Live Free or Die

The MP3 of this talk is here.

You have all seen the commercial. British soldiers line up ready to do battle. Their formation is tight and they look formidable. Then, there is some mysterious dust in the horizon and out of the woods, comes George Washington driving a crappy American car but doing it with flair and purpose. The British soldiers scatter. And the announcer tells us un-ironically cut to Washington and the car : “Here’s a couple of things America got right. Cars and freedom.”

It seems like everyone wants to talk about freedom. It was the title of a horrid, six and a half minute George Michael[1] song that was released the year some of you were born and it is the climactic line of one of the best movies of all time. Shoot we even briefly used the term to describe fried potatoes.

Everyone wants to talk about freedom, but it seems like one of those words (like love or happiness) that so many people use to mean so many different things that it doesn’t really mean anything in particular any more.

But whatever freedom actually is, we’ve all felt pangs of something we want to call freedom. For each of us in this room, there was a moment freshman year, for some of you, it was in the past week, when it suddenly dawned on you, “I’m totally free.” I could literally do whatever I want right now. I could be whoever I want. I remember exactly where I was when the full impact of my new freedom dawned on me freshman year. It was exhilarating…and a little terrifying. All of the constraints I had felt in my parents’ house were gone…but so were the excuses. I was totally free, which meant I was totally free to fail.

You see, culturally we usually use the word freedom to refer to an unqualified good. Freedom is always better than constraint. But when the prolific existential philosopher and famous atheist Jean Paul Sartre tried to summarize his philosophy in a few words, he said that the stark reality of the human condition is that we are ‘condemned to be free[2].’ Sartre found the weight of unlimited options crushing because it brought with it such a dreadful responsibility. I suspect some of you are experiencing that tension, whether you are freshman and are new to this peculiar social experiment we call college, or maybe you got a couple years under your belt and feel like there has to be a better way to negotiate the freedoms and responsibilities of these college years. Well, what we want to do with our introductory series, over the next three weeks is to look at some counter-intuitive things Jesus and the Christian scriptures have to say about freedom and explore some of the resources the Christian worldview offer to help you actually experience freedom and avoid counterfeit versions.

You see, Jesus and the Christian Scriptures have a pretty radical vision of what freedom really is…and what it isn’t. According to Jesus, freedom is not just autonomy. It is not just the absence of constraints. It is not just being able to do whatever you want to do. Freedom, in the Christian worldview, is voluntarily selecting the constraints that were designed for human flourishing. The Christian paradox of freedom is that it costs you your autonomy. But the subtle paradox of autonomy is that it is usually an illusion.

One of the things we want to say to you tonight, as you are just starting a new year in this place (and maybe just starting your first year in this place), is that if someone is promising you freedom, make sure they can deliver. The Scriptures warn, that many who promise freedom, don’t actually even know what it is. Look with me at this passage from the Christian Scriptures:

2 Peter 2:19 They promise freedom, while they themselves are slaves of depravity—for a man is a slave to whatever has mastered him.

When I read this verse, I immediately think of a little green bear.

I went to undergrad at a little state school in upstate NY. And in the center of town, just east of campus, there was a big fountain in the middle of the road. And on top of that fountain there sat a little bronze bear. Now this little bear is a celebrity in this town. It even has its own facebook page.

But this local celebrity also had a legend associated with it, which I heard for the first time during my freshman orientation. Legend had it that if anyone ever graduated this school and by some cosmic confluence of bad luck and prudishness was still a virgin, that on that day, this little bronze bear would climb down from his perch, and walk out of town. Yet year after year, (click) there he sat, for 122 years, a little bronze monument to the sexual freedom of the American University.


So…you can imagine my surprise, when I logged on to the university web site recently and found this.

About a year ago, the bear went missing. And so, it had finally happened. Some poor, repressed, soul had gotten too busy with chess club and made it through 4 years at a college campus without having sex, and the little bronze bear, well that was just more than he could take.[3] He up and left town.

Now, the real story was that the bear had just been removed as part of a project to restored the fountain which, after 122 years of Western NY winters, was totally falling apart.[4] But the message of this little morality tale that I was told on the first day of my freshman experience was clear. The morality tale of the bronze bear was meant to offer us freedom. The moral of the story was that everyone gets laid in college. It is a time of sexual experimentation. So don’t be so uptight about it. Have fun with your bodies. Enjoy your new freedom.

But be careful, because “They promise freedom, while they themselves are slaves of depravity—for a man is a slave to whatever has mastered him.”

The thing I didn’t get about this from the start was “How is this really a message of freedom? “ What is the actual message of the parable of the bronze bear?
The actual message here is that:
Your sexual appetites are too strong
…resistance is futile
…you are at the deterministic mercy of your biology.
Therefore sexual degradation and experimentation are inevitable in college.

And somehow, this is supposed to be a message of freedom. How is that freedom? How is that not constraint?

Those who are offering freedom are saying that sexual forces that will pull at you in college are too powerful to be denied. Your sexual impulses are stronger than you are given the buffet of opportunities that university life provides. So just let it happen and get over the antiquated social pressures that cause you guilt. In other words, your sexual impulses are your master. You serve your sexuality. It owns you. Or, in other words, you are the bear’s bitch.[5] That is not freedom. Many of those who claim to offer you freedom in this place, are not themselves free. They serve their appetites.

“They promise freedom, while they themselves are slaves of (their impulses and their appetites) (φθορά[6])—for a man is a slave to whatever has mastered him.”

Three years before David Foster Wallace tragically took his life in 2008, he gave a commencement speech at Kenyon college. Now, I love Wallace. His has actually had a pretty substantial influence on me and his death was a blow. But to my knowledge, he was not remotely a Christian or even a theist. Which made his comments in this speech particularly intriguing. He said:

Here's something else that's weird but true: in the day-to day trenches of adult life, there is actually no such thing as atheism. There is no such thing as not worshipping. Everybody worships. The only choice we get is what to worship. And the compelling reason for maybe choosing some sort of god or spiritual-type thing to worship -- be it JC or Allah, bet it YHWH or the Wiccan Mother Goddess, or the Four Noble Truths, or some inviolable set of ethical principles -- is that pretty much anything else you worship will eat you alive.

If you worship money and things, if they are where you tap real meaning in life, then you will never have enough, never feel you have enough. It's the truth. Worship your body and beauty and sexual allure and you will always feel ugly. And when time and age start showing, you will die a million deaths before they finally grieve you. …

Worship power, you will end up feeling weak and afraid, and you will need ever more power over others to numb you to your own fear.

Worship your intellect, being seen as smart, you will end up feeling stupid, a fraud, always on the verge of being found out….

And the so-called real world will not discourage you from operating on these default settings, because the so-called real world of men and money and power hums merrily along in a pool of fear and anger and frustration and craving and worship of self…The freedom all to be lords of our tiny skull-sized kingdoms, alone at the center of all creation.

Or in other words: “They promise freedom, while they themselves are slaves of depravity—for a man is a slave to whatever has mastered him.” or in DFW’s language – a man is a slave to whatever he chooses to worship.

Because freedom is not the absence of constraints, it is choosing the ones that were designed for our best.

Appetites are brutal masters – the more you give them the more they want.

Academic recognition and professional success are merciless masters. If you live for academic success and fail, academic success is not going to forgive you. It doesn’t love you. Your dreams will not let you off the hook if you fail them.

There is only one master who cares more about you than you care about yourself. There is only one master whose constraints are, without exception, for your good. Jesus.

You see, freedom is not autonomy. Freedom is not living without constraint. It is not living for your impulses and appetites. Freedom is choosing the right constraints. Freedom is choosing the right master. Freedom is selecting the master and constraints that enhance our humanity, that optimize human flourishing. But the world (particularly the University) is full of stuff that would entangle our hearts and diminish us.

And this is the central message of Christianity. The great paradox of the Christian worldview, is that freedom comes from giving yourself to Jesus. But the reason this ends up making sense, that freedom comes from belonging, is that he does my life better than I would. There is a poem in the Hebrew Scriptures that says ‘his boundaries are set for me in pleasant places.’ He is the only master who cares about you more than you do and his constraints are not arbitrary and capricious rules for your torture but wisdom for your best. Our hope from the start has been that CL would be a place for two kinds of people: those who have made a commitment to belong to Jesus and are trying to figure out what that looks like and those who are spiritually curious and wonder who this Jesus guy is. But really we are all the same. We all need to do the same thing to experience more freedom in our lives. We all need to give ourselves to Jesus.

And so, the heart of the Christian teaching on freedom is that Freedom counter-intuitively emerges from choosing the right master, Jesus. But over the next three weeks we want to look a little bit more carefully at a few specific resources that the Christian world view offers to help you find freedom at college.

In two weeks, Laeya will talk about how a Christian theology actually leads to a life of balance…how belonging to Jesus helps you to achieve a peaceful equilibrium between competing claims on your time.

Next week, Dan will talk about the life of the Spirit, and how the Christian scriptres teach that there are supernatural resources available to help you experience the kind of freedom that you were designed for.

But, finally, with the seven minutes or so I have left, I would like to investigate the primary resource Jesus gives us to maintain a life of freedom, which is not particularly supernatural seeming but is extremely effective. Jesus’ primary resource for helping us maintain a life of freedom is community. The second paradox of Christian freedom is that it is not only found in giving yourself to Jesus, but also in giving yourself to a community of his people. Let me read you one more scripture.

Hebrews 12:1 Let us throw off everything that hinders and the sin that so easily entangles, and let us run with perseverance the race marked out for us.”

I just want to observe two quick things about verse. The insight the Scriptures bring to an understanding of personal freedom is that our hearts entangle easily.[7] Our heart desperately wants to love something intensely. If it is not set on the one it was meant to love it can end up fixated on disappointing half loves. This verse warns that it is easy to get entangled.
But the second really interesting thing about this scripture is that even though it is using a race metaphore, which is an individual event, it uses corperate language.

“Let US throw off everything that hinders and the sin that so easily entangles, and let US run with perseverance the race marked out for US.”

One of the surprising things about Jesus following is that it is irreducibly corporate. Many people are willing to belong to Jesus, because, well, he is pretty great, but they draw the line at belonging to a people, because, well, we are often annoying, hypocritical and socially awkward. But notice the corporate language in this passage. If we want the freedom Jesus offers…if we want to avoid the things that can entangle our hearts[8] we can’t do it as an ‘I’. We have to do it as an ‘us’. Christianity is irreducibly corporate. Experiencing true freedom, selecting the right constraints, and avoiding entanglement by vesting our affections in things that disappoint, these things are most effectively accomplished in community.

I want to wrap up with a brief illustration. This is Hank Green a video blogger who alternates posts with his brother John. In this post, he talks about a new project that another video blogger by the name of “Dan Brown” has taken on:



I am convinced that Dan and Hank have tapped into something totally fundamental here. Jesus meant us to help each other to figure out what to do with this. And that is why we think that the most important thing you could do at the beginning of the year is to join a small group. It will cost you some autonomy. You will give a weekly night to six to ten other people, which, I get it, is an enormous cost. But it is worth it. community is fundamentally empowering. By helping you avoid entanglement and helping you ‘figure out what to do with this’ community generates opportunities for you to flourish, which isn’t a bad working definition of freedom.

Don’t confuse Jesus for a Jedi master. The way of the Jedi is non-attachment…but look what happened to them. The way of Jesus is community. In Christianity, community is the conduit of freedom. It is helping each other avoid entanglements and to choose healthy constraints. It is helping each other to figure out what to do with this.

In summary, freedom from a Christian world view is not the absence of constraint. It is selecting the constraints that were designed for human flourishing and the master that cares more about us than we do. And the first great resource that Christianity offers to get there is a community of Jesus followers, involved in each others lives in non-trivial ways. So we really hope that you this community or one of the other excellent Christian ministries on campus. We hope you will stick around, join a small group and:

“Help Me…Figure Out…What to Do With This.”

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[1] Really, the only kind of George Michael song there is.
[2] “because once thrown into the world, he is responsible for everything he does.” Being and Nothingness
[3] Just an aside, it is kind of creepy that this thing kept such close tabs on our sex lives.
[4] And we knew this, because many of us did, in fact, graduate from that school as virgins, including myself, my wife and many of our friends.
[5] This should be cut, but I really don’t want to.
[6] Phthora - (fthor-ah') - From phtheiro; decay, i.e. Ruin (spontaneous or inflicted, literally or figuratively) -- corruption, destroy, perish.
[7] Jesus, as is his way, articulates the idea in the form of a story. He says that some people’s spiritual journeys are like a seed that grows quickly early on but is eventually entangled by weeds. When he was asked what the story meant he said that some make take an initial interest in him but “as they go on their way they are choked by life's worries, riches and pleasures, and they do not mature.” They become entangled by their fears and appetites and loose the opportunity for a life of freedom
[8] I want to do something with this like The human heart can not bear a vacuum. It is not satisfied unless it has something to love intensely. – maybe after the sower passage