It’s just a few days before Christmas, so I wanted to ask y’all about presents.
Have you ever bought someone a gift and really wanted to tell them about it?
Maybe even after you’ve wrapped it but before they’ve unwrapped it, they mention how much they wish they had something – and it’s the exact thing that you are going to offer them? For example, you already purchased your friend a ticket to their favorite team’s upcoming game and then you’re hanging out and they mention how much they would love to attend a game live.
Have you ever been in a position where you have something that you know would help someone if only they would listen to what they already knew to be true or see what was right in front of them all along?
How about this one, have you ever received a gift that you enjoyed so much you then gave it as a gift to someone else? A great book? The perfect kitchen gadget?
Throughout this year as part of our Annual Roadmap goal to learn what it means to be a better resource for people in our community and congregation with mental health concerns I’ve been in a lot of meetings with community leaders about the mental heath and wellness of our Lake Travis area. Not long ago, I was in a meeting with some wonderful people, community leaders, entrepreneurs, and a lot of parents of middle and high school students. The people gathered were talking about the things they have seen and heard that are keeping people in such a poor mental and emotional state. They were expressing a desire for more places and communities in which they could be themselves and where they were not expected to simply fit some societal mold. Yearning for more opportunities to take off masks and present themselves as they are – beautifully broken and perfectly imperfect. Wanting to discuss the depth and breadth of life instead of only ever having conversations at the surface level. They wanted freedom. To be unbound and liberated to be who they are.
As I sat in the meeting, I had a feeling impeccably similar to when you have a gift to offer, and the person you are going to give it to is telling you that it is exactly what they need and what they’ve been looking for and hoping to receive.
What I had to offer is truthfully not mine to give. But rather a gift I had received that I have a hard time not blathering on and on about it, and a gift I like to give others. Though, I’m more the delivery person than the gift giver, in fact, I’m probably more along the lines of that email or text notification that the gift has indeed already arrived. What gift?
It is the gift of God’s grace. The gift of God who sets us free to be.
This is the good news of God – that you are fully loved in all of your perfect imperfections. You are loved because of exactly who you are, not in spite of who you are. You are loved not because of anything you have done or will do and nothing you have done or will do can decrease the love given to you. You – the whole you – is exactly what is beloved and beautiful.
God is about the work of freeing those who have been bound.
This year I led a Bible study on the book of Exodus, and someone asked a perfect question: “What does it mean to be set free for those of us who have not been slaves?”
They could wrap their minds around the good news of God’s liberating activity that set free the Hebrew people from slavery in Egypt, but they did not know what it meant for them, who has not lived a life in slavery.
What it means is that you are free to be the whole you. There is no reason to put on a mask or try and fit in a form that isn’t you because you are deeply and fully known and loved by the source and ground of everything.
In today’s gospel reading from Matthew 1, Joseph is set free by God to love and accept Jesus as his own son in a world where he was expected to disown and demean Mary, disdain a child that wasn’t his, a society that had told him that his ultimate goal and value lay in passing on his own family line.
Joseph is set free to celebrate Christmas correctly, which, says Dietrich Bonhoeffer – German Lutheran pastor and theologian who resisted and rebeled agains the Nazi regime even as they coopted the church – to celebrate Christmas correctly is to finally lay down all power, all honor, all reputation, all vanity, all arrogance, all individualism beside the manger. That is what Joseph does, that is what we are set free to be able to do.
God’s grace sets you free.
You are free from the expectations to look and act a certain way, free from the requirement to have certain possessions that mark your status, free from having to hold onto a false certainty, free to be the fullness of who you are. You are already free to not feel “fine,” or “great,” you are free to be vulnerable and not be OK. Those things that you desire – a place and space and community in which to be yourself and to discover and discuss the breadth and depth of what it means to be human and to be the person you truly are – those things are yours.
You are loved. You are free.
This is the good news of God’s grace. This is the gift that is not mine to offer but is yours that you have already received. All that’s left is for you to accept that you are accepted.
Here is the hard part – there are so many things and people and forces that would tell you to put your mask back on, to bind yourself back up, that you have to live up to certain expectations. There are real and powerful things at work to keep you bound – some are external and some are internal. There are voices that tell you that you are not loved, that tell you that parts of you need to change to be loved. The good news that you are loved and free is dangerous. It is the message and life work of Jesus and he was killed for it. And yet, those forces that try and limit and inhibit the message of love and freedom do not win the day – life and love do because they are the essence and nature of the animating force of everything (aka God).
This is nothing new. Hear the good news of God’s freedom in the words of Paul to the Galatians, who also must have been struggling to maintain and trust their freedom two thousand years ago, “For freedom Christ has set us free. Stand firm, therefore, and do not submit again to a yoke of slavery.”
You are loved. You are free.
Regardless of your culture, creed, background, gender identity, sexual orientation, skin color, body, ability, mental or emotional state
You are loved. You are free.
For freedom you are free.
Do not let others or yourself bind you back up.
Keep on enjoying and living your belovedness and freedom, and in doing so you will invite others to recognize, accept, and enjoy their belovedness and freedom.
You are loved. You are free.
This is the good news.
Live like it. Invite others into it. Work for justice and freedom and love so that you and everyone can enjoy their belovedness and freedom.
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