WRITTEN THINGS
Sermons • Songs • Etceteras
“If you have come here to help me you are wasting your time, but if you have come because your liberation is bound up with mine, then let us work together.” These are the words of Indigenous Australian artist, author, and poet Lilla Watson who, in 1985 delivered that timeless and transcendent message at the UN Decade for Women Conference in Nairobi just four years after I was born, in 1985.
It wasn’t until many, many years later, probably about 10 years ago, that I read her words for the very first time. And when I did, they vibrated and echoed in my bones like a trumpet through a canyon, and I understood -- viscerally, if not yet intellectually or practically -- that she was preaching the Law of Love and speaking gospel truth. Her words recast Scripture for me in a way that utterly transformed my theology, my actions, my whole person, and grounds me still to this day in a vision of Christ and eternal salvation through the lens of Mutual Liberation in the right here and now. So I was thrilled to find today’s epistle is Galatians 5:1 and 13-25 which opens with this trumpeting proclamation from St. Paul: “It is for freedom Christ has set us free. Stand firm, therefore, and do not submit again to your own enslavement… You were called to freedom, beloved siblings, not to give you an opportunity for self-indulgence, but that through love you may become slaves to each another.” Across that canyon of two thousand years and countless empires raised and felled, Paul’s words resounded and rhymed and were echoed in Lilla Watson’s. And both, of course, were echoes of what Christ said -- and didn’t say -- in today’s gospel. But to hear them like the bell they are, I want to go back a bit for a birds-eye overview lest we forget how we got to the Samaritan village in the first place.
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