SERMON FOR OCTOBER 25, 2020 TEXT: JOHN 8:31-36

Whenever I read this passage from John, I think of what a dear friend wrote about it: “If truth comes to us as a series of propositions the proper response is assent . . . . If truth comes to us as a creed, the proper relationship is belief, as believers who have a creed demonstrate when they recite it. For example, ‘I believe in one God, the Father almighty, creator of heaven and earth .’ But if the truth comes to us as a person the most appropriate response is love . . . . [W]hen truth comes as a person, the only thing left to do is follow that person wherever he goes.”

In today’s Gospel we encounter a set of followers described as “the Jews who had believed” in Jesus, and we witness a bitter parting of the ways. They are trapped by what they think they know to be true and impervious to the truth standing before them. Theirs is a proposition inherited from their dead forebears, a creed that defines and binds them: “We are descendants of Abraham, and have never been in bondage to anyone.” Jesus, on the other hand, is there in their midst, challenging them to know themselves differently in the here and now. They aren’t having it; they can’t make the move with him. These folks cease to be followers and become fixed points of opposition instead. “I know that you are descendants of Abraham,” Jesus tells them, “yet you look for an opportunity to kill me, because there is no place in you for my word” (John 8: 37).

Three years ago when I preached on this same text, my dear hound Copper offered himself as an example of the challenge of following. It was our first autumn here, and he and Cher and I walked daily on the rail trail, stopping at the designated dog beach so I could admire the lake and the foliage. “They were snuffling contentedly, so I left them to their snouts’ delight and took pictures of the trees,” I wrote. “Then I heard a whisper of sound and turned to see one of the wonders of God’s creation — a galloping Basset Hound, ears flying, head and tail pumping up and down in alternation like a burnished seesaw. I gave pursuit as Copper hustled through the narrow clearing down to the water’s edge. But by the time I got there he had veered off into the bushes. He was exultant; here finally his short legs and torpedo-shaped body were assets. He could readily dodge through and around the underbrush. I could hear him crashing along, but I could not go after him. I called out cajolingly, increasingly frustrated and then frantic: “Copper, Copper, come back, buddy, I can’t follow you.” I think now of this past year, when I had to carry him up and down the porch steps and set him on his pins or walk him across the yard on his front feet like a wheelbarrow when his hind legs gave out. It wasn’t hard to keep up with him on the rail trail anymore; indeed, I had to stay close enough to prop him up as needed. It was rough, and I realized it would only get worse.

Knowing the truth about the painful places in our lives does make us free. It is not an escape from the loss; it is a way through. You can react by clinging to the past — this can’t be happening to us; this is what we have always believed; this is the way we have always done it; we are the descendants of Abraham, for God’s sake. Or you respond by following the Lord step by blessed step, sometimes striding, sometimes limping, always moving into the future. You grow into the changes the truth demands.

Today we celebrate Reformation Sunday. Note, it is not the feast day of St. Martin Luther. He was by no means the single-handed hero of the drama that engulfed the late medieval church, but he was the critical catalyst. This day marks the posting of Luther’s 95 theses, truth presented as a series of propositions about church doctrine and pastoral practice, intended for academic debate. In no time they went the 16th-century equivalent of viral, and the movement for reform was off and running.

According to John, Luther’s favorite Gospel, “the Word became flesh and lived among us, and we have seen his glory, the glory as of the Father’s only Son, full of grace and truth” (1:14). Luther knew that when truth has come as a person, the only thing to do is to follow that person wherever he leads. For many years he believed his relationship to God required his constant striving for righteousness and the added grace of God to cover his deficits. No one’s good works could ever be good or plentiful enough to satisfy God’s justice. When told to do what he could and trust that God would reward his best yet inadequate efforts with unfailing generosity, Luther despaired. He saw too much of sin in himself to take comfort in his “best” efforts.

His spiritual director counseled him to stop obsessing about his unworthiness and to look outward instead. Behold the crucified Jesus, who takes our sins to the cross and dies so that we might know the depth and power and certainty of God’s love. Luther followed where Jesus led, into the the darkness of his soul and out again, through the terror and angry despair to the assurance and freedom of God’s forgiveness. This is how he describes the truth that made him free: “Then finally God had mercy on me, and I began to understand that the righteousness of God is a gift of God by which a righteous person lives, namely faith, and that sentence: The righteousness of God is revealed in the Gospel, is passive, indicating that the merciful God justifies us by faith, as it is written: ‘The righteous shall live by faith.’ Now I felt as though I had been reborn altogether and had entered Paradise.” Now Luther understood that for God justification by grace through faith is more an affair of the heart than a matter for the courtroom. He realized he could never be free from sin, but he could live undefeated by it — calling it out for what it was and braving its corruption for the sake of loving his neighbor.

“If you are a preacher of grace,” Luther wrote to a friend, “then preach a true, not a fictitious grace; if grace is true, you must bear a true and not a fictitious sin. God does not save people who are only fictitious sinners. Be a sinner and sin boldly, but believe and rejoice in Christ even more boldly. For he is victorious over sin, death, and the world.” Look at Brother Martin, once crushed by despair, now unafraid of the truth as he sits fat and sassy in the lap of grace. Despite the bitter conflicts and the many disappointments of his life, this delight in the goodness of God never failed him. It is the truth that continually makes us free. Amen.