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Reformation Day
October 31, 2021
John 8:31-36
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 in-laws or 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 can 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 counter-intuitively 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 beginning to think about at St. Paul’s today, as we kick off our stewardship campaign: 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.”
Over the next four weeks, we will be hearing about some of the exciting ways that St. Paul’s is dreaming about living more intentionally into God’s vision for us. We’ve been thinking, praying, talking and dreaming about it for months, and now, we have the chance to ask you to commit to making some of this happen, by pledging your time, talents, and treasures to the service of this vision. You should have received (or will shortly) in the mail a letter describing some of those things, as well as a time and talent sheet, a pledge card, and a chart to help you consider how you might be able to increase your giving this year.
Maybe, as you prayerfully consider your involvement in this, 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. Maybe you will join a new ministry, or volunteer in a way that is a little out of your comfort zone. Maybe you will commit to praying for the success of these ministries. 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!”
500 years ago, the Spirit moved in the Church and did something new. That Spirit never stopped moving in the Church as a whole, and it never stops moving in her members. I hope you will listen to what the Spirit is changing, reforming, in your heart, to live more intentionally into God’s mission for us.
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 begin 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.
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