I saw a church sign on the highway. It read, “God’s love keeps us going.”
Yeah. It’s something like that.
This is the Lo-Fi Gospel Minute, a five-minute podcast about eternity. I’m Tripp Hudgins.
I imagine a story of a bird in the mountains, something about flight and the liberty that comes from a perspective of unfettered love. Instead, I find myself behind the dash of a Subaru on the coast of North Carolina in July. I am…fettered by love. Tied down by it. Inhibited. Cloistered even. And such limitation is profound and grace-filled. I am grateful for it.
I see my brother. He’s driving. My son who is seven chats with him from the back seat. Their love for one another is a deep bond. My wife and I listen as they work out something important about beaches and dinosaurs. Later we’ll go and get some ice cream. My son will drop his spoon on the floor, pick it back up, and keep eating. My brother will watch on in horror.
This is the life I have always dreamed of.
Love is a bond. Love ties us to one another, connects us. We are fettered. Fettered to each other and fettered to God.
It might be a surprising thing to realize, but the love of God is a burden of sorts. We are freed from sin to be bound to God. In that binding is our liberation. Embodying that liberation is our shared calling. That’s where the work is. None of us are free if even just one of us…To put it another way, Jesus did not die on the cross to save you. Jesus died on the cross to save us. All of us. You are just the singular subset of God’s redeeming love for all Creation.
Back to “God’s love keeps us going.” It was on a church sign somewhere near where my brother lives. I didn’t catch the full name of the church. I would love to talk to someone there about it. How do they understand the love of God? The sign moved me. It was an AME church. I want to hear about this kind of love. Life can throw some serious difficulties our way. Salvation can feel far off. Liberation can feel far off. But it is God’s love that keeps us going. Bound to God, we fall down, but we get up.
We are called to work out our own salvation with fear and trembling, as scripture tells us (Philippians 2:12). The pronoun “your” here is plural. Not singular. This falling and rising is communal. We have to be there for one another, lifting one another up when we inevitably fall down. Forgiveness. Release. Liberation. Freedom. Faith. This is what it means to embody the love of God. We are bound to one another in this work called “salvation.”
We are all fettered.
It’s a challenging thing in our culture to understand liberation as a kind of boundedness, of being fettered. Our history of chattel slavery and indentured servitude have done great harm to how we understand and relate to God and one another. We are still chained to the past. Traumatized by it.
Some of us cannot imagine a God that wants the liberation of all people, whose love is both a bond and liberation simultaneously. We can only imagine a God who is like us, prefers us, works on our behalf and for our individual benefit. We cannot imagine a God who saves everybody, who works for the liberation of all people. Our theological imaginations are limited, fettered by something other than love. Is it fear? Perhaps.
Let me close with this prayer from Sam Wells, the Vicar of St. Martin In The Fields, a church in London, England…“God of time and eternity, if I love thee for hope of heaven, then deny me heaven; if I love thee for fear of hell, then give me hell; but if I love thee for thyself alone, then give me thyself alone. Amen.”
My name is Tripp Hudgins. Thank you for joining me this week on the Lo-Fi Gospel Minute, a five minute podcast about eternity.
Episode 4