Epiphany 5 2006Isa 40.21-31, Psalm 147, 1 Corinthians 9.16-23, Mark 1.29-39.We’ve heard this morning possibly my favourite piece of scripture in all of the bible.
It’s the reading from Isaiah. In particular the bit about being lifted up on eagles wings. It’s a powerful image to me, because there is something about eagles I really like. I like eagles so much that I had one tattooed on my right arm a long, long time ago. I remember how much of a thrill it was a few years ago, when I was riding my last motorbike, my long suffering Honda 500, around Kangaroo island, and I saw an eagle at the side of the road. It just sat there and watched me ride past. It was magnificent, such a wonderful, majestic creature. And so unafraid, so unconcerned with this noisy motorcycle going past, so aloof and unaffected by the passing world.
What does the image of an eagle mean to you? To the American forefathers, who chose as their national emblem the bald eagle, it apparently meant strength, courage, freedom, and immortality. I also read that the eagle can symbolise spiritual energy. The eagle is the symbol of St. John the Evangelist, which by coincidence is the patron saint of the church where I became an Anglican and identified a calling to ordained ministry.
But I think it’s the freedom that I like the most about the symbol of the eagle. That the creature is not stuck on this earth, that it can soar above the turkeys stuck on the ground, all the rubbish, and be distant, removed, aloof.
On Monday I got back from a week on the bike. 2700kms or thereabouts, to Melbourne via Port Fairy, the Great ocean road, then from Melbourne to Wodonga via Healesville and the Blacks Spur, Beechworth and the Bakery, and home via Shepparton and Bendigo, through Horsham. What a fantastic ride. When my butt had recovered, by about Wednesday, I found myself wanting to be back out on the road, traveling. This has been exacerbated by watching the dvd of the series “The Long way round” with Ewan Macgregor and Charley Borman riding around the world, northern hemisphere at least, on BMW motorcycles. It’s not always easy for them, the journey, especially in Mongolia and Siberia, but the freedom, the travel is the thing. It’s not so much the destination, it’s the journey. I had a much easier time of it than they did, I only had to ride through very hot conditions, like 40 degrees for days on end. No bogs, no river crossings, no freezing conditions, although the heat was hard enough. Yet through the hardships, the freedom, that feeling of traveling, of being in between, rootless, removed from the cares and the petty worries of the world was a wonderful feeling. It’s very easy to get addicted to that feeling and to feel a bit lost when it’s all finished, even though you get home to the family and friends, and back to normal life. Ewan and Charley recognized the feeling was coming, that let down at the end of a journey, when a destination is realised.
I was talking to someone about this phenomen a couple of days ago, the fact that I kept thinking about the trip and pining for the road, and this person described the feeling as “freedom withdrawal”. So this “withdrawal”, combined with the eagle’s wings reading, has got me thinking a lot about freedom.
Freedom has become a commodity. Harley Davidson try to sell their rather agricultural motorcycles on the basis of freedom. But considering the more desirable models in the larger engine range cost upward of $23k all I can think of is being shackled to a huge personal loan. That’s not freedom to me I’m afraid. But Freedom is a desirable commodity. People are prepared to pay for it. Yet as with the Harley, its rarely actually freedom. It’s an illusion of freedom. There are still dependencies, there are still ties, there is still a cost in the end. True freedom is something totally different.
We tend to think of freedom as the ability to do whatever we want to, some sort of personal anarchy. There is a common misconception that religious people, particularly Christians, aren’t free, because we have lots of rules to follow, and spend all our lives trying to curtail other people’s freedom and fun as well. Hippies were free, the idea was to have no ties man, free love, all that stuff, until sexually transmitted diseases started running rampant in communes. Funny how herpes can make people square again, turn them into good middle class citizens. Our concept of Freedom is but an illusion, I think. Our version of freedom could never make us happy. If we did just what we wanted to do, then imagine the chaos, the anarchy, the mess, the herpes. No, as Pope John Paul 2 once said, "Freedom is not the power to do what one wants. Freedom is the power to do what is right." Freedom is not being shackled to the evil of this world. It is the ability to love in spite of who we are and the situation in which we find ourselves. It is the ability and the desire to heal and be healed ourselves, and to live that healing for the world. It is the freedom to dare to be whole. It is the freedom to love God and let God love us. It is the freedom to believe that Jesus did something wonderful for us.
God restores us, frees us.. That’s what we hear in the reading from Isaiah. God is the one behind it all, the one who made it all, the one beside whom we are very very insignificant. Yet in Gods saving grace, the gift of Jesus Christ, we see that we are not insignificant in God’s eyes, we are loved, we are offered freedom to choose to love God and love God’s creation, our fellow creatures. And people who are freed, restored to fullness in creation are going to want to tell others about it. That is our commission, as Paul writes in the letter to the Corinthians. It is something we are entrusted with. Paul is free, yet in this freedom he chooses to serve others and tell them the gospel. He is free to act appropriately in a context, being inclusive and tolerant with his behaviour amongst different cultures, telling the gospel in relevant ways and treating different peoples with respect. Freedom means he did not have to follow an oppressive set of laws, but could follow the law of love, and in so doing share in God’s blessings. We are free to believe in something, freed of the pessimism of this world, free to hope.
Free to do a lot, really, contrary to popular opinion.
Being a Christian isn’t too bad, is it?
The Lord be with you.
