Devotional Messages

Galatians 5:1, 13-14 – For freedom Christ has set us free.  Stand firm, therefore, and do not submit again to a yoke of slavery. … For you were called to freedom, brothers and sisters; only do not use your freedom as an opportunity for self-indulgence, but through love become slaves to one another.  For the whole law is summed up in a single commandment, “You shall love your neighbor as yourself.”  (NRSV)

At the end of the musical “Pippin” someone asks the title character how he feels.  “Trapped,” he replies, “but happy.”  Our culture is very confused about happiness, freedom and love.  So many movies, TV shows and advertisements try to convince us that happiness is the capacity to do whatever we want to do, with no constraints.  ‘Commitment ties you down,’ they tell us.  ‘Keep your options open.’

And yet, deeper tales show us that constant avoidance of attachment and intimacy leads to emptiness and despair.  Commitments may require compromise, but they also provide benefits that take the sting out of not getting our own way.  At the core of this reality are love and the ways love transforms us.

It can sound nonsensical to hear that you are free to become a slave, but that is what Paul is telling us.  Christ has freed us, given us a choice to freely offer our lives in love to others, like he did.  Do we just grab up our forgiveness and run off by ourselves to live however we please?  It might seem like that would be the temptation.

But when we truly find our freedom in Christ and Christ’s love, we discover that our choices change; our priorities shift.  Our deepest desires are not what they once were.  Rather than satisfying the needs simply of our own body, we are drawn to attend to and live as the whole body, the Body of Christ – God’s presence in the world.  Pippin’s new happiness confused him, because it came with the limitations of a relationship.  He had yet to understand that happiness is found not in limitless freedom, but in the free choice to love others as ourselves.

Collect for the Week:  Loving God, who took on human form that we might know the depths of your love, grant that our understanding of your mercy might grow, that we might be a witness to the freedom of life in Christ and agents of your transforming love for all the world.  Through Christ Jesus and the Holy Spirit, Amen.