What one word comes to mind when you think of the United States of America?
As I consider the past 250+ years since our nation’s founding, I propose that the one word that most defines our national project is “freedom.” Consider this famous line from one of our nation’s most important founding documents, the Declaration of Independence: “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.”
You don’t see the word “freedom,” but you see its synonym, “liberty.” We Americans are people of freedom and liberty. How many times over the years, for example, have you heard the words, “It’s a free country, so I can _______.”? Often people say that as an excuse to avoid accountability. And in fact, that gets to the heart of one of the most complicated philosophical debates regarding liberty, that of liberty versus law. Does freedom require anarchy, lawlessness, total liberty from all restraint or accountability? Of course not. But where does a society draw the line? There’s lots of debate about that.
And what about the reality that in our nation’s history, we proclaimed freedom from the harsh taxation placed on our forefathers by the King of England, while at the same time those very forefathers stole land from the indigenous peoples who lived here first, or they cheated indigenous people out of the land. Where is the freedom in that? Also, at the same time our forefathers shackled and trafficked men, women, and children from Africa, enslaving them to work for free here on our shores. How is that consistent with liberty?
It’s not.
What I’m getting at is that the United States of America, though a free nation, founded on the good goal of freedom, has struggled mightily to live up to its founding creeds. We’ve made progress, hard-won progress, but we are not perfect. We could have been a lot more free, and we still have work to do.
I bring up the idea of freedom, because freedom is a very good thing. In fact, what we will find this coming week is that freedom flows from God’s heart. For these last three weeks before my sabbatical, my blog series is about sabbath. This past week, we studied the weekly sabbath. What we will learn this coming week and next is that there are two more kinds of sabbaths that God instructed the people of Israel to keep. This coming week, we study that latter parts of Leviticus 25 to learn about the radical sabbath concept that relates to freedom. Frankly, the sabbath we’ll study this coming week blows my mind. I think you’ll find it quite challenging, as I have. But we need to hear about it because it is God’s heart.
We get started on Monday.
Photo by Luke Stackpoole on Unsplash
Engaging Scripture 