For Freedom We Are Free
What is a Christian call to freedom in an America like this?
The Christian call to freedom is being used to justify acts antithetical to God — like gleefully building detention centers, dropping bombs on people, denying health care to millions of vulnerable people.
So what does it mean to be free in Christ?
Why are there so many references and Bible verses about freedom if it is not about freedom in a nationalist sense? So much of white Christian patriarchy justifies itself by saying we are free to be in bondage to Christ, free to make disciples of all nations — code for: we are free to make everyone else bow before this version of white Jesus, as the only true Jesus.
What this gets at is the disquieting truth that freedom often couched as being enslaved to Christ. Bound to God.
Which … isn’t the idea of being freedom as being bound or subservient to God antithetical to the notion of freedom as being one’s own master?
And herein is the great tangle of whiteness, individualism, consumerism, and exploitation. To get at the freedom Christ offers, we have to unravel so many messages of what we’ve been told makes us free.
Freedom has been sold to us as having enough power, and owning enough stuff, to dominate and demand assimilation with impunity. In this logic, “freedom” means “I do not have to be discomforted by any reminder that my power comes at cost to others.” The precarity of this “freedom” depends on subsuming any narrative that threatens it — which is the flourishing of anyone or anything outside of its own self-perpetuating rules. This is why so many Christians don’t want religious freedom. They claim it’s evangelism, it’s what Jesus told us to do, but what they mean is: any flourishing outside of ours is a threat to our continued exploitation existence. It’s an engine that self-fuels.
Because freedom to dominate others, even the idea of freedom as being one’s own master, is still a concept of freedom locked into a carceral system. It’s an idea of freedom that isn’t free. This logic of freedom doesn’t mean liberation, it means trying to work the system that keeps us chained (you might even say, bound in sin). It means: “I am free to do harm, and be protected from harm.”
But that is not the logic of a God who is born to an unwed woman and laid in a manger. That is not the logic of a God who, as a child, is carried by parents across borders. (It’s not the logic of a God who choses to be born as a baby, full stop.) That is not the logic of a God who repeatedly commands God’s people to honor their status of being God’s people by taking particular care for the immigrant and the stranger.
This is what I think it means to be free in Christ:
In a world full of endless, seductive options to choose fear, violence, and hopelessness based on “all the facts,” freedom in Christ is choosing the joy of knowing there is MORE than we can see.
Loving and being loved by Christ sets us free from the endless loop of a charming and entrapping violence that corrodes every thought, peace, and dream.
Because of Jesus, I know that anything I do to keep myself barricaded, any way I choose to be secure through outright violence, or the subtler violence of white supremacy, patriarchy, etc —these are not eternal securities.
They fade. They crumble. They betray. They corrode the soul and the body, of both the oppressor and the oppressed.
They are the chains of the world. The things that keep us — in biblical terms — enslaved.
But Jesus has a terribly un-seductive invitation into freedom through surrender. An unappealing beckoning to lay down the temptation to armament by opening His arms on the cross.
It is not, actually, terribly marketable. But to the depths of it, Jesus’ freedom is more powerful than any product or border we buy to be safe. To be free in Christ means to be truly free.
Not free as in nothing bothers me, not free as in I am not haunted by fear. I am, actually, terribly afraid most of the time. Clinically, legitimately, and maternally terrified. All the time.
But being free in Christ means I don’t let that chorus of fears keep me in their jaws.
I am free because my rest, my hope is not secured in things that crumble or corrode. I am free because only in God can we live in safety.
So when we pray those words from Galatians, “for freedom Christ has set you free,” I don’t hear a gun-salute kind of freedom that uplifts tyranny or sees threats around every corner.
I hear an invitation into a freedom from that kind of fear.
Christ beckons us into a freedom that celebrates the bigness of God, and the wild wideness of God’s creativity in diversity, and we can feel free to know we will not know or control everything. It is the freedom of being human in the face of God being God. It’s a lot more free-ing. And therefore, far scarier.
Freedom in Christ is not freedom to do hurt, but freedom FROM a world that says you are only safe if you are armored against hurt.
Freedom that depends on arsenals and walls to stay free is not freedom; that is fear.
You have heard it said: “freedom isn’t free” but Jesus says --
“No, babe, this freedom? Freedom in me? It’s literally is freely offered to you. I’ve got the tab. No expectations.”
The cost comes from the world.
Because being free from the things that want us chained and afraid means those systems will be very. very angry they’ve lost a paying client.
Because our freedom is in one who died. Fully died. Brutally. Horribly. While his mama watched, helplessly. And then he sauntered out of that grave, wounded, but alive. Because even death could not chain him.
And neither will it chain us.
Get your copy here!
Some people who have taught me a lot about freedom, whose teachings are imbued in anything I write or say about it:
Your book is now in my Amazon wishlist. As a retired UCC minister I am with you girl
Needed this today--thank you <3