As many of you may know, today the U.S. remembers the birthday of civil rights activist Martin Luther King, Jr.  Central to this commemoration 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.

     For this is what God 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.  We frequently miss the point.  We abuse it terribly.
     

    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 fact of God.  King knew this well, and steadfastly centered his call for freedom in the presence of God.  He knew that freedom is only meaningful if it is grounded in something bigger than itself.

     

    He knew that freedom is more than a release from physical bondage, a slip of one material experience to another. 
    

    As we remember King's birthday, we also remember that the freedom he preached is ultimately, as Mahatma Gandhi observed in his explication of satyagraha, self-discovery in truth.  We are not free in an accidental universe, a cosmos without definition; we are free in a universe made real by truth itself.