Man is Born Free

When I was teaching, I always got to work ridiculously early.  The only other teacher who got there around the same time as me was the other eighth grade Language Arts teacher and he somehow managed to fit surfing in before he arrived at school.

But I always enjoyed that quiet time, to finish (or sometimes begin) my lesson plans for the day, get my copying done, maybe some grading.

One day, I was sitting at my desk when I noticed a horrible smell, like a sulfury, sewage smell.  This was not an uncommon smell in my wing thanks to a nearby restroom.  So, I ignored the smell and continued working.

Sometime later, the intercom in my room buzzed to life.

“There is a gas leak in the building,” the front office secretary announced.  “We need everyone in the building to evacuate at this time, please.”

Oh, I thought, that was the horrible smell, a gas leak … gas that I had been breathing in for the better part of an hour, gas that could have brought my life to an abrupt fiery end.

As you may know, natural gas has no smell, so a chemical called mercaptan is added to the gas because it smells like rotten eggs or sulfur and will clue you in to a possible leak.

What’s crazy is that the leak in this case was on the other side of campus.  It wasn’t anywhere near me, but was strong enough for the smell to reach me.  I absolutely was aware of the smell and I absolutely ignored it and continued to sit there.  It never occurred to me that I was in danger, because I was used to a classroom that smelled like crap.

I use this story not so much as an example of my own lack of common sense—I have a million stories about my lack of common sense—but rather to illustrate a greater point about something that is happening in the world today.

We are sitting in a room slowly filling with gas and we know something is wrong, but we’ve lived with wrong for so long, we don’t even know what to do with it anymore.  We’ve lived with the wrong, but the world is still in one piece.  Armageddon hasn’t happened.  

We still get up every morning and eat breakfast and go to work.  We meet with friends for drinks on a Friday night.  We go to church.  We are able to fulfill those basic needs of food, clothing and shelter.  We’re aware that others in this world are not so fortunate, but what can we do about that?  So we sit, helpless, and the room continues to fill with gas.

In today’s Gospel reading from John 6:41-51, Jesus references one of the great miracles of the Bible, of the Old Testament with the Israelites flight from Egypt.  The flight from Egypt is filled with so many great images, so many great moments of God’s power, the plagues, the parting of the Red Sea, and, as Jesus mentions here, God raining down manna from Heaven to feed His people.

But what’s interesting here is what happens before God sends the Israelites bread from Heaven.  In Exodus 16:3, the Israelites complain to Moses and Aaron and say the following, “If only we had died by the hand of the Lord in the land of Egypt, when we sat by the fleshpots and ate our fill of bread; for you have brought us out into this wilderness to kill this whole assembly with hunger.”

In other words, Moses and Aaron, as bad as things were when we were slaves in Egypt, we wish we could have that again.  We wish we were still in Egypt.

Can you imagine?

Every year when I was teaching, I used to read a story with my students from Ann Petry’s biography of Harriet Tubman.  In Petry’s story, she relates several incidents where the fleeing slaves became so frightened and so hungry and so weary that one would cry out, “Let me go back.  It is better to be a slave than to suffer like this in order to be free.”

But Harriet knew that if any of them went back they put hundreds of people at risk, so she would pull out her gun and point it at them and say, “Go on with us or die.”

Can you imagine?

Can you imagine being an Israelite or a runway slave on the Underground Railroad and being so afraid, you would choose slavery over the possibility of freedom?

And yet what if I told you that that is exactly what you are doing?  That is exactly what all of us are doing right now in this world, in this country.

“Man is born free,” philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau famously said, and “[yet] everywhere he is in chains.”

And here is where I’m going to challenge you.

Here I am going to tell you something you are not going to want to hear.

Right now, in God’s eyes, you are no different than those migrant children in cages.  You are no different than those immigrants, those “huddled masses yearning to breathe free.” 

Our cages and our chains, yours and mine, are just harder to see.  But they’re there.  Our chains are called apathy, and ambivalence, and helplessness.  Our chains do not physically bind us, do not physically harm us, but they do something so much worse.  They bind our very soul.  It is our very spirit that is in danger.

We are in a room, filling with gas, and we have somehow convinced ourselves that we’re just fine.

Jesus’ words in today’s Gospel are both a warning and a promise of hope.

He tells the people in John 6:49, “Your ancestors ate the manna in the wilderness, and they died.”

This great miracle of the Old Testament—God feeding His people in the desert—and Jesus tells the hard truth to the people here—the truth being that it wasn’t enough.  It fed their bellies but not their souls.  They still died.

But what Jesus has to offer is so much more.  He goes on to say in verse 51, “I am the living bread that came down from heaven. Whoever eats of this bread will live forever ….”

Right now Jesus is standing at the door with his hand outstretched asking us to come with him, begging us to listen, telling us, like that voice on the intercom in my classroom that day, that the danger is imminent and that if we want to live, we must go with him now.

So, here is what we need to do.

We need to stand up.  We need to get moving.  We need to admit that there is problem with this world that is greater than our ability to solve on our own.

We need to admit we need help.

And we need to turn to Jesus now.

Right now.

It’s really as simple as that.

Amen.