Growing up my mother tried to instill within her five sons the importance of personal organization and cleanliness. In other words, my mother insisted that we keep our bedrooms clean. We were told that everything had a place, and with very few exceptions, that place was not on the floor. This was never a lesson I learned well. But my mother insisted, even to the point of using the state of our bedrooms as a way of dictating whether we were allowed to go over to a friend’s house to play, or whether we were allowed to go to the movies, or even whether we were allowed to watch television on a Saturday morning. I think in desperation there were even times in which she tried to use “brotherly peer pressure” as a form of motivation by having family trips to the lake, or to the amusement park delayed until everyone’s room was clean.

Not wanting to miss out on fun, and not wanting to give my brothers another reason to be irritated with me, I became very good at keeping my room clean. Not by putting things away where they belong, but rather by finding places to hide my mess. The easy place was to push and hide everything under my bed. But soon that became the first place my mother would look. So I became creative at finding places to hide my mess. I used closets, clothes hampers, shoe boxes, anything that would hide my mess long enough for my mom to come into my room and see that my room was clean. I remember I once took all my blankets off my bed, and filled my bed with all my mess. Then I replaced the blankets and tried to smooth it out to hide that my bed was full of stuff. It worked, but it made it hard to sleep that night.

An unexpected benefit from these early days is that I am still pretty creative and pretty good at hiding my messes. Except now the messes I hide are not just confined to my bedroom floor. Today I am pretty good at hiding the ‘other messes,’ messes like failures (old and new), hurts, guilt and shame. Most would never know it. After all, like most people I can put on a pretty good front. I can still make most people think that my room is pretty clean. “What’s that lump under those blankets?” you ask. “Why, that’s nothing, don’t look over there. Look over here and see how nice the floor looks.”

Eventually though I run out of hiding spaces. And what surfaces in my life is that I have become crippled and trapped by everything that I am trying to hide. I fill up more and more closets, I lock up more and more doors, sealing off more and more rooms of my heart and soul to prevent my true self from being discovered. I think I am making my room look clean. I think I am keeping the world locked out from seeing my true self, but in fact I am keeping myself locked in. And in locking myself in, I often lock the most important people in my life out. In locking myself in I find myself no longer living my life motivated by grace and thankfulness, but instead I live a fearful life hoping that no one sees what is under that lump in the corner of my room.

Most of the New Testament was originally written in Greek. The word for forgiveness in Greek can be translated as "to free," or "to let go." One way to see and understand the gospel story then is to see and understand it as a freedom story. To those whose sin was obvious, and who had been cast out of community because of their shame, Jesus kept saying things like, "Your sins are forgiven. Be restored." To others, who were better at keeping their ‘sin,’ their faults, their messes out of plain view, Jesus came with the liberating word saying, "Just stop hiding.”One of the resurrection stories of Jesus found in the Gospel of John has Jesus walking right through the locked door to find the disciples huddled together in fear. He shows them (us) his wounds which are the marks of our forgiveness. Then he says, "Peace be with you." You are forgiven, peace is restored to your troubled soul, and you are free.

         During these weeks in which we are reminded that we have been Eastered, may you hear the loving, liberating voice of Jesus come to you and say, “I know what is under your bed. I know what you are trying to hide in your closet. Let it go. Empty it out, receive the gift of forgiveness, move on, and let yourself be free.”

- Dr. Rev. Pastor Joel