Pentecost 4 (NL4) John B. Valentine
1 Corinthians 6:12-20 June 21, 2026

“OF LICENSE AND LIBERTY”

Have you noticed how ubiquitous the word “freedom” is at the moment?

• The folks in the White House slapped it on their Fight-Night event last weekend ... calling it “UFC Freedom 250" ....

• Juneteenth revelers used it to describe their reason to celebrate this past Friday ... how “Jubilee Day” and/or “Emancipation Day” for enslaved Black American is really “Freedom Day” for all ...

• Pete Hegseth took FDR’s beloved phrase “The Arsenal of Democracy” from eight decades ago and reworked it as “The Arsenal of Freedom” in a speech he gave earlier this week ...

And on and on and on ....

After all ... “Freedom” is about as attractive a moniker as one can possibly put on anything!

We all want freedom. And nobody doesn’t want freedom.

We don’t want anybody to mess with our freedom ... or regulate our freedom ... or restrict our freedom.

And ... if you can somehow affiliate “freedom” with whatever it is that you’re pushing ... it will certainly get peoples’ attention!

I mean ... Jesus knew the appeal of freedom as a basic human aspiration two millennia ago!

In Luke 4 ... when he’s describing the work that he has been sent by God to do ... he says “The Spirit of the Lord is upon me, because he has anointed me to bring good news to the poor. He has sent me to proclaim release to the captives and recovery of sight to the blind, to set free those who are oppressed, to proclaim the year of the Lord’s favor.”

And again ... in John 8 ... he offers his first friends and followers the promise: “If you continue in my word, you are truly my disciples, and you will know the truth, and the truth will make you free.”

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I mean ... who can argue with freedom??? With the possible exception of autocrats and oligarchs and dictators ... of course.

Actually ... Paul can!

And Paul actually DOES ... in this morning’s Bible lesson.

You see ... you may have THOUGHT that this morning’s Bible lesson was all about sex ...

After all ... it DOES mention at least a half a dozen different sexual behaviors that Paul finds to be abominable and categorizes them as expressions of sexual immorality ...

But ... if you look at it closely ... in terms of what Paul is trying to hammer home to the folks in that Greek city of Corinth ... it is REALLY about FREEDOM!

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You see ... the folks who were part of that first church in the city of Corinth found themselves in a bit of a pickle.

The morality and the ethics of the Hebrew Bible ... the Old Testament ... the “Judeo-Christian world-view” as it is ... were completely out-of-synch with the morality and the ethics of the community in which they lived.

For instance:

• Every butcher shop in town was affiliated with a temple ... to this, that or the other Greek deity ...

And selling off the meat of the animals which had been sacrificed was a major source of income for all those temple ...

So these first Christians in Corinth had all sorts of questions about whether or not they could eat meat that had been sacrificed to idols.

• And again ... prostitution was considered ‘legal’ and ‘normal’ and even ‘morally-appropriate’ in Corinth ...

And a few of the temples in town were well-known throughout the empire for the quality of the ‘services’ which they offered ...

So these first Christians in Corinth had a number of questions about that.

• And again ... the biblical concept of monogamous marriage ... you know ... two people in an exclusive and life-long covenant ... was completely out of step with what folks in Corinth assumed to be normative ... betwixt polygamy and concubines and what have you.

And so these Corinthian Christians are struggling with all sorts of questions about how they ought to live.

• Do we live like Jews ... and follow all the commandments and mandates of the Old Testament??

• Or do we live like Greeks and Romans ... and behave like everybody else here in town??

• Or do we do something different??

“Which rules apply to us, Paul? We REALLY need to know! We know that Jesus has freed us ... from sin, death and the power of the devil. We have been gifted with freedom. But what does the life of a Christian LOOK like?”

HOW DO WE ACTUALLY LIVE AS JESUS’ FREED AND FORGIVEN PEOPLE???

Not an insignificant question ... no??? Then ... or even now!

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Anybody a bowler? ANYBODY?

I’ll confess that I’m NOT a bowler ... or at least not very much of one ...

But you know how ...

• you go to the bowling alley ...
• you lace on the goofy shoes ...
• you stand out there on the hardwood floor ...
• and ... out there ahead of you ... you see those ten pins lined up ahead of you ... all nice and neat and just begging for you to knock them down.

It all appears relatively straight-forward and simple ... right?

Except .... EXCEPT ... for what?

Well ... the gutter on the right ... and the gutter on the left!

(And don’t go telling me that you’ve never ever rolled a gutter ball ... or that you only play with ‘bumpers’!!)

• Too far one way ... will get you in trouble ...

• Too far the other way ... will get you into equal but opposite trouble.

At least for me ... navigating the bowling alley ... and actually getting my ball down to where the pins are ... without guttering left or right ... is about as much of a challenge as navigating between Scylla and Charybdis was for Odysseus in that old book The Odyssey ...

Which ... by the way ... is about to be released as this year’s big summer-blockbuster ... but that’s another story.

But ... you see ... In response to the question “How then shall we live?” ...

Paul seems to identify two gutters ... one too far one way ... one too far the other way ... which need to be avoided by those who would seek to live out their calling as Jesus’ people.

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The first of those gutters is what we might well call ‘license’.

License is a total and complete embrace of that bit wherein Jesus says "If you continue in my word, you are truly my disciples, and you will know the truth, and the truth will make you free."

• License” means “Grace without Guidance” ... “Grace without Questions” ... “Grace without Limits.”

• “License” says “Christ has set me free to do anything I want ... live any way I want ... step on whomever I want ... do whatever we want, whenever we want.”

• “License” says “Whatever I do, God will forgive me, so it doesn’t matter what I do ... not to me, not to God, not to anyone.”

License is this assertion that ... because Jesus has freed us ... all the old rules for living have been superceded and tossed aside ... that the Law has no function for those who live under grace.

Dietrich Bonhoeffer once described “license” as “cheap grace” ... and had this to say about it:

“Cheap grace is the preaching of forgiveness without requiring repentance, baptism without church discipline. Communion without confession.

“Cheap grace is grace without discipleship, grace without the cross, grace without Jesus Christ .... of course you have sinned, but now everything is forgiven, so you can stay as you are and just enjoy the consolations of forgiveness.”

That’s the one gutter ... the one that Paul is referring to when he writes that “All things are lawful to me.”

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Now the gutter on the other side ... is what we could well call “legalism”.

And ‘legalism’ is all about just replacing an old set of rules with some new ones.

Let’s be honest ... folks. People like rules. WE like rules. Because rules tell us what we can do and what we can’t do. Rules take the guesswork out of living.

There IS something comfortable about reducing Christianity to a list of do's and don'ts ... be that list generated by mindless fundamentalism or woke-minded liberalism.

I mean ...

Legalism’s list of do's and don'ts mean you always know where you stand ....

Legalism’s list of do's and don'ts mean you don't need to be wise ....

Legalism’s list of do's and don'ts mean you don't have to think or make hard choices.

Legalism ... and legalists ... do not want us to be free.

They don't want us to be free to express our faith originally and creatively in the world.

They insist that we all look alike, talk alike and act alike, thus validating one another's worth.

They just really want us to conform to what they have decided is the new set of rules ... and in so doing throw Christ’s hard-won gift of freedom in the trash can!

Let’s be honest ... folks.

We in the church have stuck all sorts of conditions on the Good News over the years ... most of which we can’t even recognize because they are so enculturated to us.

“What must I forsake?” ... the young man asked.

“Colored clothes for one thing. Get rid of everything in your wardrobe that is not white. Stop sleeping on a soft pillow. Sell your musical instruments and don't eat any more white bread. You cannot, if you are sincere about obeying Christ, take warm baths or shave your beard. To shave is to lie against him who created us, to attempt to improve on his work.”

Now ... granted ... that list is like 1800 years old ... but looking it over gets me to wondering just what conditions we have replaced it with in our day and age.

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But somewhere in between ... the realm of life and living for those of us who are people of God ... that terrain which we ... each of us ... must navigate as best we can ... is maybe this word ... “Liberty.”

Liberty doesn’t necessarily mean the absence of laws.

When the Constitution of the United States promises its citizens “liberty” ... it doesn’t give us license to break its laws?

Rather ... “liberty” isn’t as much about freedom “from” this, that and the other thing as it is “freedom FOR” ... freedom for service to God and those whom God calls our neighbors.

You see ... the Good News of the Gospel means that we are free ...

• that we are free to live by the guidance of God’s Spirit ...
• that we are free to be guided by the word that is the Word of God ...
• that we are free to love our neighbors as we love ourselves.

We are NOT free to do whatever we want whenever we want however we want ... for we are forever constrained by the law of love.

For ... as Peter Marshall ... the long-standing Chaplain of the U.S. Senate once said prayed:

“Teach us that liberty is not only to be loved but also to be lived. Liberty is too precious a thing to be buried in books. It costs too much to be hoarded. Help us see that our liberty is not the right to do as we please, but the opportunity to please to do what is right.”