Sermon: We are free indeed! (Reformation Sunday, 2014)

Reformation Sunday

October 26, 2014

John 8:31-36

            I am reading a book right now called Sensible Shoes. It’s about four very different women

who all find themselves together at a spiritual retreat center. One of the women, Charissa, is a young, beautiful grad student pursuing a PhD. She is driven, a perfectionist, and she has never had a teacher who didn’t love her. She is at the retreat center at a professor’s suggestion, to enhance one of her classes, but she is appalled to discover at the first day of the retreat that there is no syllabus, no objectives, no intended outcome to the retreat. How is she supposed to measure her success? How will the instructor know how well she is doing? From day one, she is frustrated by the experience.

            She brings her discouragement to her professor. She asks him what she is supposed to be learning from this unfocused “spiritual journey” thing he’d recommended. He tells her plainly that her desire to learn has become an idol for her. He says, “If your desire to learn is keeping you from encountering Christ, then the right place to begin is with confession and repentance. You begin by acknowledging the truth about yourself: you’re a sinner who needs grace.”

            Tough words for a perfectionist – and indeed it sends poor Charissa reeling. All she has ever tried to be in her life is Good. She is a model Christian, a good student, she is focused and responsible and always follows the rules. How dare her professor call her a sinner? She has done everything right! How could God not be pleased with that?

            I admit I think there is a little bit of Charissa in me – perhaps in all of us. It is that part of us that holds to the belief that if we just do things right, and are good enough, then God will love us, keep us safe, welome us to heaven. Although this makes logical sense, it will always lead to disappointment, to a sense of failure. For those who usually do achieve what they set out to achieve, the danger is that they really start to believe that their good deeds can save them, that the power lies in their own hands, that they can do this by themselves. On the other hand, for those who have seen in their lives too many failures and shortcomings, the danger becomes a belief that they are beyond saving, that they are so bad that nothing could ever make it better, indeed that they are unlovable, even by God. It’s a slippery slope, either way you slide.

            And either way, I think this belief that salvation is dependent on what we accomplish or not becomes for us a sort of captivity, or enslavement. Either you become enslaved to a need to always perform well and follow the rules and do the right thing, or you become enslaved to the despair of never doing anything right, to the hopelessness of not being enough.

            We talked a lot about enslavement in our Bible study this week on today’s gospel lesson. Jesus tells the Jewish leaders, “If you continue in my word… you will know the truth, and the truth will set you free.” The leaders quickly respond, “Free? But we have never been slaves to anyone!” Well, first of all, that is rubbish – the Jewish people had been slaves many times over: in Egypt, under the Assyrians, and the Persians, and at the time of this conversation, under the Romans. But regardless of their particular history, their kneejerk response opens up a conversation for us today. In our Bible study, we thought together about the various things by which people might be enslaved. The list was impressive: addiction, a job, perfectionism, broken relationships (both marriage and

otherwise), a need to stay busy, depression or other mental illness, financial constraints, ignorance, fear, disease or physical limitations, a general sense of apathy… I’m sure you could add your own things that keep you feeling trapped or enslaved. Even though we live in America, the “land of the free,” there is still so much that enslaves us.

            And then of course there is Jesus’ contribution to the list: anyone who sins is a slave to sin. That’s not unlike those words we say during our confession each week: “We are captive/in bondage to sin and cannot free ourselves.” We are! We can’t help it! No matter how hard we try, we always fall short of doing everything right, even if it is just because we have made “doing everything right” into an all-consuming idol.

            This week in confirmation class, we were learning about the liturgy, the form of the worship service, and about why we do each of the different parts. When we were talking about confession, someone asked, “What if we don’t remember everything we need to confess? Will it not get forgiven?” This, in fact, was the fear that young Martin Luther had. As the story goes, he would

spend as long as six hours in the confessional with the priest, confessing every little thing he had done wrong in his life, and was tormented by the possibility that he might have forgotten something; he would leave the confessional, only to turn right back around and go back in, having just remembered something else. It was so bad that the priest dreaded when young Martin came to confession, because he knew this would take a while! But then one day in his personal study, Brother Martin read these words from Romans that we heard a moment ago: “There is no distinction, since all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God; they are now justified by God’s grace as a gift, through the redemption that is in Christ Jesus.” Suddenly he realized: he was never going to escape from sinning, but that was okay because first of all, that was simply a part of being human (all have sinned and fall short). But more importantly, his works would never save nor condemn him anyway - that was what grace was about. Upon discovering this, Luther wrote, “I felt myself to be reborn and to have gone through the open doors into paradise!”

This was the realization that led to the Reformation, which we celebrate today, nearly 500 years later: that we are saved by grace and not by works, that nothing we do can be enough to save us,

but that the work of Jesus Christ is big enough and gracious enough to save us all – indeed enough to free us all from whatever enslaves us.

            That is also what we celebrate in baptism. The opening words of the baptismal liturgy say, “In baptism our gracious heavenly Father frees us from sin and death…” That doesn’t mean that suddenly after baptism we will no longer sin. What it does mean is that because of our baptism, we are no longer enslaved by the fear that we are not enough, the fear that we could do something to make God stop loving us, the fear that we could sin so much or so badly that we would endanger the fact that God has claimed us and named us “beloved children.” Our baptism frees us from the burden of believing that we somehow have the power to make God either love us or leave us. We don’t have that power – only One does, and that is the One who claims us in baptism, who feeds us with Himself, who forgives us our sins, known and unknown. And because that power is in God’s hands, not ours, we are left with freedom: to love, to live, to dare, to struggle, to dream, to risk, even to fail – and most of all, the freedom to hope in the one who gives himself for us, in whom we are free indeed.

            Let us pray… God of grace, left to our own devices, we will always fall short of the glory of God. And so all the more we give you thanks for your grace, for your unrelenting love, for your power to free us from all fear so that we might live lives not of despair, but which are full of hope in Christ. In the name of the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit. Amen.