Reformation Sunday (and Celebrate Generosity Sunday)
October 27, 2019
John 8:31-36, Romans 3:19-28, Jeremiah 31:31-34
INTRODUCTION
Happy
Reformation Day! In case you’re not up on your Lutheran history, we always
celebrate Reformation Day on this last Sunday of October, the day closest to
Oct 31, when, 502 years ago, Martin Luther nailed the 95 Theses on the church
door and started a conversation that would dramatically change the Church and
Western civilization. I say “celebrate,” even though it wasn’t much of a
celebration at the time! In fact, Luther was a hunted man for his teachings.
But now, centuries later, we do celebrate – not the pain and division that was
also a part of this movement, but the Gospel itself, because Luther’s teachings
helped Christians to set their sight once again on the essence of the Gospel.
And the texts
we hear today, the same ones that are always assigned for Reformation Day, help
us to focus on that gospel message. Jeremiah, normally a book full of doom and
gloom, offers the remarkable promise that despite our many mistakes, God will
forgive us and “remember our sin no more.” Our Psalm tells of the strength of
our God – it is the Psalm on which Luther based his famous hymn, A Mighty
Fortress. Our reading from Romans is the one Luther was reading when he
came to the world-changing realization that we can do nothing to earn our own
salvation, but that we are saved by grace.
Finally, our Gospel is what provides
most explicitly today’s stewardship theme: giving as an act of freedom. “If the
Son makes you free,” Jesus says, “you will be free indeed.” And that is what
I’d like you to think about as you listen to these readings. The people Jesus
is talking to say they have never been slaves to anyone – but I’d argue (and so
does Jesus) that we are all captive, or slaves, to something. So, as you
listen, think about what that might be: what holds you back from being the free
creature God made you to be? What makes you feel bound and captive? Let’s
listen.
[READ]
Grace to you and
peace from God our Father and our Lord Jesus Christ. Amen.
The book, Sensible
Shoes, tells the story of 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 on 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?
Charissa’s
story resonates with me… maybe with you, too. In so many areas of our life, we
do have near complete control over our fate, or at least we’ve convinced
ourselves that we do. The American dream says as much: you work hard, you do
well, you follow the rules, or at least know the appropriate time and way to
break them, then you’ll get ahead. And if you don’t, well, that must just mean
you have done something wrong, and need to work harder.
This is the message society
tries to teach us. And yet then we come here to church and the very first thing
we do is speak aloud those words, “We confess that we are captive to sin and
cannot free ourselves.” How counter-cultural is that!
Because it is
so counter-cultural… I wonder how many of us really believe those words when we
say them, more than we believe what society teaches? Or, how many of us instead
think, “I’m a pretty good person, I always try to do the right thing, I’m kind
and generous with my time and resources. Yes, I know I’m a ‘sinner,’ but really
I don’t sin that much.” I admit that when we get to that part of the
service where there is some silence for self-examination right before we pray
the prayer of confession together, I sometimes struggle to think of specific
sins because, like many of you, I am, for the most part, a pretty good person.
But this view
of sin misses the point. It makes us sound like the crowd in today’s Gospel
lesson. When Jesus tells them the Truth will set them free, their response is,
“What do you mean free? Free from what? We’ve never been slaves to anyone!”
Like Charissa in Sensible Shoes, they are aghast at the mere suggestion
that they could be held captive by anything. Well, first of all, this is, for
this Jewish audience, entirely untrue – they had been literal slaves
several times throughout their history. But more importantly humans from across
the ages have been held captive by any number of emotional, mental, and
spiritual threats, by “hordes of devils filling the land,” as Luther calls them.
We are held captive by our guilt about the past, our anxiety about the future,
and our resentment about our inability to control our situation. We are slaves
to our work, to a need to stay busy, to achieving at least the façade of
success. We are bound by disease and health limitations, both mental and
physical, and by a general sense of apathy. We are trapped in the heartbreak
surrounding so many broken relationships – with our partners, our siblings, our
parents or kids, our neighbors. It turns out, we are slaves. We do long for
freedom.
Now, those things are not necessarily
inherently sinful. It is not a sin, for example, to be sick. But they are a
part of the broader understanding of the condition of sin, because any
or all of those things has the potential to threaten our relationship with
Christ. They drive us away from trust in God and toward trust in our own
abilities. Or, they convince us that we are somehow less than a beloved child
of God who is made in God’s image. Or, they cause us to turn in ourselves, to
focus on our own navels, rather than look up and out to see God and neighbor.
And when we do any of those things, the cycle of captivity to sin just
continues.
But on this Reformation Day (and
every day!), we celebrate that this captivity to sin does not define us. Now, I
want to be realistic here – those things do exist, because we are human,
we are captive to sin, and we do experience the brokenness that
goes along with all that. But this brokenness does not define us. What defines
us first of all is that we are beloved by our merciful Creator. We are loved. What
defines us further, and what offers us hope in the midst of brokenness, is the
very thing that society might try to tell us is a failure: We are captive to
sin and cannot free ourselves. But God can, and does, free
us. It is by pure grace that we are freed from, forgiven for, this
brokenness; even though we are sinners, God still does this for us. It is God’s
promise that we are not responsible for achieving our own salvation: God
through Christ does that for us. As Paul writes, “All of us have sinned and
fallen short of God’s glory. But God treats us much better than we deserve, and
because of Christ Jesus, he freely accepts us and sets us free from our sins.”
(CEV) He forgives us, as Jeremiah says, and remembers our sin no more.
That’s good
news, but that’s not where it ends. When we hear this news, we might be tempted
to say, “Great! I’m off the hook! I don’t have to do anything!” But if we truly
grasp how incredible this news, this promise, is, we can’t sit back and
do nothing. Instead, we are compelled to serve, to give, to love even the
unlovable, to share this news with others, to do all we can to make sure the
world knows how great this is. That’s what we do, when we really believe and
trust in God’s promise. You see, Christ provides us two kinds of freedom –
freedom from the crippling power of sin, and freedom for service
and generosity. This latter freedom, the “freedom for,” when we truly believe
and accept the former, spontaneously springs forth from us.
And that’s the sort of freedom we are
celebrating at St. Paul’s today: the freedom to be generous. The freedom to
say, “I know God’s got my back, that nothing can defeat me since Christ
defeated death, that my God is trustworthy and good, and so I want to thank
and praise, serve and obey him. I want to love and serve my neighbor. I want
to be generous with my time, talents and treasures for the sake of God’s mission
in the world, of which I am blessed to be a part. I am free to give of myself
and my assets, just as God so freely gave of His.”
At the end of
our service today, we will celebrate that freedom in a physical way, by coming
forward to offer a commitment to give sacrificially to God. Maybe you will feel
moved to pledge for the first time, or maybe you will commit to increasing your
gift by 10%, or maybe you will commit to give more regularly and intentionally
and not just when you happen to think of it. Whatever your commitment is,
whatever you, your family, and God have decided, this is an opportunity to pray
and worship and thank God with our hearts and our bodies, to say, “I love you, God,
I trust you, I thank you!” And then, we will further enjoy God’s bounty in the
form of a luncheon, a thank you to God for our existence, our freedom, and our
opportunity to participate in God’s mission, and a thank you to all of you for
your generosity and your faithfulness to that mission.
It has been a gift to spend this time
this month thinking so deeply and intentionally about how we respond to God’s
generosity, and I thank you for this. But the greatest gift of all, speaking
personally, has been the opportunity to learn and grow with you, to deepen my
own faith, and to reflect on the many ways God has loved me and freed me and
given me life. Thanks be to God!
Let us pray… Generous God, thank
you for our abundant blessings, and especially for freeing us from all that
enslaves us. Help us to trust that you are our provider and true source of joy
and satisfaction. As we wrap up our stewardship campaign today, free us from
the worries of financial insecurity, and help us to give according to the
blessings that you have so generously given us. Thank you for how you have been
using and will continue to use our congregation to bless the community that you
have called us to minister to. In the name of the Father and the Son and the
Holy Spirit. Amen.
