Stone walls do not a prison make,

Nor iron bars a cage;

Minds innocent and quiet take

That for an hermitage;

If I have freedom in my love,

And in my soul am free,

Angels alone, that soar above,

Enjoy such liberty.

These beautiful words came to my mind earlier this week as I started preparing this sermon. Earlier, I say. Before the snowstorm that imprisoned me in a dark cold house for the rest of the weekend, thinking with some of the rest of you, in that powerless fix, that the power would be fixed at any moment. Little did I know how this loss of freedom would test my love.

If I have freedom in my love … The English poet Richard Lovelace wrote these words that come at the end of his poem “To Althea, From Prison.” Parliament sent him to the Gatehouse Prison in London in 1642 for supporting King Charles I’s claim to the divine right of rule. Althea is a made-up name that comes from the Greek word for healing. Scholars believe that Lovelace had in mind both his bondage to a cell and his bondage of heart for a woman named Lucy Sacheverell. By this poetic device he tied together his understanding of true freedom and true love.

It’s a similar tie we make today as the spiritual and the romantic come together. Today is both Valentine’s Day and the last Sunday in the church season of Epiphany. As for the first part, we have reached a high point in the Gospels now as Jesus is on the Mount of Transfiguration. He is radiant white, shining with the majesty of divine favor. Peter, James and John witness it. Moses and Elijah make an appearance, too, signifying that all the history of Israel—the Law and the prophets together—point now to this one who is glorified on the mountain. He is the embodiment of God’s people on the one hand and of God the Father himself on the other.

Moses and Elijah endorse Jesus. It’s as if they are saying to us all, “We are passing the mantle of authority now from ourselves to him. Jesus surpasses us because while we bore witness to the truth, he himself is the truth. Listen to him. Follow him.” And then the voice from heaven says just that. In other words, it’s a passing of authority from the legal to the personal.

Nothing’s more personal than Valentine’s Day. We think of love today as at no other time. And when we think of love, we know there are certain customs we do well to observe. For instance, pity the man who offers tulips and peanuts on a day of roses and chocolates. But romantic love lacks its full luster if all you’re thinking about is rules and obligations. These effectively squeeze all the romance out of love. We think instead about relationship and passion, about the joy of a full heart that comes without fear of doing the wrong thing but only being in the presence of the one you love. This is the freedom of love. It’s that easiness and whimsy that allow you to live with faith and without fear.

And yet neither spiritual nor romantic freedom is lawless. You might think so, though, if you read Paul’s words in 2 Corinthians. So we have to parse through them for a moment. Paul contrasts the Old Covenant of Moses with the New Covenant of Christ. The old, he says, is about keeping the law, living by the rules, trying always to do the right thing. But that leads to death, not life.

It’s an odd thing for a former Pharisee like Paul to say. He would have made the point all his religious life long that the Law of Moses, interpreted rightly by the prophets, led to life and not to death. It was, after all, a gift from God to Israel. God deals in life, not death. God is not in the business of destroying people by leading them astray. But after his encounter with Christ on the road to Damascus, where he’s converted to being a Jesus follower, Paul realized something else and something deeply profound. He saw that in his love for the Law, he had lost sight of the law of love.

Paul was so zealous for the Law and for getting people to live by it rightly that he was on his way to persecute and do violence to those who didn’t adhere to his understanding of it. The new insight Christ gave to him was that the Law pointed beyond itself to true freedom. If the Law led to spiritual freedom, it did so because the Spirit of God was in it. But if it led to violence and fear and death, it was because the Spirit of God was not in it. The Lord is Spirit, Paul says. And where the Spirit is, there is freedom.

Now this is passage can be and too often is used to beat up on Jews who do not believe in Jesus. And Paul was himself deeply pained by the fact that most of his Jewish brothers and sisters did not see the surpassing splendor of Christ. He likened them to Moses, wearing a veil over their faces to hide the fact that the glory of the Law was fading. And all the while God is shining forth on the face of Jesus, and it never fades away. He wants them to see Christ this way and turn to him.

And yet ironically this passage is now a witness against some of us Christians. Even we who say we believe in Jesus and have put our faith in him for eternal life can be guilty of this focus on the Law that loses the Love. We can become so duty-driven to do right that we drain all the freedom and joy out of life. Some Christians are so scrupulous that they lose the wondrous. They would rather join the Puritan police than get on the freedom train. And what’s worse, they see it as their duty to scrutinize the scrupulosity of everyone else, too. It’s always black or white, right or wrong: there’s no shade of gray between, no question of merely seeing things differently.

Look what happens to us when we do this: it’s like staring at the windshield instead of through it while you’re driving; you’ll crack up in no time because you’re focusing on the wrong thing. If a skier at the Olympics this week looks at her skis instead of the course, she will fall. But if she trusts her equipment, feels the mountain under her, keeps her core steady and her eyes fixed ahead, she will fly down the mountain safely and glide across the finish line upright.

The Christian life knows boundaries, but only in order that love be boundless. As the poet said, if there is freedom in love and if the soul is free, then only angels above enjoy such liberty. It’s the liberty, the freedom of love that matters. The laws that govern it do so to make us more, not less, free.

Think of it this way. A river flows best when it flows within its banks. As long as it does, it has a force and power that carries water downstream and can electrify a city if harnessed well. But when it flows over its banks, the water loses its intended force and dissipates as it spreads everywhere. It does harm instead of good.

In the same way, we should be more concerned with the freedom of love than the love of freedom. The Spirit of the Lord brings us freedom by governing our hearts in love. When we follow the way of Christ, we are following the law of love more than the love of law. Ask yourself this: Is it easier to follow instructions or to emulate a person? Now, what if the spirit of that person were living within you like an internal guidance system? This is how the love of Christ operates in us.

Now, the way of Christ doesn’t reject things like the Ten Commandments, say, but it sees them as grammar-school fundamentals that allow us to matriculate upward in freedom and make us better able to love. It’s like figure skaters who used to have to perform what they called compulsories before they could do the freestyle skating we watch on television. They would carve meticulous figures into the ice in order to be eligible to go to the next level. But the point was never to stay at that level; it was always to know the freedom and creativity of the more elegant performance.

Jeff Bridges gives an Oscar-worthy performance in the movie Crazy Heart. Bad Blake is a broken-down country singer who finds himself playing bowling alleys with pick-up bands just to keep afloat. He was once a gifted and celebrated singer and songwriter, but he came to love bourbon more than anything else, including his four ex-wives and a son he hadn’t seen in 24 years. He spent his life blaming everyone and everything else for his decline, until he met a woman with a young child—both of whom captured his heart. Only his love for them could wake him up to the fact that he couldn’t continue to love the bottle more than life. If he wanted them, he had to give up the sauce.

I’ll leave the rest of the story for you to see, but the picture vividly shows us this deep truth that Paul is trying to get across to us: True freedom is not the ability to do anything you want; it’s the ability to love someone or something so completely that the discipline doesn’t even feel like a sacrifice. If an alcoholic only focuses on the Twelve Steps as rules to keep, he will not ever be free, even if he’s free from the liquor. Something more is needed: he has to love the life that sobriety gives him until he no longer sees the loss of drink as a loss.

When you give your life to Christ, you have to love the life you are giving yourself to more than the life you are giving up. And when you do, you will find yourself giving up things that don’t feel like you’re giving them up in the sense of losing them but instead giving them up in the sense of offering them up to God as a gift.

True freedom is perfect love, and perfect love is true freedom.

Maybe the greatest cartoon cover of The New Yorker magazine appeared in February 1981. It shows a picture of a man closed safely within his apartment with eight deadbolt locks on his door to keep everyone out. But into that prison of solitude, where no one can break his heart, someone has slipped a handwritten Valentine under the door—a red heart drawn with a crayon that wordlessly says I love you.

God is Spirit, and God always finds a way to slip us that Valentine. There is no true freedom that doesn’t accept that love. You are made to know love and to live it in freedom. Don’t hide yourself behind any stone walls, iron bars, or deadbolt locks. Let the Spirit of God make you free.