Chainbreaker

One quick note: I composed the following blog the Monday after Easter, I just procrastinated on getting it posted.  Sorry it's not as timely or relevant as it would have been, but hopefully it's still worth a read!

Yesterday morning, the youth at church planned and led an amazing Easter sunrise service, culminating in a parade around the sanctuary to Charlie Hall’s “Chainbreaker,” complete with paper chains.  That song never, never, fails to move me to tears, which also means it causes me to think deeply about its meaning.  “You are free/you are free/drop your chains sons and daughters/come and run in liberty.”  Freedom through Christ is a common enough theme throughout Christianity, one that always stirs emotions, but what does it mean?

I felt that freedom all the more profoundly yesterday because I was not experiencing a number of other emotions that I associate with freedom.  I was tired, stressed, and for a number of reasons, a little sad.  Our congregation has been through a lot this year, and there were people that I missed yesterday.  Freedom in Christ doesn’t seem to mean freedom from pain or heartbreak, doesn’t appear to mean safety from bad things happening, and clearly is not immunity from the ability or even entirely from the desire, to sin.

So what does freedom from the power of sin mean?  Yes, it obviously means that we can be forgiven our sins and thus freed from eternal damnation, but is that the limit of freedom?  What exactly are the chains that are broken?  There’s a very subtle cycle that sin moves us into, both our desire to commit sin and the pain we experience when others sin against us, or those we love.  In the face of great pain, or the strong desire to take actions that will cause others pain, two instincts take over: the instincts to distance and devalue.  We push others away, and we tell ourselves they don’t matter.  We lessen the depths of our relationships and the strength of our commitments, as well as draining away the passion from what we used to value, and it’s pretty obvious why we do it. We don’t want others to hurt us, and we don’t want to have to care if we hurt them. We don’t want to feel how far we fall short of our values and ideals, so we set the bar lower on purpose. 

Obviously, we all do this to some extent, and this is bad, but sometimes we don’t even see how little we are left with when we follow this path.  We make ourselves so small when we allow nothing in our lives that is big enough to threaten or challenge us.  We make ourselves so small, and that tiny, tiny piece of self that is left to us becomes what we live and die for.  All our resources are turned to protecting and justifying it.  This trap of distance and devaluation is the chain that sin forges for us, the chain that holds us back from the life abundant that Christ has for us.

The hope found in the cross allows us to face our pain and our failures, to own them rather than to shrink from them, reducing ourselves thereby.  The crazy truth of God’s boundless forgiveness and ceaseless presence with us allows us to hurt without losing hope and to fail without despairing.  When this happens in our lives, we are freed from the need to turn parts of ourselves off, to make our relationships shallow, or reduce our values to lip service.  We are set free from the chain of the mediocre life.  Christ alone can halt our downward spiral into isolation, self-satisfaction, and endless quests for diversion.