Where are my chains?

     One of my all-time favorite passages is included in our texts for Sunday.  Galatians 3 is a grace-filled, hopeful look into what it means to be baptized into the Christ.  We are reminded that before faith we were under the law but now Christ has come and set us free from the discipline of the law to live as children of God, all boundaries destroyed, all one in Christ Jesus.
     This is such good news for me - to live knowing that guilt (yes - we Lutherans tend to have, as a colleague of mine has said, 'overactive guild glands') no longer need rule my life, but that I am free to live as I am, striving to learn from mistakes, and not letting them weigh me down.
     This is such good news for me - to live knowing that the human boundaries of race, sex, socioeconomic status, ability, employment, etc. have no bearing on how valuable we are.  The boundaries do not exist in God's kingdom, for we are all one.  It means that I need not let human constructed boundaries get in my way, deter me, or in any other way, shape, or form, rule my life.
     What good news for us all!  We are worthy of Christ's love because we are children of God.  We are bound together in community not based on any outward signs or categories, but based on the fact that baptized we all look like Christ.  Our identity is changed, not discounting who we are or our gifts, but to more fully be who we are, we take on Christ.
     Except.  Except while this sounds really good, it is EXTREMELY hard to believe.  I can't just take off my eyes and not see (thereby judge) others based on my own biases.  That person looks _______.  I can't believe they just _______.  Did you see what they are ______?!?  You can fill in your own blanks, but you get the gist.  Knowing something to be true doesn't make it easy to believe.

Photo from peaceofmindministries.com

     And that is where our gospel text comes in.  It is a lovely little story commonly called,"The Gerasene Demoniac" found in Luke 8.  It is a powerful story of healing and the human capacity for belief and fear.  To recap for you, Jesus comes to the Gerasene region, and in that region is a man who has been living with demons possessing him.  He breaks chains, runs naked, and lives in the tombs (considered to be one of the worst places people could live - dead people were against the religious rules of the time).  So Jesus commands the demon to come out of the man, they have a little dialogue, the demons leave the man, enter a herd of swine, rush down the cliff, and drown themselves.

     After this happens the swineherds run into town to tell everyone what happened and the people come out and find the man "sitting at the feet of Jesus, clothed and in his right mind."

And they were afraid.

It is common for people, once they discover what they knew to be true is no longer true, to react with fear.  This man, whom they knew as the demoniac, who ran around naked and broke chains, is no longer this man.  He is sane.  He is clothed.  He is sitting with other people.  The norms and stories that had held this community together were no longer true, and it was threatening.

     This is just as true today as it was then.  Think about how you categorize your own life.  Work one way, home another, church perhaps a third way.  When something happens to disrupt your balance, when something changes in any of these categories, the most common gut reaction is fear.  When we found out we were pregnant, we were so elated!  But then as I thought about what that would mean, I began to be fearful.  What will this mean for my sleep habits?  How will people react when they find out I'm a mom?  What sort of world am I bringing this little person into?

     The norms that had normed my life for so long no longer held true and I fell back into fear.  The freedom we have in Christ is like this.  We were under the law - living a certain way, fulfilling certain expectations, saying the right thing, making God happy.  But this is no longer the case any more.  Christ has freed us - our salvation, our worth, our value comes out of Christ alone, not on anything we do or don't do, say or don't say.  

     The fear here is great.  What if Christ isn't enough?  So, to cover our rear ends, we do the stuff we don't have to do and say the things we don't have to say, all the while living in our guilt rather than our freedom in Christ.

     With the Gerasene Demoniac, perhaps if more of us went throughout our towns telling all that Jesus has done for us, less people would live in fear.  Perhaps more people would come to believe and not just know the freedom God gives us in Christ.  Perhaps our communities of faith would begin to be central parts of the life of their wider communities.

     I invite you to ponder the mystery of Christ's freedom this week.  Where are you still living in fear?  Where are your own (or others') boundaries dictating your life and beliefs?  Remember, we are all one in Christ.