Jesus said, “Let your speech be Yes or No.” Matthew 5:37

Saying “Yes” without resentment, and saying “No” without regret is what Christian freedom looks like. Such freedom is beyond the law, as Paul and Luther so clearly point out. In other words, when we are acting from love, there is no law we must feel regret for breaking. And when we are acting from love, there is no law we need to feel resentment for obeying. In truth we need not moderate our “Yes” or “No” in order to fit in or not fit in—or in order to play it safe or not play it safe. All real options are permitted to Christian freedom.

Of course the laws are guidelines, often reflecting centuries of wisdom, but for your or my personal responses in each moment of our 21st century living, we have no absolute obligation to obey any law. We need to feel no resentment for obeying any law, or have regret in not obeying any law. We can be open to our essential freedom.

Operating from our essential love, we are free to obey laws as well as to disobey them. Law and law obeying is actually a very important part of our real life. Social structures and norms are important gifts to any situation. Some of us are slaves to obeying whatever laws have been incorporated into our superego. Others of us are slaves to disobeying any laws that we do not like. Most of us are slaves to some of both of these common slaveries.

So how does the fully free human spirit chose what to do? We look fully into the real situation that we face, we weigh up what values might apply, we predict the consequences, we notice any principles of wisdom that might guide us, and then we leap into that Mysterious Reality called “the future” We put our being, our mind, our body, including our mouth, into motion or into no motion. That is basically the look of the realistic, response-able freedom of the Christian Holy Spirit.

Living in this Spirit presupposes a love of Mysterious Realty and a love of the reality of all that neighbors us in this moment of choice. Loving God-and-neighbor is not a law, but a commandment of realism that includes the realism of living our absolute freedom. This is the Holy Spirit. If you say that such a Spirit is impossible to do, you are correct, but you are thereby confessing that you are a victim to some slavery. “With God all things are possible”—that is, our essential freedom is possible as a gift, not a quality that can be achieved. If you are not being given your freedom, pray for it. If that prayer is answered, say “Thank you.” That is, say, “Thank you,” by living the freedom of your real life.

You might also notice that the prayer for freedom is itself an act of freedom, and that the answer to that prayer entails some sort of giving up on your part of some slavery that you have invented in times past and supposed until now that you had to keep going.

For example, we all confront the need for humanity, including our humanity, to leap into doing away with the fossil-fuel energizing of our societies and replacing those energy sources with wind and solar sources of energy. So either say. “Yes,” without resentment to showing to everyone how this is true and how to get this massive shift done, or say, “No,” without regret to continuing with our present course of “cooking up” further distress for rich and poor alike. These dread consequences will especially affect the poor and other almost powerless minorities. Yes or No! This is the Holy Spirit.

What does realism require? You will need to risk the details, but you can know what is freedom and what is not freedom. And saying “No” to this or that option comes up as often as saying “Yes” to this or that option. You can’t say, “Yes” without resentment, if you can’t say, “No,” without regret. And you can’t say, “No,” without regret, if your can’t say, “Yes,” without resentment. “Yes or No” is the nature of freedom.

But instead of saying “Yes or No” to our real options, we assume that this or that is impossible. And life does offer many serious limits, but those limits are not our options. In terms of options that we could indeed take and outcomes that we could indeed bring about, we all tend to be pessimists. The truth is that our pessimism is about 20% realism and 80% excuse making. We are all lazy slobs when it comes to realistically living our real lives in our real freedom. We all lack imagination when it comes to making a full embrace of our Yes-and-No freedom.

Returning reflection to our climate crisis options, we all lack imagination about what could be done about that prime emergency. We lack imagination about how well our society could launch the phasing out of our fossil fuels and the phasing in the solar and wind along with an infrastructure of electrical and hydrogen delivery systems. We prefer to believe the pessimists who say that we cannot do without oil or natural gas or coal or nuclear power plants or whatever already exists and is being defended by big and determined wealth-powered owners.

When we hear one of our peer-group members say that the Green New Deal is an extreme set of undoable programs, we believe that excuse for inaction before we even investigate the matter. Suppose we found out that the Green New Deal is actually a set of doable programs that get the US moving on moderating the climate without dumping the costs of this on working classes, what excuse do we build then. Some of us us use our favorite politician or news station claim that the climate crisis is a hoax. We find that excuse enough for doing nothing. Most of us are more sophisticated than that in our excuse making. Most of us simply have other things to do than figuring out what candidates to vote for and what demonstrations to attend.

Here is an all purpose excuse for avoiding figuring out our Yes-and-No freedom about anything in the realm of politics, “All politicians are corrupt, there is no difference between them.” Here is another effective excuse, “Love is about personal relations, not about changing the social structures.” There is actually no end to these somewhat effective excuses.

Just say, “Yes or No.” Just say “Yes” without resentment to doing all you can for climate change, or say “No” without excuses or regret for doing nothing on that front. Freedom can be “No” as well as “Yes” to any temporal option. Perhaps your particular life is called to saying “Yes” to something more important for your life than the climate crisis. Just say “Yes” to whatever that is. You will be guilty for doing nothing about the climate crisis, but being guilty about not doing many somethings will always be the case. Being our Yes-or-No freedom presupposes forgiveness for whatever we do or don’t do.

“No” to our Yes-or-No freedom is the only wrong path. Freedom itself is our only righteousness. This freedom carries with it a love for everybody and everything, as well as our complete trust in this path of raw realism—namely, responding with many Yes-or-No responses in each real moment to the Unbelievably Demanding Reality we face. Such freedom can be a bumpy ride for our self-absorbed ego. But for our most profound layer of consciousness Yes-or-No freedom is finding our true being.