Why Does That Caged Bird Sing?

The singing bird in the cage.

What does it have to sing about anyway?

Maya Angelou claims to know why (metaphorically speaking).

Paul Lawrence Dunbar claims to know why in his poem "Sympathy".

It almost begs a person to go deeper than they need to and wax philosophical.

It's a bird. It's in a cage. It sings.

I know why.

It doesn't know it's not free.

It doesn't know there is life beyond the cage.

It doesn't know any better.

Stupid bird. It doesn't know any better. What does it have for a brain? Matter the size of a pea?

The human brain is much, much larger...

Moe to Curly: "Quiet, birdbrain!"

Uh-huh...

There's a point in here somewhere. Trust me.

A lot of us human like characters are no better off than the bird in the cage.

Remember the movie "Animal House"? Dean Wormer's advice to the student "Flounder"?

"Fat, drunk and stupid is no way to go through life, son."

Yet we do, maybe not in that exact description, but variations of the theme.

Billy Corgan wrote, "In spite all my rage, I am still just a rat in a cage."

Sing or be filled with rage.

Ignorant of the cage, we sing. Awareness of the cage brings rage.

The cage can be a 5X5 prison cell...

...or 10,000 acres of Montana ranch land.

Freedom can exist within the same dimensions.

It all depends on how you define freedom.

Americans get all wrapped up in the Constitution.

Freedom on paper.

More Americans have lived and died in the cage believing they were free having never tasted a morsel of real freedom.

So where is it?

Real freedom?

John 8:36: "So if the Son liberates you [makes you free men], then you are really and unquestionably free."

Gal. 5:1: "It is for freedom that Christ has set us free."

All of that before Thomas Jefferson and the boys were even a blip on the radar screen.

It transcends circumstances. Or politics. Or human and civil rights.

In the cage of rage. In the cage of song.

The freedom Christ supplies is one of the human heart, soul and spirit, which is essentially only really free when free in Jesus Christ.

Even when the flesh is incarcerated or confined, limited or confounded, by situations self-imposed or forced, Jesus changes things.

It's the one time the caged bird can sing even while knowing there is life beyond the cage.

You may never be rich, but your desire to be rich no longer confounds you.

You may never be healthy, but you are no longer confined just because you are ill.

You may never fulfill your dream to become this or that, but you have become satisfied by a more realistic hope.

Jesus is the fulfillment of all things. Life happens in spite of it all.

He is the Song.

Keepin' it Real,

Pastor Kevin <><

www.reallifect.com