I experienced the dangerous prayer last night.  You know, the prayer that begins:  “God, set her free…”  Freedom is messy.  You start inviting people out of dungeons of shame, and caves of guilt and into the radiance of identity in Christ…there will be some heaving and trembling, anger, laughter and a lot of tears. We get uncomfortable with that.  Sure we want freedom we say, but the process?  That should be relegated to behind closed doors, not in the public assembly of the righteous.  It is too clumsy, and makes us feel strange and unsure.  Or is it that when the Liberator breaks into the bondage, and the soul is invited into life, the Soul is seen in all of its imperfections and celebrated that we question our geography?  Are WE free?  are We alive?   I am amazed as I look at what God says about it, in the life of his Son.  He wasn’t afraid of getting messy.  He wasn’t afraid of poor public opinion polls from his crusades as a result of letting a woman wash his feet with her tears, and undo her hair to use as a towel. He doesn’t pull her aside and question her motives, or her actions.  He accepts the lavish outpouring of love from a heart once enslaved. He wasn’t too overly concerned with dressing the part of preacher when children romped around him destroying his freshly pressed robed because they insisted on sitting in his lap and touching his hair.  They hadn’t really been allowed to play in the hallowed halls of religion, so “The Delight of Torah” came to them on the grassy fields where lambs were raised.  It seems this Son of Heaven that only did what Dad told him to, or only said what he overheard Dad saying was constantly banging on cell doors, and moving boulders every where he went.  He wasn’t ashamed of tears, or emotion, or joy or awkward attempts at displays of affection, he let people come to him in all of their mess and he celebrated the movements of the heart from death unto life.  His inaugural message to the world he had come to save was in answer to the question his Dad had asked of the prophet:  What is it like when I fast?

  Isa 58:6 Is not this the fast that I have chosen? to loose the bands of wickedness, to undo the heavy burdens, and to let the oppressed go free, and that ye break every yoke?