Reformation Day
October 29, 2023
Stewardship Kickoff: “God’s Extravagant Grace”
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, 506 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. And our Gospel will claim that the Son makes us “free” – free from the sin that would hold us captive, and inhibit our ability to live joyfully in the world.
Today we are kicking off our stewardship campaign, focusing on “God’s Extravagance.” Today’s focus is on “God’s extravagant grace.” These texts are all loaded with signs of God’s grace! So as you listen, watch for the ways that God’s grace shows itself in these passages. 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, and I suspect it may with some of you. 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 believe 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. That was kind of the whole premise of the Exodus story, that they were delivered out of slavery in Egypt. 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 on 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. Today we celebrate God’s extravagant grace. Now, I want to be realistic here – those things I mentioned 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 gracious 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, extravagant 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.”
It is, truly, extravagant. For God just to forget our sin! To freely accept us, though we don’t deserve it! Wow! When we recognize that for the extravagant gift that it is, how do you feel compelled to respond? Personally, I’m overjoyed. That is so much more gracious than I have ever received from any human, and to know that even with all my mistakes, and small-mindedness, and participation in broken systems, and judgement of things I deem somehow not enough… God still loves, accepts, and forgives me… Whew. It is so liberating. It frees me to love and to be gracious to others with less fear.
And, it frees me to be generous. That is what we are talking about during this stewardship season: that God’s grace, marvelous and extravagant as it is, frees and compels us to respond with generosity, both of spirit and of resources. Because of God’s extravagance, we have 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.”
This week, you should receive in the mail some information about planning your giving for next year. These next weeks are a chance for you to pray and discuss about how God’s extravagance compels you to respond, and then to make a commitment to God to do that thing. Maybe you will feel moved to pledge for the first time, or maybe you will commit to increasing last year’s giving 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, know that God’s extravagant grace for you is unfaltering. You are God’s beloved, and nothing can ever change that.
Let us pray… Extravagant God of grace, we find ourselves bound by so many forces, both internal and external. Thank you for freeing us by your grace, so that we would be free to love and serve you and the world with generosity. In the name of the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit. Amen.
No comments:
Post a Comment