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One of the most frustrating things about being a human, at least for me, is that you don’t just get to a point where you have everything figured out. You can check off a lot of your goals, but at the end of the day, you’re still just a little creature flailing around. Deep down, you’re still just that little kid asking big questions about the world and how you fit into it.

My husband, Daniel, and I have been talking about this recently. More specifically, we’ve been reflecting on the core values that guide the decisions we make. I like to think that, deep down, I am driven by virtues of kindness, peace, love, and joy. And those are real values I hold.

But Daniel very astutely pointed out that I am also driven by a less positive value: I am deeply afraid of getting in trouble. I am a card-carrying, life-long rule follower. Not because the rules always make sense. Not because I always agree with them. And certainly not because I think rules are somehow innately virtuous and always there to protect us.

(In fact, I do have a radical streak in me. In my 20s, I tried to bring about significant reforms at the retail stores and factories I worked at. It didn’t work.) But I have to admit that fear is always at play, making me doubt myself and making it harder to live into those virtuous core values. After months of reckoning with this fear, I encountered today’s epistle reading, and something shook loose.

Today, Paul sets two “F-words” in opposition to one another: Freedom and Flesh. Christians have often misunderstood the way Paul uses the word “flesh.” He doesn’t mean it simply as the physical body. Rather, “flesh” is a way of thinking about our natural inclinations in a broken world. The “works of the flesh,” which we might call “sin,” are attitudes and actions driven by ego and self-protection. They are things that keep people divided, that cause schisms and disappointments beyond repair. They are habits that keep people chained in cycles of addiction and isolation. They are distractions that keep us from loving our neighbor as ourselves.

These “works of the flesh” are ultimately “works of fear.” Because they are motivated, deep down, by fear: fear that we are not lovable, that we don’t have enough, that we will be misunderstood, that there’s an unseen enemy lurking around every corner.

But the F-word that Jesus invites us to is neither Flesh nor Fear. It is Freedom.

“For freedom Christ has set us free.” I tried to figure out why the sentence was phrased that way, but that’s really what it means: Christ has set us free so that we can be free. In the original context, this meant that the early Christians were free from a rigidly interpreted Jewish legal code. But that idea can be expanded. For us today, the scripture suggests that we are free from the ideologies, expectations, and fears that don’t allow us to imagine a world beyond “flesh.”

Christ’s freedom is not the limited freedom of our patriotic songs, which ask us to prove our allegiance to one place and one people. It is not the violent freedom that we take by trampling on others, dividing people into categories of powerful and weak, ally and enemy. It is not the regulated freedom brought about by man-made laws, which by their very nature can only restrict the worst in us, not encourage the best in us. Christ’s freedom is certainly not the small, false freedom I achieve when I avoid getting into trouble.

It’s bigger than all of that. “For freedom Christ has set us free.” The freedom of Christ is different from anything we have ever encountered in this world of flesh, because it exists beyond fear. It rejects “brokenness” as the natural order of things and reveals “love of neighbor” as the natural order of the Kingdom of God.

As Paul told us in last week’s reading, there is no dichotomy that Jesus hasn’t already destroyed: “…there is no longer Jew or Greek, there is no longer slave or free, there is no longer male and female; for all of you are one in Christ Jesus.”

The freedom of resurrection life is so big that it cannot be defined against what it is not. True freedom doesn’t require haves and have-nots to define its own quality of freedom. True freedom is found in the flattening of hierarchies and abandonment of control. It is evident in our mutual relationship to Christ and one another, as we become a part of his Body in the world.

Theologian Kathryn Tanner puts it this way: “All our action is to be like that of the ministers at the Lord’s banquet table, distributing outward to others the gifts of the Father that have become ours in and through the Son” (Jesus, Humanity, and the Trinity). We are free to give, free to receive, and free to luxuriate in God’s goodness in us, through us, and all around us.

“For freedom Christ has set us free.” What a profound and odd statement: to be free for the sake of freedom.

But if we could just lean into it, feel it, and let go of just a little bit of our fear, do you realize that the world would be an entirely different place? We would be governed not by things that divide, isolate, and shame us, but by the neighborly love of the Kingdom of God. Shaken loose, we would bubble over with love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, generosity, faithfulness, gentleness, and self-control. These attributes would become infectious, leading us deeper into resurrection life and bringing the world with us.

When we follow Jesus, we are called to be radical in the original sense of the word—to “affect the fundamental nature of something.”

We are called, first, to believe that Christ made us for freedom, not for fear. Then we are called to turn this world of the flesh into a world overgrown with fruits of the Spirit. We do that by rejecting fear as a core value, by committing to love beyond man-made boundaries, and by letting go of control. And by practicing actions and attitudes that lead us back to communion with Christ and one another.

The day we finally understand that we are free, there will be so much fruit, the whole world will feast.

Amen.