by Dr. Lani Wilson

Good day and prayers for our world, and you! National and international disruptions, terrorism here and abroad, and the continuing struggle for human dignity and rights of African-Americans who built this country and all the groups that benefit from our struggle are foremost on the horizon. And then we have our local, close to home disruptions, human loss - out in the open, in our face, undeniably real and present. There are real tyrannies of government and of persons.

It’s God we are answerable to-all the way from life to death and everything in between-not each other. That’s why Jesus lived and died and then lived again: so that he could be our Master across the entire range of life and death, and free us from the petty tyrannies of each other.
Romans 14:8-9 (TMB)

Living sometimes drives us to our own tyrannies, be they interpersonal or intrapersonal, acknowledged or unacknowledged, individual or institutional. It is nearly impossible to see the tyrants within us, ideas or perceptions that are fixed.

Sin can’t tell you how to live. After all, you’re not living under that old tyranny any longer. You’re living in the freedom of God. So, since we’re out from under the old tyranny, does that mean we can live any old way we want? Since we’re free in the freedom of God, can we do anything that comes to mind? Hardly. You know well enough from your own experience that there are some acts of so-called freedom that destroy freedom. Offer yourselves to sin, for instance, and it’s your last free act. But offer yourselves to the ways of God and the freedom never quits. All your lives you’ve let sin tell you what to do. But thank God you’ve started listening to a new master,
one whose commands set you free to live openly in his freedom!
Romans 6:14-18 (TMB)

If we define sin as separation from God, then Paul is telling us in Romans 6 that submission to God is freedom. Pretty straightforward, right? Again, in Romans 8, Paul is telling us that sin, separation from God, is tyranny; to be cruelly oppressed, powerless.

A new power is in operation. The Spirit of life in Christ, like a strong wind, has magnificently cleared the air, freeing you from a fated lifetime of brutal tyranny at the hands of sin and death.
Romans 8:2 (TMB)

But Romans 14:8-9 mentions freedom from the “petty tyrannies of each other.” We are freed through Jesus’ living and dying and then living again. It is not just that we influence each other but that we bear within us those who have gone before, those whom we affect in our present lives, and the young to whom we hand the future. Although Paul was reconciling Jewish Christians and Gentile Christians in this letter to the Roman church, William Barclay more deeply interprets this passage as freedom from isolation.

No human being can follow a policy of isolation. We are bound to one another and to Christ by ties that neither time nor eternity can break. We can neither live nor die for ourselves alone.
William Barclay, The Letter to the Romans
The New Daily Study Bible, pg. 220

This is so much more comforting than merely focusing on the blanket statement about sin, a massive concept that is dressed up and dressed down and gets lost in layers of guilt-laden material. One thing is certain: Isolation is a concept every human being understands because we are hardwired to be together. In simple biological terms, we are pack animals and we don’t do well without each other. Jesus extends the concept in typical fashion, reiterating that He has come to renew and invigorate our relationship to God and then to each other. He has come to “fulfill the scriptures:”

“I am the Vine, you are the branches. When you’re joined with me and I with you, the relation intimate and organic, the harvest is sure to be abundant. Separated, you can’t produce a thing.”
John 15:5 (TMB)

This final corollary makes it clear that we are part of an evangelistic trio: We are in Jesus; Jesus is in us; we are all in God.

"The one who listens to you, listens to me. The one who rejects you, rejects me. And rejecting me is the same as rejecting God, who sent me."
Luke 10:16 (TMB)

The goal is for all of them to become one heart and mind-Just as  you, Father, are in me and I in you, so they might be one heart and mind with us. Then the world might believe that you, in fact, sent me.
John 17:21 (TMB)

Jesus reiterates this point again in verses 22-23. Even if we account for the complications of translation from spoken Aramaic to Hebrew to Greek to English and the many versions in-between, the gist is still clear. Through the Christ, we are one with God: The ultimate transitive equation.

The same glory you gave me, I gave them, so they’ll be as unified and together as we are - I in them and you in me. Then they’ll be mature in this oneness, and give the godless world evidence that you’ve sent me and loved them in the same way you’ve loved me.
John 17:22-23 (TMB)

The glory you gave to me I have given to them, that they may be one just as we are one – I in them and you in me – that they may be completely one, so that the world will know that you sent me, and you have loved them just as you have loved me.
John 17:22-23 (NET)

Rabbi Dr. Michael Lerner, explaining Yom Kippur in a message delivered to Allen Temple on September 24, 2017, taught us that the Hebrew word for “sin” comes from archery. It’s like an arrow that is aimed for the target but goes off course. The Day of Atonement or Yom Kippur is set aside to “get back on course” where Jews have fallen short in obedience to God. We could say that sin is separation from God because we have gone off course and missed the target. As Christians, we believe that Jesus the Christ in His living, death, and resurrection became the path back on course. In effect, He is our guidance system, pulling us back on the path to God. The tyrannies of life do not have to suffocate, defeat, maim, disembowel or slaughter us nor do we have to do any of that to each other. Can the 21st century church, Black, White or other, do that? Is the shibboleth of “love one another as I have loved you” given to us by The Christ now merely a tawdry, mainline chant or does it have true meaning? And if we say it does have meaning, are we going to practice it on everybody or just bodies that look like us? Just how much love did The Nazarene expect us to practice? These are no longer rhetorical, feel-good questions that children learn in Sunday School. Answers to these questions will define, direct, and determine what the 21st century Christian church is. If God is love and Jesus is the Son of God and if Jesus is in us and we in Him, then are we love?

LORD Jesus, thank You for making “love” a four-letter word in Your day. Remind us that the first Christians were Jews who were called the “People of the Way” and “The Way” was You, The Christ. Thank You for teaching us that human tyranny and love are incompatible. In Your incomprehensible way You give us choice, always choice. We can choose to move away from Your obvious presence in living or we can surrender to Love, to the Ultimate Good, to the Only One and be free. Freedom is an obtuse, complicated, overstated, underused state of being that we don’t have any handles on, LORD. You recognized this when You were here with us in person and now You patiently wait for your church to get it right. We, the people, are Your church and in Your goodness You are forcing us to walk the road of Love. You told us that we are in You and You in us and therefore, we are in God, reconciled through the horrific death of Your Body and its resurrection. To You we succumb and submit our freedom so that we are tethered to You and each other by Your final blood covenant. In relinquishing ourselves back from whence we came - from You - we manumit our souls to all that lives forever. Released to the tyranny of Your ferocious love, Jesus, we are finally free. Free Your folk, free Your church, free us all.

We submit.

Amen.