One of our family’s favorite TV shows for a while was called, Clean House. A while back, they went in search of the messiest home in America. They found it in Cincinnati, OH. The daughter, Bridget, had written to the show, pleading for help with the home she lived in with her mother, Sharon. Not long after, a team of people showed up at their door, ready to help them sort through their clutter and mess. As the team stepped gingerly through the piles and mounds of clutter, Sharon denied she had a problem with hoarding things, or that she had a problem with buying things and bringing them home, even if she didn’t need them and couldn’t use them. With the team’s help, Sharon and Bridget put most of their clutter in a rummage sale. Get this: they had enough stuff to fill an empty K-Mart—with departments! With the money they made at the rummage sale (plus some matching money from the show), the Clean House team were able to redesign and organize Sharon and Bridget’s home to the tune of $75–100,000! What amazes me is how hard it was for Sharon and Bridget to part with things which in most cases they hadn’t seen or used in years, and it had all piled up to the point where their lives had become narrow lanes through their home, and the roof of their living room was bulging down with the weight of what was above it. Many of us have issues like this—oh, maybe not having piles and piles of clutter. But many of us sometimes feel trapped by our lives, as if the walls are closing in until we only have narrow lanes in which we live. What is it that keeps us in those narrow lanes of living? And how do we escape from the prisons in which we live? Our passage for today talks about freedom—how we give it up and how we can find it again.
“How do we give up our freedom...and how can we get it back?”
Let’s begin with how we give it up. The Christians in Galatia are struggling with both their fears and their hopes. The well-intentioned missionaries who have arrived have played on their hopes by encouraging them to “get serious” and “go hardcore” in their faith by piling on rule after rule to their walk with God. But these missionaries have also played on their fears: what if what we are doing for God is not enough? What if we have to show our love more than we are now? This fear can take us into dark places. Like Sharon, afraid to give up any of her things, afraid to make the changes that will open things up, we too can clutter our lives with rules thinking they mean God will love us better, while they gradually curtail our freedom. We forget that we can’t make God love us more than God already does. All too often we give up our freedom for false promises of security, but we were made for freedom.
Of course, the other extreme of how we give up freedom is the folks who throw out all the rules. I remember my first semester of college. Yeah baby! Mom’s not around. Dad’s not around. Woohoo! I’m staying up all night! Yeah, and I’m eating pizza and frootloops at every meal. I thought, “I’m walking on the wild side!” I could go on, but maybe that’s for another time. The point is that kind of living lost its luster pretty quickly for me. It felt like what mattered most to me got lost in that approach. I realized going to classes was actually something I wanted for me—a way to say “I love you!” to the me I wanted to become, and a way to say “Thank you!” to the God who gave me the gifts that brought me there. I started looking for ways to make a difference in the lives of the people around me. I didn’t have the words for it, and some of the time I felt really isolated from people and angry at God. I was trying to figure out how to be the boss of my life, but I hadn’t figured out how to trust God to be my real boss. I was trying to learn what Paul means when he writes, “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.” Freedom is more than being able to do whatever we want, because just living for ourselves is slavery to our appetites and wants. True freedom is being able to do whatever…is loving. Paul says, “the only thing that counts is faith expressing itself through love.”
Which may lead us to ask ourselves: What do I trust? Where have I placed my hopes, my identity, my sense of security? If our faith is in a certain level of income, a degree of status, or our grip on “The Rules,” then we are driven by these things, and the fear of losing them. If one of these things should fall through, then we can feel lost and adrift, even feel that our world has ended. Like Sharon, how often have we chosen to let our lives narrow out of fear of missing something or losing something, until we have nothing but a dark maze. For Jesus, loving and trusting meant He could conquer his fear and face the cross, trusting God would bring things right in the end. And on that first Easter, God surprised the world by raising Jesus from the dead, to even greater freedom. What counts is not “The Rules” or being able to do whatever we want…what counts is faith expressing itself through love. When we know the right and loving thing to do, then we do it—trusting that the same God who loved Jesus as He was doing the right and loving thing on the cross, will help us do the right and loving thing too. And that’s when the true freedom is born with unexpected bursts of grace!
So where do you place your trust? Do you feel like you are on a roller-coaster, white-knuckling it through life, wishing things would just stop moving? Like Sharon, are you holding on to things, the comfortable and familiar, trying to pretend that nothing is going to change? You know Sharon’s story has a really sad ending: as the cast and crew were showing Sharon around her beautiful, spacious house, you could see the storm clouds forming over Sharon. And in the middle of filming on the last day, Sharon said, “I hate it!” And she walked away, got in her car and left… She only came back after everyone but her daughter had left, and she started bringing junk back into her house. Once we get that we are free, Paul says, “Stand firm…and do not submit again to a yoke of slavery.” Only by taking the risk and letting go, can we get past fear and learn to trust the Lord who loves us so deeply and only wants to give us more. From that place of trust, deep friendships and loving relationships can grow and fill our lives with the intimacy we crave. From that place of trust, we can share what we have—even if we don’t have much. From that place of trust, we can truly help another person, opening ourselves to them as we trust that God has a plan. From that place of trust, we can have deep peace about whatever is to come, because we know that the same Lord Jesus who loved us enough to go to the cross, will walk hand-in-hand into the future with us. Only as we get past fear and find that place of trust do we truly have the freedom to live after God’s own heart. Thanks to grace in Jesus Christ, we catch a glimpse of how perfectly free each of our lives, and our neighborhoods, and our cities, and our nation are meant to be, but best of all that we are freed to love. No fear—only love. What counts is faith expressing itself in love.
“...we are freed to love. No fear—only love. What counts is faith expressing itself in love!”