Joe Ho, a friend of mine and fellow IV staff at Dook said this in a talk to his students last spring:
"In our culture we're told that freedom is primarily about choice. But let me ask the graduating seniors in the room: you guys are at a place where you have more choices than ever before about what happens next in your lives. Anyone feel more free?"
No hands went up. All the seniors were stressed out, anxious, and overwhelmed at the prospect of trying to figure out what came next.
"Obediently following Jesus is the essence of true freedom. It frees us from the tyranny of choice."
C.S. Lewis argued that much of what we call 'us' is really just a pooling of genetic and sociological factors that we had no part in shaping or choosing. The only way to true personality, then, is to look to the one from Whom Personality comes from. It is only in Him that the genetic and the sociological stuff of our lives is redeemed--the good stuff is made glorious and the bad stuff is burned off, sometimes painfully so.
The same thing is true for us as we consider what freedom is. Freedom is not an infinite number of choices that we are then sovereignly able to pick from. Freedom is found only in obeying the One from Whom true Freedom comes from. Otherwise, our choosing is simply more tyranny; the options that we choose from are simply a smattering of chance opportunities that are presented to us at any given time.
So freedom is ultimately found in submission. Not a glorious word, but it is a glorious life.
If, as my theology professor says, we were made to run on God like a fish was made to swim in the water, then real freedom is found only as we submit, follow, and live in Him. A fish is not 'free' to live on dry land. Dry land is death to the fish, just like a God-less life is toxic to us.
Looking around at life in the Land of the Ruins, it seems very much like fish trying to live on dry land, out of their necessary element. All dying a slow death. And so Jesus invites us to live a life of Freedom as we were originally intended. A freedom not ultimately about choice but ultimately about something much greater: real life, however messy and inglorious it may appear.
4 comments:
Alex,
this is my absolute favorite talk to give! I LOVE talking about freedom being what we were designed to be, which is: completely dependent on God. Another YEA for Gary Deddo!
In a conversation with Joe Moore about this, he suggested that freedom is like flying a kite. A kite is not truly free when it is untethered--in that case a couple of things will happen: 1) it might not even ever fly or get off the ground, 2) if it does fly, it will be absolutely battered about most likely becoming entangled in the nearest tree or power lines. Thus, the kite is really only free to fly when it is tethered to something that helps it to catch the wind and avoid hang ups and entanglements.
For those who may have been there, "can I get a woo-woo?"
YEA for Joe Moore
maghretta, thanks for the reminder that I'm not the only one who can rant on my blog! a couple thoughts:
1. the point of the post (which could have easily gotten lost in the midst of me trying to say too much) is that what our culture thinks about freedom and how the Scriptures conceive of freedom are fundamentally different. Certainly we still have choices to make, but choice is not the essence of freedom, obedience to Christ is.
In place of 'choosing our career' for example, we talk about calling. Calling means someone else is doing the calling and that in one sense as Christians we are 'obligated' to obey--and in that obedience we find freedom.
Even in the smaller decisions where we might assert we have 'freedom of choice' some of the great saints tell us that taking seriously the presence of Christ in all our lives gives us a different understanding of those choices. At some points, God simply invites us to choose. In other cases he might have a claim on our lives that we didn't realize before. But in either case obeying God in all things is what true freedom is, not choice.
2. You are very right in pointing out that all analogies fall apart at some point--it doesn't take too much to pull apart just about any analogy and you do a rather thorough job of dismantling these two. Yours also has its' limitations (we aren't born smokers but we are born sinners separated from God). But here's the problem with dismissing analogies too quickly: Jesus seemed to find them pretty helpful. The Kingdom of God is NOT a piece of wheat, or a treasure chest, or a mustard seed, but Jesus delighted to use these limited analogies to make his points--even inanimate objects that on the face of it had very little to do with the point he was trying to make.
So I think that we are invited to join Jesus in making analogies so long as we understand that all analogies have limitations and some analogies are certainly more fitting than others. If these don't seem to quite work for you (and clearly they don't!) then feel free to dismiss them personally...but I wouldn't be too quick to declare them altogether useless.
My favorite metaphor for the freedom issue is the pipe-organ (which really, really dates me). If you have ever seen an organist sit down to play a pipe organ, you will see the artist go through quite a routine of setting up (programming?) the instrument. Setting these stops here, that register there. It takes a while. Then, the organist finds his music to play, the score. All of this preparation is undergird by hours and hour of practice. Then the organist begins the piece. He or she is confined by the instrument, by how he or she set it up, by the score. The artists committed to those limitations. But when the preparation is complete, the organist can soar, the organist can be free to explore all the wonders of the instrument and the piece. That's freedom to me.
thanks, paul, that's a great analogy!
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