slave or free?

5 Epiphany B 2009
(Isaiah 40: 21-31; Ps 147: 1-12, 21c; 1 Cor 9: 16-23; Mark 1: 29-39)


Who is a slave, and who is free?

Today we prayed to be set free from bondage. “Liberation” was a common word back in the Chicago of my passionate younger days. The God of the Bible is a God of liberation, and we proclaimed this daily in our prayers and in our protests. It was all good and important and true—the key moment of the Old Testament is God’s freeing of Israel from slavery, and the key moment of the New is Jesus breaking the slavery of death.

But there was yet a deeper liberation for which we longed. When I was younger I was freer than I am now in many ways—free of obligations, free of debt, free to imagine my life as an endless blank slate of possibilities. Now my shoulders bow a little more under my responsibilities. But I have this odd dark sense that I am somehow freer now than I was then.

The prayer does not leave it at “liberation”—there’s that note about “the bondage of our sins.” My cloudy sense of deeper freedom has nothing to do with my having “less sin.” Maybe it has to do with more self-awareness—I have fewer illusions about my mixed motivations, the self-interest behind even some of my more generous-seeming moments. Maybe it has to do with knowing my basic need, my need for God, for grace, for the liberation that only God provides. Free from self—not self-hatred, but free of making myself the center of the world.

Some of the people I have known who have been the freest according to the world’s standards—“independently wealthy”, free of obligations, able to pick up and go where they wished when they wished—have been the least happy, have been prisoners of boredom and lack of meaning and above all lonely.

On the other hand, my mother wrote in her journal that we found after her death—“My days are exhausting. There are little thanks. But if anyone reads this, know that I was not trapped in this house and with this family. I could have packed a suitcase any day and walked out, and once or twice I almost did. But I freely chose to stay, and I am glad I did.”

Following Christ is the mystery of how to be truly free.

God sees and God knows, sings Isaiah. God’s strength does not fade like the polish on a silver bowl, like the bright color of a silk robe. “Those who wait on the LORD shall renew their strength, they shall mount up with wings like eagles, they shall run and not be weary, they shall walk and not faint.”

A woman lay dying last year, tired and in pain. She had the most marvelous time dying , receiving visitors like she was the Queen Mum, telling terrible jokes. “I had a wonderful life, and I have no regrets” she said. Wings of eagles, indeed.

Paul’s words are full of the language of obligation. “Woe to me if I do not proclaim the gospel!” But Paul was not running in terror to serve an angry, demanding God. Paul was a man enchanted, a man living in awe, not fear. He wanted to be immersed forever in the mystery that he had glimpsed.

I’ve met some deeply free people, people who live a freedom that has nothing to do with status or independent wealth.

One was a woman, have a great time dying. One was my mother, worn with parenting six ungrateful boys. Some more are at Brigid’s Table or Rahab’s Sisters, who carry the cross of their lives with courage and joy, who bear hideous pain and real slavery yet dare to hope for something more. And some who do nothing more than live in simple faith, do their work, love those who are in their charge, love and wonder at God.

Some are monks, who watch no TV, do not leave their monastery, do not speak except for chanting psalms, who have doctorates yet work with their hands. They are some of the freest men I’ve ever met.

To be truly free is to know that our freedom comes from a deeper wellspring even than our own hearts and souls.

To be truly free is to be freedom for others.

To be truly free is to let God’s freedom come alive in our hearts, our hands, and our world.

Another prayer says, “God, to know you is eternal life. To serve you is perfect freedom.”