TRUE FREEDOM

(Preached on Sunday, July 3, 2005)

Walk with me and work with me — watch how I do it.  Learn the unforced rhythms of grace.  I won’t lay anything heavy or ill-fitting on you.  Keep company with me and you’ll learn to love freely and lightly.            -Matthew 11:29-30

 

“We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness.”  Thus begins the Declaration of Independence, the foundational document for our nation, the very reason we celebrate tomorrow.

While we celebrate the birth of this nation, while we celebrate freedom — and do not misunderstand me, that is something which should be celebrated and treasured, there is one question which our celebration raises for us to consider this morning.

What is true freedom?

 

For many years the license plates of New Hampshire bore the slogan, made famous by Revolutionary War general John Stark: “live free or die.”

The irony is that those great words were printed onto the license plates by inmates in the state prison.  They could not leave their prison, but many of us stay in our prisons when we have the power to leave.

We want to live free, but we do not seem to know the path to true freedom.

 

The truth is, there is no absolute freedom in this world.

Every one of us is bound by burdens that weigh us down, trap us and enslave us.

We proclaim our freedom this weekend loud and clear, but to a great extent we are simply rattling our chains!

We claim to be free, but we all carry a whole load of imperatives of one kind or another.

We are all slaves to many different things: job, social class, ambition, guilt, money, and consumerism.

Or we are burdened by the expectations we picked up when we were children — to be a good son or daughter, to be smart, to be creative, to be successful, to be good.

Or we are trapped by the messages we learned years ago — about who is acceptable, about what is normal and what is deviant, about the path to success and happiness, about what the Bible says and what God expects of us.

Or we carry the scars of past crises, personal tragedies or failures, dramatic accidents or illness, which are still defining our view of ourselves and controlling the decisions we make as we live our lives.

 

The apostle Paul understood the true nature of human existence and he wrote of the struggle from a very personal perspective in the Letter to the Romans.

“The good that I want to do, I fail to do.  The evil I do not want to do, that I end up doing.  O wretched man!  Who can deliver me from this slavery!  Thanks be to God, Jesus Christ will!”

 

Jesus says, “Come to me.”

For many of us, the words are so familiar, they have almost begun to lose their power.

In the traditional words: “Come unto me, all you who labor and are heavy laden, and I will give you rest.   Take my yoke upon you and learn of me.  For I am gentle and humble in heart, and you will find rest for your souls.   For my yoke is easy and my burden is light.”

After all, how do we speak these words to the parents of the teenagers attacked by sharks this past week — one girl dead, one boy without his leg, another boy injured and surely traumatized?

How do we speak these words to the those who worked faithfully for their company all their lives, counting on a pension that is not there now as they retire, due to mismanagement of some sort or another?

How do we speak these words to those looking for a miracle, for hope against hopelessness, in the face of cancer, or some other disease?

 

That’s why the words of the paraphrase version spoke to me and helped me reclaim the power of this invitation.

“Are you tired? Worn out? Burned out on religion?  Come to me.  Get away with me and you’ll recover your life.  I’ll show you how to take a real rest.  Walk with me and work with me — watch how I do it.  Learn the unforced rhythms of grace.  I won’t lay anything heavy or ill-fitting on you.  Keep company with me and you’ll learn to live freely and lightly.”

 

Jesus does not invite us to come and take up a new religion.

Nor to burden ourselves with more rigorous moral laws.

He does not lay on us further expectations.

He invites us to link our lives with his.

And as we do he promises us that we will be linking our lives more deeply with the invisible God who utterly cares about each one of us.

Through his loving words and deeds he wants us to discern and trust the irrepressible love of God which never accepts defeat.  Jesus says: “Come.  If you receive me, you receive the One who sent me.”

To come to Jesus therefore is to come to that eternal Lover whom he called Abba.  Abba being the affectionate name a small child of that culture had for a very loving father.  Dad or Daddy or Papa is our nearest equivalent in English. 

Jesus is the door into that relationship.

To come to the door that is Christ Jesus, and to enter through that door into the house of Abba, is to come home at last.  It is to place your trust in the Mysterious Parent of all, whose long, patient, creative purposes raised up on planet earth creatures that could have fellowship with their Creator.

To come to Jesus is to return to our true selves and find ourselves loved and respected and cherished.

 

To link our lives with Jesus is to discover true freedom.

It is to learn that we are truly loved, not for what we do, not for what we don’t do, not for what we achieve, but loved just for ourselves.

Loved, just because God is love and God chooses to love us, and nothing at all can change that fact.

That is freeing.

We are no longer defined by anything in our past, none of the horrors or failures, none of the mistakes or missed chances, not the things we have done or the things done to us, none of it.

We are defined only by God’s free and loving creativity present and active in our lives now.

Our lives become opened to the future, God’s future, and are freed from bondage to the past.

All of this takes place because Jesus takes all these burdens on himself and lays on us instead the burdens of grace, which are no burdens at all.

 

How do we do this?

By accepting that Jesus’ message of God’s love for us really and truly does apply to us.

By trusting that God really does want the best for us and through the life of Jesus God really does understand our lives and is right there with us always.

By trusting that God is not out to get us, not judging or punishing us, and that no matter what happens to us in life, God is right there with us and will never leave us.

By realizing that we are not on this journey alone, and that one of the ways God is present to us is through those on the journey with us. 

Trusting others, like those with whom we worship, to be willing to help share our burdens is one of the ways we take the step to trust God to share our burdens.