“Location, Location, Location” 

Colossians 1:15-28 

One of my favorite movies is the wonderfully rich movie Shawshank Redemption. It tells the story of Shawshank Prison from the years 1947 through 1966. It is a brutal and violent, and corrupt place.   

The story involves Andy Dufresne, a young and successful banker whose life changes drastically when he is unjustly convicted and sentenced to double life imprisonment for the murder of his wife and her lover.  

On the inside he comes to meet Red, who is the quintessential insider at Shawshank. He has been there so long that he has lost all hope. Having given up hope in ever reaching the outside world, he has made for himself a life on the inside. He has decided to make the best of being on the inside. Andy, in contrast, from the moment he arrives never forgets that he doesn't belong. He becomes very close with Red, but Andy knows that even though he is imprisoned for life, he belongs somewhere else.  

What makes this movie so powerful for me is the realization that though I have never been to Shawshank, and though my life is very different from the inmates there, at the same time I recognize that the walls of Shawshank are familiar, strangely familiar.

The walls are familiar because we all, I believe, have our own versions of Shawshank. We have walls in our lives, in our communities, in our world that keep us imprisoned. Think of the places of war and conflict around the world. We are fully aware of the cycle of violence. We are aware of the cycle where one side strikes the other, and the other strikes back, with the intensity and the stakes growing higher and higher. We know it; and yet we can't seem to stop getting sucked in. We are imprisoned.  

We can watch Oprah and Dr. Phil every day - who seem to have the secrets of health, happiness and wonderful relationships. We can read one or more of the umpteen begillion books on how to be rich, how to be happy, how to love, and have wonderful relationships, how to be free from worry. We can go to therapy for years, or be raised in church, and be good people. All these things can give us a map that supposedly leads to happiness, well-being, and freedom; and yet, when it comes to the most important relationships - when it comes to making wise and ethical decisions day to day - when it comes to being happy, we can be so good at building walls instead of being free. 

We can be locked in by ways of thinking. We can be imprisoned by ways of thinking that puts blinders on our eyes, keeping us from seeing new and different possibilities and solutions.

We can be walled in by our failing health, by sickness or injury, or by the inevitable aging process over which we have very little control. We can be imprisoned by the grief and disappointment over not being able to do the things we used to do.  

We can find ourselves bound by the grip of dark depression or by emotional or spiritual hurts or wounds that keep us imprisoned more securely than any physical wall could.  

We are imprisoned by our inability to communicate. We know we have to dialogue. We know we have to share and come to important decisions on controversial issues, but when was the last time we saw two persons on the opposite sides of the abortion debate in a room having a meaningful, significant, open discussion leading to agreement and common truth. We are imprisoned by fear, and by protecting our own agendas. 

We can be walled in by addiction to substances or behaviors that have power over us, power that seemingly can't be denied. 

The walls are so thick. Some of our walls are self made. Some are built around us by life and the world. But there is no denying that they are there.  

It is very easy to just shrug one's shoulders and accept it as reality - to forget that there is an outside - to believe that true freedom, peace, and love is just a pipe dream. That these things are not for us. That's just the way the world is. C'est la vie! 

When we shrug our shoulders in resignation, like Red we begin to make the best out of being on the inside instead of realizing that we belong on the outside.  

When one of the characters in Shawhank Redemption is let out as an old man, after having spent most of his life in prison, he doesn't know what to do or how to act as a free man. In freedom he is lost. His friends in prison later get a letter from him, delivered after he has taken his own life. Red narrates "These [prison] walls are funny. First you hate them. Then you get used to them. Then you start to depend on them." 

We can forget that there is an outside. The prisons of life can begin to feel like home, and we try to make the best of it. But our text this morning offers a different message, a message that proclaims that the walls around us are not the final answer.  

I know that this text is full of dense theological language. It is very easy to let the lofty language fly right over our heads, but did you know that the opening of this text, the first five verses, are a song? They are a hymn! It is meant to be sung. We don't know whether they actually had notes assigned to them, but when these words were read they were, for the hearers, a song of the Spirit!  

When the believers in Colossae felt imprisoned, when they felt opposition to their faith, when they suffered the ill effects of conflict within their own faith, when they felt as if outside powers had control of their lives, Paul said “uh-uh!” Paul sang to them that their Lord was Christ, who came to bring them out of the darkness of their prisons and into the light of the freedom.  

This song sings the heavenly notes of faith that these prisons of life are not our home. We are created to be free. This gospel truth is what the author reminds the Colossians and us of: that our roots, our home, is in God. We may be imprisoned by life, but when we come to church or read the bible, we hear this song of redemption and we are reminded that we belong to a loving and stubborn Creator who sends a loving and stubborn Savior to reconcile and free us from that which binds and imprisons.  

Paul encourages us to know where we are. We are invited to remember where and to whom we belong. This makes a difference in how we live in the present, in the here and now. Do we live as if our prisons are home, or do we live as if we belong somewhere else: at home in our Creator, Redeemer, and Sustainer, our God who loves us.  

We don't have to make the best of the inside. God is calling us out into freedom.  

There is a scene in Shawshank that I has great meaning for me. Andy decides to take on the challenge of creating a prison library. At first he is denied funding, but he decides to keep writing letters to the State, and to keep writing, and to keep writing one letter a week. Eventually his persistence pays off and he is ushered into the office.  He is handed a check and a donation of library materials. “Please stop bothering us now!” says the accompanying letter. Amongst the boxes that are delivered is one that contains a set of record albums. Left alone in the room for a moment, Andy looks through the box and with an expression of wonder pulls out a copy of Mozart's Marriage of Figaro. The beautiful music is a reminder, a glimpse of the beauty of the outside world that he once knew, that he had lost.  

Without thinking he places it on the record player, sets the needle, and Mozart's beauty begins to fill the room. The music ushers him outside the walls into freedom.  

Not able to contain the beauty of the music, he needs to share it. So he locks himself in the room, turns on the P.A. system, and places the microphone by the record player. Then the angelic voices singing Mozart begin to spread throughout the whole prison. The song could not be contained.

“I tell you those voices soared,” narrates Red, the quintessential insider, “higher and farther than anyone in a grey place dares to dream. It was like some beautiful bird flapped into our drab little cage and made those walls dissolve away. And for the briefest of moments, every last man at Shawshank felt free.” 

This is the song that Paul sings for us this morning. The walls around us may seem thick and impenetrable, and inside them we may feel lost and in the darkness. But we can hear this good news: there is a God reaching out to us, and this God will not be denied.  

Can you hear the song Paul is singing? It is a song that cannot be contained, a song that penetrates our deepest darkness and lets us know that the prisons of life are not where we belong. We belong to another place, a place of freedom, of light, joy and peace. The song of freedom, coming from that place and sung by angels and children of God like you and me, reminds us that we belong there. When we sing, when we sing with our lives, for the briefest of moments we will be free. 

Will you sing with me? Amen.  

 
 

July 22, 2007

Rev. Paul Heins

First Presbyterian Church

Logan, Utah