Try to imagine, if you can, an endless parade of humanity, men and women of all races and nationalities. . . some in rags. . .  others are really decked out. . . like that man over there in the Harris tweed jacket . . . nice threads.  Most of these people, though, look pretty ordinary . . . I'd guess teachers, social workers, nurses, maybe a few factory and office workers,  business people.  It's quite a diverse group and yet when you look closely you'll see that each one, yes . . . every one of them is carrying a chain.  Some of these I can figure out, that woman over there in the blue suit chained to her brief case . . . pretty obvious.  Or over there by the curb, that man chained to his Cadillac . . . not too difficult.  But most of these people just have chains, period.

Nothing attached.  Let's just talk to a few of them to find out what this is all about.
Excuse me sir, just what is that chain you have there.

(Lulama Kunene) This?  It's the Chain of an oppressive social system.  You can't see it, but my chain denies me and others like me plitical and economic power. So many avenues of life are closed off to me.  Even half way around the world, it limits what I can say and do through fear and intimidation."

Excuse me ma'am. . . Chain of my past.  It all happened so many years ago, but it still dictates my life, the way I act, the choices I make.  I just can't seem to shake it.

Excuse me sir. . . Chain of security.  My quest for security is the controlling influence in my life.  And yet the closer I come to achieving it the more isolated and well . . . insecure I feel.

Chains, everybody here has a chain and some of us have lots of them.  But chains are for slaves. . . aren't they?  Slavery is a foreign, repugnant concept to us.  "Certainly there are no slaves in this country, they were all freed after the Civil War.  We just celebrated the fourth of July:  Sweet Land of Liberty, the home of the free and the brave, let freedom ring.  Yes, we're about freedom in this country.  Nope, no slaves here.  Just us free folks.  (pause)

Herein lies the problem.  If we are going to understand the message of the Bible, we first need to understand how slavery is a part of the human condition.  Furthermore, if we hope to appropriate the freedom Christ offers us, we first need to acknowledge the ways in which we ourselves are bound.  In denying our status as slaves, we risk allowing chains that could be joyfully vorne to become heavy burdens, and enabling the forces that would master us to draw the chain tighter.

To face the reality of slavery in our lives, I'd like us first to look at slavery as it manifested itself among the Israelites.  As Christians, we claim the Biblical story as our story.  The characters and events of Biblical history shape our thinking and identity.  Yet the Bible is first and foremost the story of a slave people.  To this day the Jews commemorate the Exodus in the Satyr . . . the Lord God led his people out of Egypt, the land of slavery, with a mighty hand.  But the Exodus is only one, albeit a prominent one, of a series of oppression/deliverance cycles found in the Old Testament.  There are lots of them during the period of the Judges, and of course the eras of exile in Babylon and Persia.  But even during the era which we traditionally think of as the zenith of Israelite nation, we should rightly think of the Jews as a slave people.

Picture the setting. . . a restless mob gathers outside Samuel's tent at Ramah demanding a king.  Samuel is shaken and upset.  He prays to Yahweh about it, and comes before the people with a prophetic word.  (Read 1 Samuel 9:11-18)

He will make you slaves.  Historians tell us that that's the way it really was . . . the political reality of a Near Eastern monarchy in Biblical times.  Sure enough, by the time of Solomon, the Jews themselves were being conscripted into forced labor crews for the king's lavish building projects.

Political pressure ultimately destroyed the Israelite monarchy, and the yolk of the Jewish people fell into foreign hands.  For the next 600 years they endured slavery and oppression under a succession of foreign powers:  Babylonians, Persians, Greeks and Romans.  Perhaps the ultimate irony of Biblical history is that in the midst of all this, the Jews found themselves enslaved by their own religious establishment, under the yoke of the law.

About this time Jesus appears on the scene and turns the whole slavery issue on its head.  Few things would be more onerous to a Jew than being a slave, yet Jesus told his disciples <whoever wants to be first [among you] must be your slave.  He goes on to explain that his purpose in coming was not to be served, but to serve, and to give his life as a ransom for many.">  And when Jesus talks about being a servant he's not giving some new veiled meaning to the word.  Jesus' service is not some do-goody photo opportunity like politicians so often do.  It is genuinely lowly.

Another new twist we find in the NT is that the slave masters are different.  Nations, like the Babylonians and Persians of the OT, are barely mentioned.  In their place we find entities which are abstract and yet much closer to home:  Sin, Wealth, the Law are explicitly named as masters.  But I think the writer of 2 Peter captures the spirit of the NT view of slavery when he says,  "a person is a slave to whatever has mastered him."  The sources of our bondage are as numerous as the varieties of human weakness itself.

At issue in the NT was not whether the readers were going to be slave or free . . . from the greatest to the least, they were all slaves.  The issue was whose slaves were they and what kind of slaves were they going to be.

Now I'd like to turn our focus to how the Biblical material on slavery can enlighten the understanding of our own bondage
For our purposes today I'll defin enslavement as a status where lack or surrender the power to control your situation.
The Bible shows us two distinct forms of bondage.  The first is that which grows out of the human condition, such as we saw among the Israelites in Egypt, and the second is that which arises out of human choice, as in the establishment of the Israelite monarchy, or choosing to serve mammon

The chains which arise from the human condition are out of our control.  We live in bodies.  We're born into families and cultures.  We're subject to the social and political forces of our particular society.  So many particulars of our existence are beyond our choosing.

The man carrying the chain of oppression reminded us of the evil forces in this world which seek to enslave us.  Racism, poverty, militarism, sexism . . . all wield power over entire cultures.  Millions suffer under their yoke, and millions more perpetuate their power.

We at CMCL claim some familiarity with these abstract masters, but we're less used to thinking about our bodies as a source of enslavement.  But here I can't help thinking about David . . .  (Story of David Nussbaum)

I think about couples struggling with infertility, and people with illnesses and physical handicaps.  They suffer an acute sense of powerlessness that comes when you realize that your body is out of your control.  Their pain is made more acute by the fact that all around them are people enjoying perfect health:  running and jumping and producing children on demand.

I think about good looks, athletic, academic and social skills.  These are the commodities of youth.  If you lack them, childhood, even adulthood, can be a miserable time, and the scars can be lifelong.

I think about our bodily drives for sustenance, security and intimacy.  The pain we suffer when these needs are not met and the self-destructive ways we sometimes seek to meet those neeeds.  Are any of these our chains?

Finally, some of the chains of the human condition are the bonds of human relationship.  We're born in families, we grow up in geographic and church communities.  Most of these bonds are very positive, yet inevitably some are tragically destructive.

The chains arising out our human condition:  they range from the sinister to the joyful, they're outside our realm of choice, yet ther're intimately bound up with our humanity.

The second category of bondage is that which arises out of human choice.  We saw two positive examples of this in the skit and a rather negative one in the I Samuel passage.  Somehow the negative examples seem pretty cut and dried.  through willful sin, or simple bad judgment, people become enslaved.  Drug addiction, destructive habitual behavior and paersonality traits, unhealthy lifestyles enslave countless 1,000's.  In John 8:34, Jesus tells his Jewish audience that whoever sins is a slave to sin.  That's us, too!  These are our chains!

It would be tempting to spend my whole time up here talking about the all dreadful chains we must bear, but the would be wrong.  Many of the chains we carry are rewarding, if not outright pleasant.  We already saw people with the chains of educational pursuits and children.  And consider that the Bible even describes our relationship with God in the terminology of slavery.  We are God's slaves.  God is our master; the one whom we serve.

Our trouble is that we're not used to thinking of chains in a positive light.  "Babies and education and serving God, those don't sound much like chains to me."  And thay don't, until you realize that the very act of choosing is self-limiting.  As the proverb says, you can't have your cake and eat it too."  Choose one option and you'll close off four others.  Furthermore, we live in the shadow of all our decisions.  The chains we choose may be good chains, but they'll bind us all the same.

And so we have chains:  some good, some bad, some we chose, some we didn't.  What are we going to do about these chains and how does Christs's deliverance enter into all this.?

First, we have to name those chains just like we've been doing.  You can't deal appropriately with your chains and Christ can't help you either, if you don't name your chains.

Second, we have to realize that all our chains, even the good ones, have the potential to turn on us.  they can make us suffer, they can take control of our lives and bind us in ways that are unhealthy.  The world has countless forces that continually seek to enslave us.  And yet as Christians we know that there is only one master who holds all the chains.  Which leads me to my third point, and that is, we have to have our priorities straight.  There is only one master of all things.  That's who we need to serve.  That's  whose kingdom we need to seek first.  When Jesus said you cannot serve two masters he was speaking qualitatively not quantitatively.  You can have 29 masters ( and most of us do) but you can only serve one of them.  We need to be sure it's the one who holds all the chains.  In the same breath, we must be sure that our expectations aren't unrealistic.  It's not God's will to remove all our chains immediately nor should we want him to.   When Jesus came, the Jews badly wanted him to remove the yoke of Roman oppression and rule as their political Messiah.  The Messiah they got bore the chains of the world's sin all the way to the cross, broke their power in the resurrection, and the world hasn't been the same since.

The deliverance Christ offers is provisional.  It is both now and not yet.  Our chains are loosened, not gone.  We live in a body, earth is our home, sin and error still affect our lives, the kingdom has not come in its fulness.

And yet through the resurrection, the promise remains to those who serve the Master of all things:  God who rules by love will deliver us from this body of death, from the powers of this world, from those who rule by fear.  And eventually God will confer upon us slaves the status of family.

God give us the courage to seek first the kingdom.