true when reading the gospel of John, as in the Greek only the verb for faith is present and in English the verb for faith is "believe." John 3:16, for instance, is generally translated as: "For God so loved the world that he gave his only son, that whoever believes in him may not perish but have eternal life." The Greek text uses the verb for faith. In English the phrase "believes in" should be understood to mean faith, but many who claim to read the scriptures literally understand this phrase to mean having the right beliefs about God and Jesus. To resist this corruption of the meaning of the passage, the Revised English Bible translates John 3:16 as: "God so loved the world that he gave his only Son, that everyone who has faith in him may not perish but have eternal life." The Revised English Bible uses the noun "faith" rather than translating the Greek verb literally with the English verb "believe," so we (and other readers of the New Testament) will make no mistake about what the gospel claims is essential for eternal life.

If the call to faith is to be liberating, faith must be understood as trust rather than as belief. To claim that we are saved by having the right set of beliefs about God and Christ is merely to substitute a new form of law for the ancient codes. The good news of the New Testament is that trust in God, who we know through the ancient scriptures of the Israelites, in the life and death and new life of Jesus the Christ, and in the continuing witness of Christian communities, is the way into the kingdom of God. Just as we cannot earn our way into the kingdom by keeping the tenets of the law, so we cannot achieve our entry by believing the right doctrines. It is by faith alone, which is God's free (or gracious) gift, that we may come to enjoy eternal life.

Might we see today that this good news is not just for members of the churches but for all people? Might we affirm that living in faith, whether one is a Christian or a Jew or a Muslim or a Buddhist or a Hindu or a Humanist, is the way to attain the eternal now? Loving God and loving one's neighbor, as we read in Leviticus and in the synoptic gospels, is the sum or spirit of the law. Paul knew that Gentiles as well as Jews could live such a faith. We know that Catholics as well as Protestants, and non-Christians as well as Christians, can live (and are living!) such a faith. And that is really good news! It is extraordinary, liberating, religion-shattering news!

To be sure, Jesus loved God and his neighbors in a special and unique way. But it was Paul who extended this love to Gentiles, and his successful ministry meant that the liberating experience of God in Christ was reflected more clearly in the teachings of Jesus as they are presented in the gospels. The parable of the Good Samaritan may have originally been a story of two men who passed by an injured man before a third stopped and helped him. But, in the hands of the author of the gospel of Luke who knew that Samaritans had been baptized into the church, this moral story became a parable of a Samaritan helping a Jew despite the long history of enmity between these two neighboring peoples.

Similarly, the gospels of Matthew and Luke tell of a Roman centurion who asks Jesus to heal his servant, and the gospels of Mark and Matthew report that a Canaanite woman begs Jesus to heal her daughter. In these accounts, which were written after Paul's ministry to the Gentiles, Jesus says that these two Gentiles have great faith. Moreover, their great faith is contrasted with the small faith of the disciples, who at the time Mark's gospel was written were the apostles being scattered by the Roman destruction of the Jerusalem church. The experience of the early churches was given articulation and authority in the gospels, and these along with Paul's letters have been embraced as life-shaping scripture by millions of people for two millennia.

The result is a message of good news that is manifested in the remarkable New Testament story of Paul and Jesus, who bear witness to the God of love and grace. Paul affirms, "It is for freedom that Christ set us free." And the gospels show us a man who lived that freedom as a Jewish teacher and healer within his community, a man who saw each person-whether male or female, slave or free, Jew or Gentile-as a beloved child of the one free and freeing God.

The struggle for freedom continues today, both within Christian communities and within secular society. Those who read the Bible literally and point to its pages as authority for their contemporary dogmas are unaware that their witness contradicts the gospel of freedom to which the Bible testifies. Those who read scripture as an historical document reflecting the experience and inspiration of early Christian communities have a tendency to emphasize their freedom from the Bible, as they seek to address largely by means of their intellect the challenging issues of contemporary life.

We may, however, avoid both these errors. We can engage scripture thoughtfully, reverently and critically in a discipline reflecting our trust in God. We can encounter the God of freedom through the witness of the scriptures to the freedom experienced by Abraham, by the Israelite prophets, and by Jesus the Christ. We can enter into the faithful stories of the past in order to embrace the present-with faith, hope and love. We can discover for ourselves what it means today, in our own world, in our own lives, to be set free by Christ for freedom. Amen.