By Reverend Laurie DeMott

“If you want to be free,” my Dad said, “you have to give up your independence.”

I was puzzled by the inherent contradiction in his words – ‘Isn’t an independent person by definition free of attachments and obligations to others? How can relinquishing your independence lead to freedom?’ I wondered.

I don’t honestly remember my father’s explanation of his statement, or maybe there wasn’t one. Maybe he was interrupted by one of us kids suddenly asking what was for dinner or something of much more importance to us then than philosophical conundrums, but my father’s pronouncement stuck in my head because it struck me as all backwards and inside out: “If you want to be free, you have to give up your independence.” How can that be?

Jesus made those kind of seemingly contradictory statements all of the time: “If you want to save your life, you have to lose it,” he said. “The first shall be last and the last first.” Jesus was fond of turning things inside out and upside down in order to make sure that no one would grow too comfortable with their own assumptions about the world. The more certain we are that we have it all figured out, the more likely we are to be arrogant, judgmental, and condescending. The more certain we are that we have arrived at the truth, the more likely we are to stop listening and stop growing. Jesus knew that there is nothing better for our souls than to occasionally pull the rug out from under our all too firmly planted feet.

Besides, if my memory of my father’s words is any indication, we are more apt to retain those statements that beguile us with their seeming impossibility for much longer than any memory of a discussion or theological argument. We will mull the statement over in our minds for hours trying to understand the wisdom in the paradox, so if you take home nothing else from this sermon, you should remember this the next time you are tempted to preach to your children or argue with a spouse: a well crafted conundrum will have much more lasting effect on them than an exhaustive lecture.
And so for years – actually decades now – I have remembered my father’s declaration, “If you want to be free, you have to give up your independence,” and those words came back to me again this week as I read Jesus’ talk to the crowd on that plain in Judea. Here too, Jesus uses pithy memorable statements to get into people’s heads. Here once again, Jesus turns our assumptions upside down and inside out: the hungry will be filled and the satisfied will go hungry. But mostly I remembered my Dad’s words because I think that the meaning of his strange paradox about freedom and independence lies here in the description Jesus gives us of God’s rule. Which should be of no surprise to me because my Dad knew his Bible.

In the sixth chapter of Luke, people have come to Jesus “to hear him and to be healed of their diseases,” but instead of a story about Jesus’ miracle working, Luke instead records only the words of Jesus’ teaching. “Blessed are you who are poor, for yours is the kingdom of God. Blessed are you who hunger now, for you will be satisfied.... But woe to you who are rich, for you have already received your comfort. Woe to you who are well fed now, for you will go hungry....” The people come for healing and Jesus’ gives them the Beatitudes. The healing that you really need, Jesus declares, is not a healing of bones and tissue but a healing of society. You need a change in the way you do business with one another and in the way you think about yourselves. You need to understand that you will only truly be free if you give up our independence.

On Friday, in my “Spirituality and the Environment” class that I teach at Alfred University, I started a unit on Eastern religions and their attitudes toward nature, and I began the unit, as I always do, with a little coloring time. I handed out colored pencils and blank sheets of paper to the class and then I said to them, “I am going to read to you a poem written by a Chinese poet, and I want you to listen to the poem and then draw a picture of what you hear.” The poem I read goes like this:

Over thousands of mountains, no bird flies
Over thousands of paths there is no trail of footprints.
On a lonely boat sits an old man with bamboo hat and cape,
Fishing silently in the snowy river.

Well, my students listened attentively and then went to work, enjoying the excuse to act more like kindergartners than college students for a few minutes. When they were finished, I said, “Before we look at what you have done, let’s look at some typical Chinese paintings of nature scenes like the one the poem describes,” and in the slides I showed, I pointed out how the human characters in the painting are always small and well-integrated into their natural surroundings. In fact, the people and buildings are so much a part of the flow of the painting that your eye doesn’t immediately pick them out – the human presence is only one facet of the larger mosaic of forest, river, mountains, and sky all moving together in harmony.

After we had talked about the slides, I asked the students, “How does your drawing compare to what the Chinese artists have done?” and one young man blurted out in wonderment, “They are exactly opposite to mine!” Sure enough, his drawing depicted an old man in a boat, looming large in the foreground with the mountains and river merely a backdrop to the human figure. Although only one line of the four lines of the poem talks about the man, this student drew the man as the central figure, and so isolated him from the rest of the elements in the picture that you could cut take scissors and cut away everything else on the paper leaving only the man in the boat and your sense would be that the picture’s composition was unaffected. The man is in the foreground and everything else is just there to augment his glory.

And what that student drew is typical of what most students draw because in our society, the single human person takes center stage. We are raised to think of ourselves as the central figures in our own drama. We are raised to strive for excellence by surpassing everyone else academically or economically, moving them to the background. We award scholarships to the students who are top of their class or to the most outstanding athlete but never have I heard of a scholarship being given out to the best listener in the Senior class, or to the quiet and steadfast friend. Our magazines celebrate the men and women who stand out from the crowd, pasting their faces on the cover because they are faster, stronger, prettier, or richer than the rest of us. We celebrate the self-sufficiency that drives a person to the pinnacle of society and we deride dependency as an unhealthy neurosis.

We have not changed much as a people since the first century. Jesus looked around and saw a society where the rich could make their own rules; where the healthy went out of their way to avoid contact with the sick so that they would not be sullied by their touch, where the religious believed they could achieve their own salvation by the work of their own hands without any help from anyone else, thank you very much. In the first century, people also worked to rise above the others and achieve an independence that allowed them to remain unaffected by the needs, the sufferings, even the joys and hopes of those below them. The result was a society fragmented, isolated, and sick unto death, where beggars died outside the gates of the wealthy’s banquets, where the religious authorities used the power of the Temple to exploit the faithful, and where the most brutal means of execution in human history was wielded against a man who dared to challenge it all. The author Jared Diamond has written a book on the rise and fall of societies, and when a reporter asked him recently why certain societies survive crises while others don’t, he said, “The ones that survive are the ones in which those who have the power to make decisions are just as affected by those decisions as everyone else. If the powerful are independent from the rest of society and unaffected by what happens to those below them, that society will ultimately be doomed to failure.” A few decades after the crucifixion of Jesus, the Temple authorities and the Roman government that had colluded in Christ’s death, turned on one another and the Temple at Jerusalem was destroyed and the rule of the Sadducees ended forever. They disappeared into the oblivion of history.

The sin of the wealthy and the well-fed that Jesus condemned was that they believed that they could become so independent of the rest of the world that they could take scissors and cut away everyone else from around them, and they would remain unchanged. “This is not the way it works in God’s world,” Jesus warned them. “You think that salvation lies in the path of independence. You think that if you can just rise high enough, you will become so secure in your self-sufficiency that you will be safe from all harm. But I tell you that independence leads only to isolation, meaninglessness, and destruction. It leads to a collapse of community and dooms us all. If you truly want to know the fullness of joy that God promises, you must know the fullness of becoming part of all of the world. You must become so interconnected that if one man suffers the pangs of hunger, you all suffer the pangs of hunger, and if one child dreams of a home filled with peace, we all will yearn for a peaceful home for that child.”
In God’s world, your hopes will be my hopes, my sorrow will be your sorrow. The healing that we seek for our hearts and for our community is to be found in the strength of the bonds that we form with one another. To be free, we have to give up our independence, and instead step into the fullness of life lived with all and for all.