"Freedom," the Who sang many years ago, "tastes of reality."  As many of you may know, today the U.S. remembers he birthday of civil rights activist Martin Luther King, Jr.  Central to the day is King's belief, a belief he shared with millions of others, that freedom, the ability to do what one chooses, when one chooses to do it is one of humanity's greatest privileges and blessings.  We all deserve to be free.
     Is freedom reality?  If being free is the ability to find oneself as oneself is in this world, then freedom is indeed reality.  It offers people opportunity to find what is most real and true about them, their lives, and the world in which they live them.  It is a path to ultimate discovery.
     Yet freedom is also, as many historians have pointed out, a release from bondage.  In King's case, he was calling out for the end of the bondage of the American black, urging the nation to let go of its belief that black people did not deserve the same freedoms that the rest of the country enjoyed.  That all people be free to pursue their dreams.

     For this is what God really wants.  He made us to be free, to free to choose, to be free to do.  To be free to live as we like.
     Freedom is wonderful, and freedom is intoxicating.  But freedom can be frightening.  We often do not know what to do with it.  We frequently do not know what its fullness really means.  
     Maybe that's why, as John records it in chapter eight of his gospel, Jesus told his audience that, "You shall know the truth, and the truth shall make you free."  True freedom is to know the truth:  the truth of the presence of God.  King knew this well, and steadfastly centered his call for freedom in the greater fact of God.  He knew that freedom is only meaningful if it is grounded in something bigger than itself.  It's only real if it is centered in truth.
     As we remember King's birthday, we also remember that the freedom he preached is ultimately, as Gandhi observed in his notion of satyagraha, self-discovery in truth.  We are not free in an accidental universe without definition; we are free in a universe made real by truth itself.