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Free Indeed! (OR A Sermon for Reformation Sunday) John 8:31-36, Romans 3:19-28, Psalm 46 (a.k.a. A Mighty Fortress is Our God)

Caitlin Trussell with Augustana Lutheran Church on October 27, 2024

[sermon begins after two Bible readings Psalm are at the end of the sermon]

John 8:31-36 Jesus said to the Jews who had believed in him, “If you continue in my word, you are truly my disciples; 32 and you will know the truth, and the truth will make you free.” 33 They answered him, “We are descendants of Abraham and have never been slaves to anyone. What do you mean by saying, ‘You will be made free’?”
34 Jesus answered them, “Very truly, I tell you, everyone who commits sin is a slave to sin. 35 The slave does not have a permanent place in the household; the son has a place there forever. 36 So if the Son makes you free, you will be free indeed.”

Romans 3:19-28 Now we know that whatever the law says, it speaks to those who are under the law, so that every mouth may be silenced, and the whole world may be held accountable to God. 20 For “no human being will be justified in his sight” by deeds prescribed by the law, for through the law comes the knowledge of sin.
21 But now, apart from law, the righteousness of God has been disclosed, and is attested by the law and the prophets, 22 the righteousness of God through faith in Jesus Christ for all who believe. For there is no distinction, 23 since all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God; 24 they are now justified by his grace as a gift, through the redemption that is in Christ Jesus, 25 whom God put forward as a sacrifice of atonement by his blood, effective through faith. He did this to show his righteousness, because in his divine forbearance he had passed over the sins previously committed; 26 it was to prove at the present time that he himself is righteous and that he justifies the one who has faith in Jesus.
27 Then what becomes of boasting? It is excluded. By what law? By that of works? No, but by the law of faith. 28 For we hold that a person is justified by faith apart from works prescribed by the law.

[sermon begins]

When we say we’re doing something “for the sake of the gospel,” what do we mean? There are fancy ways to give answers to this question and there are simple ways. None of them are easy. Jesus tried it this way, “So if the Son makes you free, you will be free indeed.” Free indeed. I like the sound of that. He’s not talking about political freedom or financial freedom. Two big topics in the world right now. He’s talking about the freedom that he offers through himself.  Some people describe Jesus’ freedom like this, “There is nothing you can do or not do to make God love you any more or any less.” That’s simple. Freeing. “There is nothing you can do or not do to make God love you any more or any less.” That is good news in a world that pressurizes the human experience in almost every conceivable way. God’s unconditional love can be a difficult message to trust, in part because the Bible can be compared to peeling layers of an onion and never arriving at the center. People want to make what God offers contingent on a human action, what Jesus calls “the law,” rather than focusing on God’s actions that bring the freedom Jesus describes. We tend to overestimate our own power and underestimate God’s. Free indeed.

“So if the Son makes you free, you will be free indeed.” Free. Most people want to be free and we’re at a point in the United States’ election process when the word is bandied about willy nilly. At this time of year, we tend to think of freedom as political in terms of who has governing authority. Our government’s democracy wouldn’t compute for people back in Jesus’ day during the Roman Empire. That didn’t stop Jesus from weighing in on troubling aspects of life, religion, and politics in the 1st century. And it certainly didn’t stop Martin Luther in the 16th century from pushing on the regional princes to do right by their people especially related to hunger and livelihood. As we vote, it’s easy to forget that we Jesus followers already have a savior. Candidates for elected office argue that their way is the only way. But Christians through the centuries realize that the subversive way of Jesus commands us to love God, and to love our neighbor as ourselves – both of which do freely in response to God’s love for us, no matter who holds elected office. Free indeed.

Our Reformation celebration today in worship is one specific to Lutheran Christians. Lutheran Christians get our name from a 16th century German Catholic priest named Martin Luther – an ornery academic priest. His writings ignited the people’s imagination like wildfire. Luther started with his own crisis of faith. He was never certain that God forgave him enough to be received by God. He stumbled into the meaning of grace in a dark night of the soul. Luther confronted the Bible again and again, finally discovering that God’s grace must be utterly unconditional because otherwise we could never trust that we’d received it. And if God’s grace is unconditional, then no one controls it – not me, not you, not politicians, not the church. No one. Since no one controls it, the radical grace of Jesus is subversive and unpredictable. Free indeed.

Martin Luther was the Reformer who lived to tell the tale of grace. Others before him were put to death. Luther survived because he was hidden away by a sympathetic prince who protected him. His story survived because of printing press inventors and his bestie Melancthon who negotiated the theology of grace with other pastors in wider church circles. Otherwise, Luther could have been just another pastor who posted good ideas on a church bulletin board that no one ever read – his ideas swallowed up by the 300,000 revolutionaries fighting the German Peasants’ War in 1525. But his ideas lived on in pamphlets, catechisms, and Bibles in the common language. Local pastors, sly politicians, and faithful parents joined the sweeping history in real-time that pulsed with new life and grace. There are Protestants in Christianity because there were meddling Lutherans who held the church of Rome accountable to its theology and the people hurt by it. In fairness to our Catholic siblings in faith, many of Luther’s reforms have long since been put into place by the Roman Catholic Church. Remember, a little subversive grace goes a long way over the course of time. Love God. Love your neighbor as yourself. Free indeed.

Digging into the back-story of the Reformation is similar detective work to digging into the Bible like Luther did. The Bible includes many people and their stories pulsing together into the larger one. The highs and lows of our ancient Jewish cousins in the faith swooping into the 1st Century story of Jesus, a Jewish rabbi from a backwater town, and the ragtag men and women who followed him as disciples. It would take many lifetimes to exhaust the riches of God’s love story for the world, through Jesus who called himself the “truth” in the Bible reading from John. Which brings us to today. This moment. Us. And especially you who are affirming the promises of baptism in the milestone that we call Confirmation.

Just last week, our Confirmation youth and I talked about unconditional grace. Grace is the opposite of how things work with grades in school. There’s no A+ that brings us closer to God because God is already with us. We don’t earn our way to God. There is peace in realizing that God is present with us regardless of how we’re doing as disciples. If there’s any doubt, read the Bible stories about disciples getting Jesus’ way wrong time and again. Luther was convinced that there is much we can disagree about in the Bible. Those permissible disagreements are called adiaphora. Christian theologians love arguing about whether something is adiaphora or not. Sounds simple, but try this one. What we say about Jesus isn’t Jesus. Only Jesus is Jesus. That’s why faith in Jesus is more like trust than it is an intellectual belief. Free indeed.

One of Luther’s gifts to the church is that Jesus’ grace is at the heart of faith. This grace doesn’t birth just any old freedom and it’s more than poetry. It is freedom through the love and grace of Jesus. When Jesus says that sin enslaves us and he sets us free, it’s difficult to understand what that means. We have a harder time admitting that we sin much less confessing it and our need for the very freedom Jesus offers through grace. But we know this much, we are free to ask questions for the sake of the gospel. Free to ask questions about the Bible, about history, about the church, about Jesus, about our faith and our doubt, about the mystery of God. You name it and we are free to ask it. No one, not even you with your questions, controls the radical grace of the God who is love. Free indeed!

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Song after the sermon:

 

 

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Psalm 46 (a.k.a. A Mighty Fortress is Our God)

God is our refuge and strength,
 a very present help in trouble.
 2Therefore we will not fear, though the earth should change,
 though the mountains shake in the heart of the sea;
 3though its waters roar and foam,
 though the mountains tremble with its tumult.
Selah
 4There is a river whose streams make glad the city of God,
 the holy habitation of the Most High.
 5God is in the midst of the city; it shall not be moved;
 God will help it when the morning dawns.
 6The nations are in an uproar, the kingdoms totter;
 he utters his voice, the earth melts.
 7The LORD of hosts is with us;
 the God of Jacob is our refuge.
Selah
 8Come, behold the works of the LORD;
 see what desolations he has brought on the earth.
 9He makes wars cease to the end of the earth;
 he breaks the bow, and shatters the spear;
 he burns the shields with fire.
 10“Be still, and know that I am God!
 I am exalted among the nations,
 I am exalted in the earth.”
 11The LORD of hosts is with us;
 the God of Jacob is our refuge.