Grace and Truth: A word from pastors

“June is the Month with Wings,” writes world traveler Vivian Swift. She describes June as the month when anything can happen—a month characterized by freedom and possibility, a month with wings.

As a child, I often daydreamed about flying while watching birds rise and swoop through the trees around my house. Observing their aerial acrobatics, I longed to be as free as those birds seemed to be.

And I say, “O that I had wings like a dove! I would fly away and be at rest” (Psalm 55:6-8).

Adding his voice to the Psalmist’s, Paul writes often of “the freedom we have in Christ Jesus.” In his letters to the young churches he tended, Paul reminds believers that this wasn’t freedom by the world’s definition but by a new definition: freedom to learn and grow in Christ and to give oneself entirely to loving and serving God.

For the law of the Spirit of life in Christ Jesus has set you free from the law of sin and of death (Romans 8:2).

Donald Spoto writes, “Conversion is a response to God, who invites us to a state of complete freedom, away from everything that is hostile to God’s goodness and mercy.”

Racism, sexism, homophobia, xenophobia, elitism and ageism are forces hostile to God’s goodness and mercy. Jesus invites and even commands us to take off these chains of prejudice that bind us to the suffering and iniquity of this world.

Paul’s way of saying this to the Galatians is that we who have put on the clothes of Christ are freed from judging the other labels we wear: slave or free, male and female, American or Mexican or Iranian or … (You may add here the labels you know to be troublesome in your community).

Jesus’ alternative understanding of freedom comes through in our Mennonite description of discipleship. Conformity to Christ and nonconfor­mity to the world are the marks of someone who follows Jesus—and who is free.

Teenagers (or adults) who have tried to alter their looks to magazine-cover standards can tell you how life-sapping it can be to conform to the world. Anyone who has racked up a mountain of debt to buy the latest gizmos or who has tried to deny death can attest to the same. The truth of God’s presence and love sets us free from our society’ illusions and bigotry to be fully and beautifully the people God created us to be.

Of course, bondage isn’t only spiritual and internal; it can also be physical and external. Many communities celebrate Juneteenth, offering a historical view on freedom on our American landscape.

Juneteenth looks back to June 19, 1865, when slaves in Texas first heard they were free—more than two years after Lincoln issued the Emancipation Proclamation. Now, almost 150 years later, African-Americans and others join to celebrate freedom and remember the sufferings of slavery so many endured in the early days of this nation.

Last summer, the delegates at the Mennonite Church USA convention in Columbus, Ohio, adopted a statement against human trafficking to educate Mennonite churches and offer healing and liberation to those who have been enslaved for sex or labor. Still today, many people in our communities and around the world are not free to worship, work and live where they wish. The message of God’s liberating power and love is still needed in all these places.

How precious is your steadfast love, O God! All people may take refuge in the shadow of your wings (Psalm 36:7).

Here God’s wings protect those who seek refuge. Both the protection and the freedom of God’s wings are needed by us and our neighbors, and both protection and freedom are proclaimed by our winged faith. Too many children and adults experience pain and worry that bind them and keep them from experiencing a free life.

I wonder if the most perfectly June moment for children might be that first, surprising day of summer vacation: nothing to do but play. As I write this, I’m only a few days away from a sabbatical, and a professor I know tells me the first day is the best day, because everything is still possible.

Hooray for the winged freedom of June.

Sara Dick is associate pastor at Shalom Mennonite Church in Newton, Kan.