I.

A long time ago I saw a Peanuts cartoon I have never forgotten (and have used in at least a couple of sermons before). It was about Lucy, who was in her crib. She has awakened from her nap, and now wants to be let out. "I wanna get out!" she calls. "I wanna get out!"

There is no response, so she keeps calling. As she is calling, she gets impatient and begins to climb up the gate of the crib, still calling "I wanna get out!" She climbs up and over the rail and down to the floor, still calling, "I wanna get out!" She gets up and starts walking out of her room and down the hall, still calling, "I wanna get out!"

In the last frame she is standing in the living room as the realization hits her and she says with surprise, "Wait a minute... I am out!"

How much of our lives are spent in trying to escape the various cribs, boxes, pigeonholes, cubicles, categories, and habits we find ourselves constrained by? How many of our words are echoing the same words as Lucy or any other young child, stuck in a crib: "I wanna get out!"?

It is as if we are saying that we don’t want to be here, whatever it may be... in this job, in this marriage, in this family, in this town, in this school, in this car, in this class, in this social role, or whatever. We don’t want to be here in this body, this overweight, aching, aging, dying body. This isn’t the real me! As if we are saying we don’t want to be here in this town where we have to deal with crabby, obnoxious, petulant, and offensive people. We don’t want to be in our tax-bracket! We don’t want to be in this office or this kitchen or this laundryroom or this hospital bed. We don’t want to be here in this uniform or this stereotype or this personality."

"I wanna get out!" I want something else! I want something more!

So we spend lots of money and effort and time trying to figure out ways to get out of whatever crib we feel trapped in. Advertisers know this about us and have a field-day with it.

And this attitude gets reflected in our theologies and our politics, too. We often are oriented to waiting for a deliverer, we "waste our summers praying in vain for a Savior to rise from these streets," as Bruce Springsteen put it.

If some of us wait for deliverers, others don’t have the patience for that. They are the ones break out of their boxes by force of will and even violence. Sometime we literally do get motorcycles, or go hang-gliding, or bungee-jumping. We really do take on remarkable and difficult and dangerous pursuits. And a lot of it is to try and break out of our boxes and be people different from the boring people we are from 9 to 5, Monday through Friday.

For some, the dissatisfaction with life as they know it is so profound that they resort to drugs, or even to suicide, which could be thought of as the ultimate way to "get out."

II.

This little voice is practically hardwired into us. It is part of our subconscious in which is expressed our primal dissatisfaction with our own mortality, our own fear and grouchiness about the fact that we are only here for a short time and then we have to die.

Because what we want to get out of, in the end, is this body that gets weak, and sick, and dies and that’s that. We want out of its limitations and its contingencies, out of its weaknesses and its failings, out of its aging and corruption, its lazy, smelly, dirty, demanding, and bothersome self.

For some, "I wanna get out!" is even a deeply religious longing for union with pure Spirit, pure Mind, the Infinite, the Immortal, God.

Look at what Lucy was doing in that strip. For a couple of frames, she is walking around on the floor, functioning and perambulating in the world outside of her crib, but she was still saying, "I wanna get out! I wanna get out!" She was actually already out of the crib, but the crib was still in her head, and it was still governing her words and actions.

I reminds me of an experience I had with an anorexic young woman in my first church. Here was a girl who couldn’t have weighed more than 60 or 70 pounds, by the time she was institutionalized, and she would look in the mirror and see a fat person. I mean she looked like she just got out of Buchenwald, and she literally saw herself as horribly overweight. I wouldn’t have believed our perceptions could be so skewed until I saw this for myself.

I think that what Paul is saying here is that we are a lot like Lucy. We are forever crying, "I wanna get out! Somebody let me out of here! I want to be indedendent and unique! I want to live forever!" and because of this constant mantra going on in our brains we live as if we were entrapped and caged and wrapped in our definitions and categories, roles and habits.

Paul himself knows exactly what he is talking about. He himself had been boxed into a rigid religious system in which he was trying to earn his way out of the crib by carefully and meticulously doing the literal works of the law. He figured that if only he was good enough and diligent enough and disciplined enough, he would be acceptable to God and he would be delivered from his box.

It didn’t work. But he didn’t know this until later, after he had his life-transforming experience. While he was in the box, his spirituality was based on an "I wanna get out!" sentiment; and he had every reason to believe that if he was good he would be released. It would just take time and a lot of effort.

III.

And then we could say that he had a "Lucy experience." He was on the road to Damascus and he suddenly had an awareness of where he really was. It is as if he looks around himself and sees his world for the first time, and he says, "Wait a minute... I am out!"

At that moment the righteousness, that is to say, the order, the integration, the balance, the harmony, the reciprocality, the interwovenness, the connectedness, the underlying pattern of God’s Presence with and within and among us was revealed to him by the Lord Jesus. He suddenly experienced The Way Things Really Are.

In the Star Trek TV series’ they have a technology called a "holodeck." The holodeck is a big room in which a computer generates holographic images which basically project a whole new world into this small space. Suddenly it can seem like you are virtually anywhere doing anything imaginable.

But sometimes, when there is a problem with the computer, the holographic virtual imaging starts to fade and be disrupted, and the characters can see that behind this apparent world is really just the four walls of a room.

What Paul realizes is like this only just the opposite. He realizes that we think we’re in a small room, bounded by mortality and social convention, even by religious law. That’s what our senses and our perceptions and our reasoning tell us. That’s what our society and culture and institutions and traditions tell us. But the truth is that it is the small room that is really a false projection of our imagination. In reality there is a much bigger world out there and we are in the middle of it.

That big world is governed and shaped by what Paul calls the righteousness of God. It is the underlying, fundamental, basic order and framework of all reality. This Big Truth was revealed to him directly by, in, and through Jesus Christ, whose Voice it was that addressed him in his awakening experience. The Voice of Christ said to him, in effect, "You are out! You’re already free. You are already home!"

And because this information came to him, the persecutor, and because it came from Christ, whom he was persecuting, Paul experienced this Truth as unimaginable, undeserved love. He is constantly framing it in expansive terms like grace, reconciliation, and forgiveness.

Once he saw this other world beneath and within and around our own world, he realized that this world of our experience is comparatively very small and limited, a virtual box. And he knew that he could trust in that larger world that had been revealed to him. And he reasoned that the more completely we trust in this reality, the more we would be able to start seeing it. If we trust in Christ and the world he reveals, we will begin to experience it for ourselves.

IV.

The beginning of this realization is a change in our language. That is, it starts with a change in the words we use to describe where and who we are. Instead of repeating to ourselves "I wanna get out!" as if we were trapped, we could decide to say rather, with Lucy, "Wait a minute...I am out!"

In other words, we are not disconnected from everything. We are not alienated and isolated and alone. We are not primarily separate autonomous individuals. We don’t have to whine and complain to get what we need; neither do we have to steal and grab it by force. We don’t have to wait for some Deliverer to come tomorrow; we don’t even have to wait for some special, life-shattering experience. We don’t have to hack away at the box from the inside, either.

The good news is, we are already out!

We don’t have to wait for something from outside of us to come and reconnect us to life. Christ reveals that now, because of his resurrection, our connectedness to all things is intrinsic to our very being. Paul realizes that Christ reveals God’s saving Presence in everything that God has made, including us.

Contrary to the crimped ideology of scarcity that characterizes our cribs, cages, and boxes, the universe is very good, amazingly good, astoundingly good. The whole creation pulses with God’s glory, and we humans are especially blessed to be able to perceive it and enjoy it and glorify God for it.

Jesus Christ reveals this righteousness of God, as Paul says, showing that we "are now justified by his grace as a gift, through the redemption that is in Christ Jesus...." We are justified already, in Christ. It has been given to us already.

In this way we are liberated from our narrow, constricted, limited, and virtual existence. We are already out, and this knowledge changes everything. It means that we start locating the goodness and the blessing, the joy and the love, where we are: in our relationships; in our families, at school and at work; in the car...everywhere! It means looking for the pattern of God’s righteousness everywhere. Because, if you look deeply enough, it is there, in everything, in everyone, because of the action of God’s Word and Spirit.

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