The Reformation of Our Hearts

John 8: 31-36 (October 29, 2023)

Then Jesus turned to the Jews who had claimed to believe in him. “If you stick with this, living out what I tell you, you are my disciples for sure. Then you will experience for yourselves the truth, and the truth will free you.” Surprised, they said, “But we’re descendants of Abraham. We’ve never been slaves to anyone. How can you say, ‘The truth will free you’?” Jesus said, “I tell you most solemnly that anyone who chooses a life of sin is trapped in a dead-end life and is, in fact, a slave. A slave can’t come and go at will. The Son, though, has an established position, the run of the house. So if the Son sets you free, you are free through and through. (The Message)

Even though we have jumped for Reformation Sunday from the Gospel of Matthew over to the Gospel of John, believe it or not, we again find Jesus in the Temple, in conflict with the scribes and Pharisees. Seems like this is a recurring theme! In this reading, Jesus tells us what it means to truly be his disciple, and how the truth will free us.

But Jesus’ listeners don’t believe they’re not free. They say “we’ve never been slaves to anyone!” It’s odd that they claim to be descendants of Abraham and in the same breath say they’ve never been slaves, when of course their Hebrew ancestors were enslaved in Egypt. Maybe they think their ancestors’ slavery no longer affects them. While Jesus’ listeners may not have been physically enslaved, it seems Jesus thought they were in bondage in a much deeper way.

What keeps us enslaved today? Jesus tells us that continuing to choose a life of sin keeps us trapped in slavery. I’m a big fan of Nadia Bolz-Weber, a Lutheran pastor in Denver. She writes that “The Christian faith, while wildly misrepresented in so much of American culture, is really about death and resurrection. It’s about how God continues to reach into the graves we dig for ourselves and pull us out, giving us new life, in ways both dramatic and small.” She’s saying that sin is about our inherent tendency to “dig graves for ourselves.”

When I look around, I see a world full of grave diggers. Seems we’re always digging graves, either for ourselves or for others.

Aren’t we digging graves when we refuse to forgive or let go of old hurts and instead continue to swim in toxic anger and blame? Or when we see other people as our enemies instead of as members of our same human family? Or when we refuse to listen to their pain and need?

Aren’t we digging graves when we continue to believe old stories from our traumatic pasts that make us feel shameful and small? Or when we react to the people around us out of old patterns of behavior rather than responding out of the present reality?

Aren’t we digging graves when we refuse to ask for help when we need it, thinking instead that we should be able to go it alone?

Choosing a life of sin isn’t about making mistakes. To be human is to make mistakes. I believe with every fiber in my being that God only has compassion for our mistakes. In fact, I’ve heard Father Richard Rohr say that “God doesn’t choose to forgive only every now and then. Forgiveness is the permanent state of God toward Reality.” We so easily focus on what we think of as God’s “wrath,” but God didn’t incarnate into this world because God was mad at the world and wanted to condemn it. God entered the world because “God so LOVED the world.”

It was the hidden truth of this LOVE of God for each and every one of us that completely turned Martin Luther’s life around and fueled his huge impact on the world. In October of 2017, we celebrated the 500th anniversary of Luther’s gauntlet thrown before the Church in the form of his 95 theses that it’s said he nailed to the door of the Wittenburg church. In an article about “How Martin Luther Changed the World,” Joan Acocella writes,

Luther was one of those figures who touched off something much larger than himself; namely, the Reformation—the sundering of the Church and a fundamental revision of its theology. Once he had divided the Church, it could not be healed. His reforms survived to breed other reforms, many of which he disapproved of. His church splintered and splintered… The Reformation, in turn, reshaped Europe.

Luther is an unlikely hero. And certainly, an imperfect human. He was born in 1483, and though his father wanted him to become a lawyer, a lightening-storm promise to God resulted in his becoming an Augustinian monk and then a professor at the University of Wittenburg. Acocella describes him as “a charismatic man, and maniacally energetic.” During the first 12 years of his being a monk, he spoke often but apparently wrote little. That may be due to what he called his “trials” or “tribulations.” But, Acocella writes,

this feels too slight a word to cover the afflictions he describes: cold sweats, nausea, constipation, crushing headaches, ringing in his ears, together with depression, anxiety, and a general feeling that, as he put it, the angel of Satan was beating him with his fists. Most painful, it seems, for this passionately religious young man was to discover his anger against God. Years later, commenting on his reading of Scripture as a young friar, Luther spoke of his rage at the description of God’s righteousness, and of his grief that, as he was certain, he would not be judged worthy: ‘I did not love, yes, I hated the righteous God who punishes sinners.’

Luther came to despise the Church’s practice of selling indulgences – the idea that you could buy God’s favor and forgiveness. If our salvation could be bought, Luther wondered, then why had God given his son at all, and why had his son died on the cross? God came into this world to reveal God’s LOVE for the world. The work has already been done. It’s done! All we need to do is accept it.

Believing that the work is already done, that we are already loved and accepted by God, is sufficient. This earth-shattering insight finally broke through Luther’s prison of self-hatred. Just like Bolz-Weber says, God reached down into the grave that Luther had dug for himself, and pulled him right out. God gave Luther new life.

In that new life, two ideas became Luther’s guiding principles: sola fide and sola scriptura. They mean, “by faith alone” and “by scripture alone.” He reasoned that we could come to God, be in relationship with God, and discern God’s will for our lives solely through faith and through the truth found in scripture. The intercession of any church authority was not required. And he insisted that it’s not our works or behavior that justify us before God. We can’t earn our way to God’s heart – we’re already there! On the other hand, he did recognize that good works naturally come from a life of faith – that we can’t help but be motivated to love and serve when we have faith. Serving is what Love does.

In her article about Luther, Acocella writes that, “Guided by those convictions, and fired by his new certainty of God’s love for him, Luther became radicalized. He preached, he disputed. Above all, he wrote pamphlets. He denounced not only the indulgence trade but all the other ways in which the Church made money off Christians: the endless pilgrimages, the yearly Masses for the dead, the cults of the saints.”
Luther was on fire. But by 1520, he was also in big trouble. Not surprising since he referred to the Church as a “brothel” and to Pope Leo X as the “Antichrist.” Luther was labeled a heretic, and then excommunicated. He was finally dragged into a kind of court called the Diet of Worms where he was told to recant everything he’d been saying and writing.

But of course, he wouldn’t recant. Toward the end of what is now recognized as one of the best speeches ever given, Luther was pressed to answer the question he was asked simply and “without oratory.” He concluded with these famous words:

Since your most serene majesty and your highnesses require of me a simple, clear, and direct answer, I will give one, and it is this: I cannot submit my faith either to the pope or to the council, because it is clear that they have fallen into error and even into inconsistency with themselves. If, then, I am not convinced by proof from Holy Scripture, or by cogent reasons, if I am not satisfied by the very text I have cited, and if my judgment is not in this way brought into subjection to God’s word, I neither can nor will retract anything; for it cannot be either safe or honest for a Christian to speak against his conscience. Here I stand. I cannot do otherwise. God help me. Amen.

Here I stand. I cannot do otherwise. Luther had tremendous courage. Did you know that the word courage comes from the Latin word cor, and it means “with heart”?

“… this is the covenant that I will make with the house of Israel after those days, says the LORD: I will put my law within them, and I will write it on their hearts, and I will be their God, and they shall be my people. 34 No longer shall they teach one another or say to each other, “Know the LORD,” for they shall all know me, from the least of them to the greatest, says the LORD, for I will forgive their iniquity and remember their sin no more.”

The law focuses on our sin, but God doesn’t. God’s focus is on love. This is the new covenant – the law that is written on our hearts. God loves us. Full stop. That’s the liberating truth that Jesus refused to recant, no matter what we did to him. That’s the truth he died to reveal.

In our Gospel, Jesus says, “I tell you most solemnly that anyone who chooses a life of sin is trapped in a dead-end life…” We choose a life of sin when we choose to stay in separation from God and from the world around us. We choose a life of sin when we refuse to see the pain and suffering that we cause to others. Or when we only see the original sin in ourselves and not also the original blessing that we are made in the image and likeness of God.

Choosing a life of sin, is choosing to dig our own graves of death.

As we read in Deuteronomy, “I have set before you life and death, blessings and curses. Choose life so that you and your descendants may live, loving the Lord your God, obeying him and holding fast to him; for that means life to you and length of days…”

It’s our choice. We can either choose life, or we can choose death.

I want to choose life; to choose to believe in God’s love. How about you?