In a “Peanuts” column, Lucy is running after Charlie Brown shouting: “I’ll get you, Charlie Brown! I’ll get you. I’ll knock your block off! I’ll.....”

Suddenly Charlie Brown stops dead in his tracks, turns around and confronts her, and says: “Wait a minute!! Hold everything! We can’t carry on like this. We have no right to act this way. The world is filled with problems, people hurting other people. Now if we, as children, can’t solve our relatively minor problems, how can we ever expect to......”

...and at that moment WHOP!! Lucy gave him one, and he goes head over heels and flat on the ground. She turns to her girlfriend and says: “I had to do that, because he was getting to my conscience.”

“I do not understand my own actions,” wrote the Apostle Paul in Romans 7, “For I do not do what I want, I do what I hate.” Guilt is never a particularly helpful feeling, and it can become debilitating. Yet, at the same time, it is often out of despair or guilt, or some other feeling which has dragged one to the depths that one finally begins to face some truths about themselves.

In her book Thinking Out Loud, Anna Quindlen[1] quotes a 1933 speech of journalist and author Dorothy Thompson: “One cannot exist today as a person--one cannot exist in full consciousness--without having to have a showdown with one’s self, without having to define what it is that one lives by, without being clear in one’s own mind what matters and what does not matter.” The alternative is to jump on the person, the issue, the subject, whatever it is that causes us to look at aspects of ourselves that we don’t particularly want to see. Dorothy Thompson is famous for being one of the first journalists to criticize Hitler and his policy towards the Jews.

Hitler, in many ways, lifted a mirror to our nation. More than a half-century ago the Supreme Court, in West Virginia State Board of Education v. Barnette, declared unconstitutional a law requiring schoolchildren to salute the flag and recite the Pledge of Allegiance. “If there is any fixed star in our constitutional constellation,” Justice Robert H. Jackson memorably said for the court, “it is that no official, high or petty, can prescribe what shall be orthodox in politics, nationalism, religion, or other matters of opinion.” The court handed down its decision against compulsory pledges of allegiance and flag salutes on Flag Day in 1943, when young Americans were fighting and dying for that flag around the planet. The American people then, far from denouncing the court, but with the images of marching youth saluting the Führer and goose-stepping masses shouting “Zig Heil,” applauded the decision as a pretty good statement of the kind of freedom we were in fact fighting for.

Contradictions – doing what we do instead of what we want to do. I think the issue of immigration in the U.S. these days is a good example of one in which our history and our principals as a nation of immigrants is often in contrast to an increasing level of blame placed on the current generation of immigrants as the cause for problems as diverse as lowering educational standards to lack of jobs to increase of illicit drug sales. Mexicans are accused of being lazy at the same time they are accused of taking jobs away from Americans, to name one obvious inconsistency.

“The Good that I would do, I cannot...” says Paul. It is not that we do not know better, it is not that we are often blind to the contradictions that are built into the way we live our lives. It is as if one suffers from a “superiority” complex rather than inferiority. “I delight in the law of God,” that is, I am cognizant of what is good and right and decent, “but I see in my members...” [I see in my actions, another law] “at war with the law of my mind, making me captive to the law of sin that dwells in my members.”

Enigmatic verses began the scripture lesson this morning from Matthew 11. “But to what will I compare this generation? It is like children sitting in the marketplaces and calling to one another, {17} ‘We played the flute for you, and you did not dance; we wailed, and you did not mourn.’ For John came neither eating nor drinking, and they say, ‘He has a demon’; {19} the Son of Man came eating and drinking, and they say, ‘Look, a glutton and a drunkard, a friend of tax collectors and sinners!’ Yet wisdom is vindicated by her deeds.” They are an example of the way in which we live our lives caught up on contradictions and preconceptions of what is good and what is bad.

There was no way John and Jesus were going to please. He was speaking to a generation which was, how else can we put it, impossible to please. It was damned if you do and damned if you don’t. Their resistance was so high...their fear of truth, or of new possibilities so great, that, at least in this analysis from Jesus, they were impossible to reach. Jesus basically says, all I can do is say, just watch...and see what happens.

In countless one-on-one connections, with the most tightly wound of the time, the Pharisees, the rulers, the tax collectors, the sinners, Jesus tried to reach them by giving them the space to question...to experience...and to see beyond their protective illusions or well-crafted defenses. Psychologists will tell us that in act of seeing how self-interest and illusion infect even our best intentioned actions, we take the first step toward understanding our captivity and move toward real healing. The Gospel adds to an understanding of the way back to health, it is to accept the Good News as a way of life that frees us from having to define ourselves solely on terms of the cultural net in which we function...or on the basis of the trappings of wealth or position or good works. Not by self-induced, self-esteem, but by grace...the grace of God.

This grace which Jesus offered is “freedom” in Paul’s terms, freedom from the law. In our own terms, it is freedom from the rigors of conformity to one idea...or one set of ideas at the expense of creativity, and more risky exploration of the world which we inhabit. Freedom allows us to view our neighbor and our selves in the context of community made strong by differences.

We need to look at that word “freedom” and realize that it too has inherent contradictions. “Give me liberty or give me death,” said Patrick Henry of Virginia. In this famous quotation, freedom is defined as freedom from all restraints except self-control. Give me the freedom of total self-governance or I am enslaved.

The problem with this definition of freedom is that it is ultimately impossible. Because we are vulnerable, we depend on each other. Our mutual dependence creates limits. So the old, idealistic, Enlightenment definition of freedom has now become, “freedom from all unnecessary restraints.” Which in turn raises the question of which restraints are necessary and which ones aren’t. You can see this argument played out every night on the TV news. From mandatory seat belt laws to mandatory health insurance, many chaff under the prospect of any kind of individual restraint even if it is for the good of the whole.

We are in the midst of celebrating the Fourth of July. Ours is a country founded on high ideals. It is an annual and very important ritual to rehearse these ideals and to remember what it was our forbearers said they were striving for. It is also important to be honest in our reflections and realize that often we have fallen short of the ideal. We often have not done what we said we would do...

Paul moved from a personal observation, “When I want to obey God’s law that lies within me, I end up doing what comes more naturally to humankind....I serve myself,” to an understanding that all communities are somehow linked under this enslavement and fall short. The Gospel, says Paul, is a declaration of independence from the “law of sin and death.”

The liberating gift of grace sets us free from an eternal focus on self. You are free because you are loved with a love that cannot be undone. At the same time, in covenant with God through Jesus Christ that freedom enables us to act out of love and compassion for all of our neighbors. Jesus said it in another way, “Come to me, all who labor and are heavy laden, and I will give you rest. Take my yoke upon you, and learn from me; for I am gentle and lowly in heart, and you will find rest for your souls.” The yoke is the implement by which labor is shared...as two oxen are yoked together to pull as one...we are yoked to one another in Christ’s love so that we can become a team. No superstars, we are a covenanted community of equals.

In covenanting, we have chosen as a people to find true freedom by relinquishing some of our liberties....we are not independent operators but we are tied together with a mutual project, which is the health and the well-being of this nation and all of her peoples. That doesn’t mean that we are going to be in agreement all the time - that is clear. Our covenant is based on constitutional guarantees which provide us the space to disagree and still be united in our mutual project.

I was intrigued by what Marcus Borg points out in his most recent book, The Heart of Christianity. He says: And repentance in the New Testament has an additional nuance of meaning. The Greek roots of the word combine to mean “go beyond the mind that you have.” Go beyond the mind that you have been given and acquired. Go beyond the mind shaped by the culture to the mind that you have “in Christ.” I think that if we are going to follow Christ in the world today we do have to go beyond the mind that we have. Elie Wiesel also wrote at one time: When God created man, God gave him a secret - and that secret was not how to begin but how to begin again....it is not given to man to begin; that privilege is God’s alone. But it is given to man to begin again - and he does so every time he chooses to defy death and side with the living.” When we are able to do that, our life goes beyond all expectations.

Which reminds me of an old Bob Dylan song called “Gonna Have to Serve Somebody.” The lyrics go:

You may be an ambassador to England or France

You may like to gamble.

You might like to dance.

You may be the heavyweight champion of the world.

You might be a socialite with a long string of pearls.

But you’re gonna have to serve somebody.

Yes indeed, you’re gonna have to serve somebody.

The question is...who are you going to serve? So much in the political discourse urges us to think of ourselves first – how high our taxes are – how much we pay for gas – how our income compares to another person’s income. Dropped from outer space, a stranger would wonder how we have held our country together for so long and with such good result. Thinking back to the worst and the best of times through out the decades of our history, it is not hard to see that we have been at our best when we have been able as a people to act and think of the community first. Many in this room lived through the years of World War II. Americans had a joint enterprise to preserve their way of life against threats from two tyrannical empires. Nearly everyone was involved in assuring the good of the whole. Sure there were profiteers and scoundrels of all sorts around – but the preponderance of what motivated people was caring for each other, not just the self – “us and ours” not “me and mine.”

The model which made us strong throughout our history was a Gospel model of cooperation and community. The invitation to covenant as a nation is our birth right as a people, the invitation to covenant with the creator and God’s creations through Jesus Christ is an invitation which we can accept or reject.

We all fall short of God’s love both individually and collectively, and like Paul there are certainly times when we do what we know in our hearts we don’t want to do. In accepting Jesus, we are also acknowledging that by his grace we not only are free to make mistakes in judgment, but that we are also free to seek the kind of forgiveness and acceptances that allows us to start again – begin again in faithfulness. The yoke binds us by grace to one another and to our Lord. By it we are joined in covenant with the mutual freedom to be both constrained by love and set free by love. If we can love as he loved we can find rest and hope in him for ourselves and the nation we so admire. Amen.