When I was little, we would go and visit my grandparents on Sunday afternoons. They were my mom’s parents, and they lived in the village where my mom and her siblings had been born and raised, and where most families who lived there, had been around for generations.
I noticed that whenever the grown-ups were talking about their neighbors, they would refer to them by their last name first. My grandpa’s name was Georg Simon, but in the village they referred to him as “der Simone Georg,” to my grandma as “die Simone Lisa,” and to my uncle as “der Simone Hans.” And when talking about my mom before she married my dad, they would call her “die Simone Anneliese.” It was a peculiar custom, but I didn’t know it was peculiar, it just was — I was little and I was learning how to be in the world. When I think about it today, I assume that last names came first in that village culture because belonging to a family was considered of great importance to a person’s identity.
Another curious thing I noticed was how grown-ups talked to children about who they were. When they met a child on the street or in a store, a child they didn’t know or recognize, they would sometimes inquire who that child was, only they didn’t ask, “What’s your name?” but, “To whom do you belong?” And in our German dialect that sounds a lot like “Whose property are you?”
One sunny Sunday afternoon, when everybody at my grandparents’ house was busy talking about grown-up stuff, I decided to go for a walk in the village. I knew how to get to the bakery and to the butcher’s shop, and I must have thought it was time to explore other parts of town. So I just walked out the door. I was four or five years old, and my own memories of the day are blurry, but family lore has it that the village police officer saw me, got out of his police car – in my memory it’s a dark green VW 1200 Beetle with white markings – and asked me, “To whom do you belong?”
Apparently, I didn’t like the question. They tell me that I put my foot down, declaring, “I belong to nobody. I am Thomas.” The friendly officer asked me where I lived, and I pointed up the hill to my grandparents’ house on the edge of the woods, and mentioned that my grandpa was “der Simone Georg.” And then I got to ride in the police car all the way back to the house. It was a terrific adventure!
“I belong to nobody. I am Thomas.” About ten years later, I went to confirmation class for a year. I had been baptized as an infant, and in preparation for our confirmation, about thirty of us were learning about the meaning of baptism and how to live as followers of Jesus and members of the body of Christ. One of the catechisms we studied, begins with the question, “What is your only comfort, in life and in death?” Not the kind of question you’d ask a fourteen-year-old, is it? The idea wasn’t for us to come up with our own answers, but to encourage us to know the church’s teaching and to wrestle with it, try it on, grow into it.
Q: What is your only comfort, in life and in death?
A: That I belong – body and soul, in life and in death – not to myself but to my faithful Savior, Jesus Christ.[1]
I was fourteen years old. I believed that I belonged to nobody but myself – and the church taught me to find comfort in the thought that I did indeed not belong to myself, but to Jesus Christ. The church encouraged me to question some of my most firmly held assumptions: my independence, my autonomy, and my self-centeredness. I learned to repeat the answer, that I belong – body and soul, in life and in death – not to myself but to my faithful Savior, Jesus Christ. I learned to repeat the answer, but I didn’t believe it.
“I belong to nobody. I am Thomas.” A year or two later, at a youth retreat, I was introduced to the passage from Isaiah where the prophet says,
Now thus says the Lord, he who created you, O Jacob, he who formed you, O Israel: Do not fear, for I have redeemed you; I have called you by name, you are mine. When you pass through the waters, I will be with you; and through the rivers, they shall not overwhelm you; when you walk through fire you shall not be burned, and the flame shall not consume you.[2]
That I liked, the promise of God’s presence. I liked the promise, because life was overwhelming at times and frightening, and I liked the thought that God knows my name. What I didn’t hear, not really, was the part where God says, “I have redeemed you, I have called you by name, you are mine.”
It took me a few years to realize that my adolescent rejection of any authority but my own wasn’t the whole story. I was a child of the times, and only slowly did I begin to see that I wasn’t nearly as free and independent as I imagined myself to be. It wasn’t easy to acknowledge that much of what I took to be my own thoughts and my own free choices had been shaped by my desire to fit in and conform to all sorts of stories and pressures. “The great idol of the modern age is personal independence,” writes Shawnthea Monroe. “We are heavily invested in the illusion that we think for ourselves, choose for ourselves, and do for ourselves.”[3] The question then becomes, in whose company do we think, choose, and act?
For a good many years now, I have indeed known no greater comfort than the promise that Jesus has made me his own, and I have known no greater freedom than to belong to him and to let his life and teachings shape my imagining, hoping, thinking and doing.[4] And I have discovered, and continue to discover, that everything I do, everything, ultimately is an act of obedience.
Paul, of course, drives this insight to extremes that most of us find very difficult to hear. He argues that human beings cannot be independent, and that when we refuse to live as creatures of God, in grateful and joyful dependence on God the creator, we do not thereby achieve independence, but become instead enslaved to sin.[5] In his argument, sin is not an individual act in which a person misses the mark, but rather an anti-godly power of cosmic scale, an invading power, a colonizing and enslaving power. “One of the hallmarks of slavery, ancient or modern, is that slaves do not have control over their own bodies,” writes Mary Hinkle Shore.
The enslaver may force the enslaved into labor, inflict corporal punishment at will, or assault the enslaved sexually with no fear of prosecution for a crime. To be enslaved to sin is to be appropriated, body and soul.[6]
Outside of dependence on the giver of life, there’s not independence, but only fracturing and destruction. God, however, has broken sin’s mastery over humankind in the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ. And baptized into Jesus’ death and resurrection, we have been transferred from sin’s dominion to the motherland of grace. “For freedom Christ has set us free,” Paul declares in his letter to the Galatians. “Stand firm, therefore, and do not submit again to a yoke of slavery.”[7]
No more yoke of slavery, not for God’s children. We love the sound of that, the good news of liberation, the end of sin’s tyranny, let freedom ring! But there’s still the matter of obedience. “Do you not know,” writes Paul, “that, if you present yourselves to anyone as obedient slaves, you are slaves of the one whom you obey?” Martin Luther wrote,
People talk about Christian liberty and then go and cater to the desires of covetousness, pleasure, pride, envy, and other vices. … We want them to know, however, that if they use their lives and possessions after their own pleasure, if they do not help the poor, if they cheat their fellow-men in business and snatch and scrape by hook and by crook everything they can lay their hands on, we want to tell them that they are not free, no matter how much they think they are, but they are the dirty slaves of the devil.[8]
In Paul’s mind, human life is either God-centered or self-centered, and few ideas are more easily twisted for selfish ends than the idea of freedom. For Paul, the only real freedom for human beings is a life lived in recognition of their creaturely dependence, and he doesn’t seem hesitant at all to qualify this freedom as being “enslaved to God.”[9]
And he expects us to go there with him, for argument’s sake. And he expects us to hear good news in that.
In the first-century mediterranean world, slavery was seen by many simply as a given. Scholars estimate that a third of the population in Italy were enslaved people, and that the Christian community in Rome, Paul’s initial audience, was made up of a majority of slaves and freedpersons, possibly as many as two-thirds.[10] They knew in their bones the reality of being enslaved, the full meaning of having been appropriated, body and soul, for the plans and whims and moods of another.
Did they know, I wonder, that belonging to God, being claimed as God’s own was not a mere transfer of ownership from one master to another? Did they hear Paul out and discover that the weak metaphor of being enslaved to God was already breaking down because they had been claimed, not as property, but as children?
And did you hear that you were called to freedom, and that freedom’s glory is the loving surrender to God’s reign of grace? Do you know in your bones that having been claimed as God’s own, you no longer belong to death’s dominion — that you belong to life in fullness, and fullness of life belongs to you? No more yoke of slavery, not for God’s children. Remember whose you are.
[1] http://www.ucc.org/beliefs/heidelberg-catechism.html
[2] Isaiah 43:1-2
[3] Shawnthea Monroe, Feasting, Year A, Vol. 3, 182.
[4] Philippians 3:12
[5] See James D. G. Dunn, Romans 1-8 (WBC), 353.
[6] Mary Hinkle Shore https://www.workingpreacher.org/commentaries/revised-common-lectionary/ordinary-13/commentary-on-romans-612-23-6
[7] Galatians 5:1
[8] http://www.iclnet.org/pub/resources/text/wittenberg/luther/gal/web/gal5-01.html
[9] Romans 6:22; see James D. G. Dunn, Romans 1-8 (WBC), 345.
[10] See Dunn, 341; Brendan Byrne, Romans (Sacra Pagina), 200.