Sermon for Reformation Sunday
God’s Amazing Grace for Us All
By The Rev. Eric Christopher Shafer -
(This sermon is adapted from a sermon by the Rev. Dr. David Lose)
The truth will make you free. You have heard these words, taken from today’s text from St. John’s Gospel, you have heard these words before. You will find these words posted on many churches and libraries and academic buildings. They are even found on the wall at the CIA’s Headquarters in Langley, Virginia. My brother, Byron, used them as his favorite quote in his high school yearbook. These words are everywhere. The truth will make you free.
Those who first heard these words from Jesus are people, the text tells us, they are people “who believed in him.” They were followers, disciples, of Jesus, people who had decided that this was the Messiah, the one who offered abundant life and was the embodiment of God’s promises.
Yet in today’s Gospel text there is something about Jesus’ instruction and promise that seems to grate on his followers’ nerves and pushes them away. Perhaps it is simply that Jesus offers them something they believe they already have. Which, when you think about it, could be kind of offensive. Just think of an ad for a product which promises to help you be “good looking.” Kind of implies you are not particularly easy to look at just now.
So rather than receive Jesus’ offer of freedom with gratitude, his listeners push back, so offended they are almost nonsensical in their anger: “We are descendants of Abraham and have never been slaves to anyone. What do you mean by saying, ‘You will be made free’?”
Never been slaves to anyone? Really? But what about the Egyptians, or the Assyrians, or the Persians? And how are you enjoying the Roman occupation? The “truth” is that the Jewish people who listened to Jesus were slaves again in the Roman empire as they had been slaves many times before in their history.
So, what is going on here? For Jesus’ followers and even for us? Why do they, and we, have this penchant to resist anything that threatens our thoughts and perceptions and – if we can admit it – anything that threatens our illusions about our independence and self-sufficiency?
The answer rests, perhaps, in Paul’s analysis. The law, Paul says in the 3rd chapter of Romans, in today’s second lesson, the law makes sin manifest (3:20), that is, visible. “Sin,” here, is not so much accusation but description. We are flawed, far from God, simultaneously beautiful as well as broken, courageous and confused, both capable of great good and so often perpetrators of great harm.
Part of the way we tolerate these contradictions and endure the tension they create is by maintaining a level of what one might call “willful denial,” but which, when you get right down to it, is little more than self-delusion.
And all too often, religion aids and abets in that delusion, giving us things we can do, a heritage to boast of, a sense of what makes us distinctive over and against others. It was not too many years ago that a sermon you might hear in a Lutheran congregation on Reformation Sunday would not only celebrate our faith and history, but also put down other faiths, often and especially the Roman Catholic faith. Some of you have told me you grew up hearing such sermons. I am so pleased that those times are now long past.
You see faith – at least faith like that rediscovered by Martin Luther – faith does not offer that retreat to religious practice or doctrine or identity. Rather, faith announces God’s arrival, the arrival that spells an end to our delusions of ability and accomplishment and simultaneously promises absolute acceptance and unconditional love, the two things we desperately need but cannot attain outside of a relationship with someone else.
We all have a deep need to hear the words, “I love you.” Yet we cannot finally believe and trust those words unless they are preceded by three other words: “I know you.” Absent the assurance that we are known, we may fear that we have fooled our beloved, that he or she loves the person we have presented, not the person we are.
And so more often than not, when God gets involved in the lives of people in the Bible – like Jacob, Isaiah, and Peter, and, today, these disciples who “believed in Jesus” – when God gets involved in the lives of people in the Bible, their initial response to God’s presence is usually not deep joy and gratitude but fear or offense, for finally the pretense over, which feels an awful lot like dying. And not only, of course, for people we can read of in the Bible, but for all of us as well.
But then, almost immediately if not simultaneously, precisely because our former, initial response was pretense, the genuine love and acceptance God embodies and offers comes to us and creates new life in us.
And sometimes, the very challenges and troubles of this life, a life that has already announced the “I know you,” those very challenges can make us more ready to receive God’s “I love you” with thanksgiving.
I know you. I love you. Both said by the God determined to do anything and everything it takes to bring us to life, a God who both knows us and loves us, who both sees through our pretense and accepts us as we are. A God who accepts us as we are, not the person we are trying to be or planning to be or have promised to be, but the person we already are. Known. Loved. Already.
Until suddenly we all cannot help but sing, “I once was lost, but now am found, was blind, but now I see.”
Amazing grace, how sweet the sound, that saved a wretch like me. I once was lost but now am found, was blind but now I see.
Through many dangers, toils and snares, I have already come; ‘tis grace has brought me safe thus far, and grace will lead me home.
God knows you and me. And, despite knowing all about us, all of our good and all of our bad, God loves us. That is the truth of the Reformation and the truth of the Gospel of Jesus Christ. God’s grace, God’s unconditional love for us, continues to bring us home to God.
God says to you and to me, I know you, I love you. Today and always. God’s amazing grace for us all. The promise of the Reformation and our Christian faith. I know you. I love you.
Oh, just one more thought, one for Reformation Sunday, a day we celebrate Martin Luther and, more importantly, the truths of the Protestant Reformation. I believe that “God knows us, and God loves us” covers much of the foundations of Martin Luther’s beliefs and the Reformation itself. A third Reformation/Luther theme would be “God wants us to know God.” That theme is behind Luther’s emphasis on everyone reading God’s word in his or her own language and the “priesthood of all believers,” our equality before God. And, once we acknowledge the God who knows us and loves us and wants us to know God, we realize that, since we are saved by God’s grace and love alone, we are free to reach out to others in God’s love, not to earn our salvation, but because we have a God who knows us and loves us and wants us to know God.
God says, “I know you. I love you. I want you to know me.”
Thanks be to God.
Amen.
(With thanks to the Rev. Dr. David Lose).
The Rev. Eric Christopher Shafer
Senior Pastor - Mt. Olive Lutheran Church
Santa Monica, California
Sermon for:
October 25, 2020
