pat loughery

Today, we as a nation celebrate freedom. I met a local pastor, a wonderful person, in line at the grocery store this morning. He was buying coffee; I was buying donuts for our welcome table. He was very excited: “Today’s the day we celebrate our freedom!”.

Yesterday my brother in law, Shannon’s youngest brother, shipped out from his national guard unit in Montana to Texas for infantry training, and will be in Iraq for 15 months. We’re all concerned for his safety, and proud that he’s going.

“Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere. We are caught in an inescapable network of mutuality, tied in a single garment of destiny. Whatever affects one directly, affects all indirectly.”
– Martin Luther King, Letter from Birmingham Jail

In our little gathering today we talked about fasting, and its relationship to freedom for the captives, freeing the oppressed, clothing the nekkid, feeding the hungry, loving the widows and orphans. Jesus’ ideas about society and spirituality, blended together, blow my mind. We looked at God’s reminder to his people about the nature of true fasting in Zechariah 7:4-11 and in Isaiah 58. But yet Jesus also, in Matthew 6:16, expects his followers to fast. And the context indicates that it’s a food fast, that it’s a normal part of spiritual life.

But when you fast…

And then there’s the whole issue of rewards. Sit down sometime with a highlighter or a search program, and look at all the times in Matthew 6 that Jesus talks about rewards given by the Father. Rewards intrigue me.

What is freedom to a Christian? We hang in the balance between being set free to live radically abundant lives, but as bondservants of Jesus. We are freed from our old, crusty patterns of death and freed to experience the Kingship of the triune God.

It is for freedom that Christ has set us free. Stand firm, then, and do not let yourselves be burdened again by a yoke of slavery.
Galatians 5:1

Isn’t Easter really when we celebrate freedom? I wonder if our celebration of freedom on July 4 borders (or obliterates the border into) idolatry. And yet I also realize that it was God’s gracious gift to me, to allow me to be born here, and not in some other nation.

++Thank you, Lord, for freedom. Help me to understand it. Help me to not take for granted that you gave it to me, and gifted me with citizenship in your Kingdom++