My chains fell off ....

Most of us live in quite favourable circumstances of relative freedom and these do not guarantee us salvation or true liberty. Most people in the world would envy us our freedoms of liberty and economic choice. Perhaps we don’t know the meaning of the yearning for freedom because we don’t know about the lack of it. Much of the world knows such a yearning. A yearning for the freedom of having enough food, water and a place to sleep. Freedom from the constant threat of having your home bombed or your family killed.

           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 years ago at the funeral of a friend, 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 marvelous 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!

The role of the church when it comes to freedom has often been to be the oppressors and rightly or wrongly, many people in our modern age regard the church as just that.

“In every country and every age, the priest has been hostile to Liberty.”

-- Thomas Jefferson

           So what is the meaning of the liberation we have as Christians and the liberation we are called to be and to share?

Of Paul and Silas it is said

There were in Prison laid

But when they went to take them out

They were not there instead.

Security the same insures

To our assaulted Minds --

The staple must be optional

                                            That an Immortal binds. (Emily Dickinson)

           Part of the challenge of our disciple's work is undoubtedly to put all this in terms that resonate with the twenty-first century. How do we make real our 'way of salvation' today? The rest is just to be there when suddenly it is clear that someone does require saving, healing, freeing, rescuing, here and now. God needs one or more of his disciples, probably at some cost, to deliver his love at the point of need. God also requires of us to lose our own chains, to give over those things that keep us down and restricted in our lives. AMEN.

Rev Gordon Bannon