When I was young person growing up in the church (about 13 or 14), I remember nothing moved me more in the church service than singing those words of the Wesley hymn “my chains fell off, my heart was free, I rose went forth and followed thee.” I felt charged and close to tears with the passion of the words and the image in the story of Paul in prison. A few weeks ago at the funeral of Peter Hoare, that same hymn was sung by a packed church. I presume many of you have had the chance to sing that hymn in a packed church. It is very uplifting. But, at the same time as I was being carried away with this marvellous hymn, I looked up and, on the balcony of the church there were a large group of people who were not church people. It was fascinating to see the expressions on their faces as some of them tried to join in and others stood exchanging bemused and puzzled looks with each other. It occurred to me that some of them may have been impressed with the singing, but to most of them, the concepts involved in the hymn, the theology, was alien and unintelligible.
To me, in my younger days those words spoke to me somehow of my own liberation from personal sin somehow. The joy I felt was about me personally and what I felt God was giving me.
I have also spent some time in my life when I have felt that those words apply to the sort of political liberation that God promises. It is a liberation from the politics of dishonesty and oppression to one of justice and compassion. In many ways that is where I am today when I think of our liberation.
As I grown older I no longer see things in that way. In fact sometimes when I look at my self in the church I feel like those people in the balcony. So we have before us the question, What do we ask of God when we say .. Be our Freedom Lord!
Rev Gordon Bannon
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