Our readings for Reformation Sunday invite us to reconsider what Christian freedom is. When a Christian understands that they are freed from sin, lies, and other burdens, they become free to love and serve their neighbors with open hands.

Vicar Erik Nelson
Reformation Sunday
Texts: John 8:31-36

Beloved in Christ, grace and peace to you in the name of the Father, and of the + Son, and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.

“You will know the truth, and the truth will make you free.”

“So if the Son sets you free, you will be free indeed.”

As people in the United States, we hear a lot about freedom. It’s one of those loaded words that carries a lot of meaning, depending on your own experiences in this country. And as our country’s 250th anniversary approaches, I think we’ll hear more and more of that word being thrown around.

So I think this is as good a time as any to get ahead of the curve and start thinking about freedom, and how it relates to our Christian identities. In the months I’ve been here, we’ve talked about how our allegiance is first to God’s family. What does freedom mean in that context?

I’ll take a risk and say that Christian freedom, what Jesus calls us to, couldn’t be further from what our culture tells us freedom is.

American freedom, as it’s been defined for most of my life, has been primarily used to describe freedom from things. Freedom from taxation, freedom from being told what to do, freedom from obligation, generally.

But the Christian message of freedom is bad news for that American idea of freedom.

Christian freedom is simultaneously the freedom that Christ describes here, a freedom from lies and sin, (pause) and also a freedom to serve our neighbors. Because we have been freed by Christ and welcomed permanently into his family, we are freed to love and serve God and our neighbors … to live a life of freedom, and obligation.

American freedom is often just self-centeredness … Christian freedom leads us to serve our neighbors.

This calling to service with open hands starts with rightly understanding today’s scripture readings, and our place in them.

As I read these passages, I see how God is the actor in all of them.

In Jeremiah, God is the one who writes the law on our hearts. In the Psalm, God is our refuge; God is the one who melts the earth and breaks the bow and shatters the spear. In Romans, God is the one who justifies, taking away any of our arrogant boasting or self-righteousness. And in John, God in Christ is the one who sets us free, welcoming us into the household of faith forever.

Because God has acted in this way, setting us free, we are freed from our obligations to ourselves, to our self-interest, to our own stubborn independence … and we gain obligations to the family of God.

Martin Luther spoke rightly about freedom when he said, “A Christian is a perfectly free lord of all, subject to none. A Christian is a perfectly dutiful servant of all, subject to all.”

This paradoxical statement tells us the truth that because Christ has set us free, we are no longer subject to the burdens that others place on us. People tell us that you have to look or act or love a certain way in order to be welcomed into the family of God, and in this gospel reading, we are reminded that we have already been freed from other’s expectations and welcomed into the family of God forever. We have been welcomed into this family not because of our own earning or righteousness, but because of the love of God.

Because we have received everything from God — life, love, a home, a family, wholeness — we go forth to share that with the world.

Luther, knowing he was freed in Christ, was able to make his stand when he went before the rulers of the church and empire, and say, “here I stand, I can do no other. God help me.”

Luther was able to know that he had received the abundance of God’s grace, and had no fear of what the rulers could do to him. He knew what it meant to be freed from the limitations others put on God’s love. And because we’ve been freed, we live lives surrendered to Christ, committed to service.

Lutherans at our best have understood this, creating things like Lutheran World Relief, Global Refuge, and Lutheran Social Services. Serving with open hands, knowing we’ve been freed, going out to free others.

But when we forget that God is the one who frees us first, through God’s own action, we lose sight of the abundance that God gives to all. At our worst, Lutherans have waged war against Catholics. Lutherans have thrown Anabaptists into rivers. Lutherans have put Native Americans and Sami people into boarding schools.

I think these examples are times when Lutherans have lost sight of the abundance that comes with our freedom. They gave into a mindset of scarcity, that says that my freedom, my identity, my security is threatened by your presence, your difference.

When we give into this scarcity mindset, we cling too tightly to the things that should make us free, and in the process, let go of our Christian freedom.

At our best, we live in abundance, knowing our place in the family is not dependent on our own work … God has given us a permanent home … we can live without fear and so we go out to serve with joy.

When we lose sight of that, when we think God is so small that God needs us to fight … when we see others as enemies to be conquered rather than as neighbors to love and serve, we destroy others and lose ourselves in the process.

But thankfully, we aren’t defined by our worst days. And also, we aren’t defined by our best days. We are defined by Jesus’ words for us here in John 8.

“You will know the truth, and the truth will make you free.”

“If the Son makes you free, you will be free indeed.”

Because the Son has made us free, we refute Luther’s writings against the Jews. We apologize to Sami and Native communities, and seek to make reparations. We work for reconciliation with Catholics and Anabaptists.

Because our first, primary, only identity is beloved children of God.

The Son has made us free, and we are free indeed. We are freed from the baggage of the past, good and bad, and we are freed to enter into new life with our neighbors

As we commemorate Reformation Day this week, let’s also consider the ways that it can be Reconciliation Day, to come together with our Christian siblings.

or Repentance Day, as we refute the harms done in our name.

or Revival Day, as we pray for the Holy Spirit to come down and renew us.

Or we could just remember it as Reformation Day, as this church of the Reformation is always reforming. Let’s reform our church to follow the Holy Spirit’s leading into freedom and service, wherever She goes.

Because what matters most is not our Lutheran identity, as much as I might love being Lutheran, or our favorite hymns or the Small Catechism, but instead the fact that Christ has made us free.

We have the freedom that comes from a permanent place in God’s family, a place that no one and nothing can take away.

Thanks be to God.

In the name of the Father, and of the + Son, and of the Holy Spirit.  Amen.

  

God’s the one who needs to wrestle with you and me in prayer, to call us to do God’s justice in this world.

Pr. Joseph G. Crippen
The Nineteenth Sunday after Pentecost, Lect. 29 C
Texts: Genesis 32:22-31; Luke 18:1-8

Beloved in Christ, grace to you, and peace in the name of the Father, and of the + Son, and of the Holy Spirit. Amen

God initiated this fight.

Jacob wrestles on a riverbank with someone the writer calls “a man,” who by the end is revealed as God. But Jacob didn’t start it. God showed up on the riverbank looking for a quarrel.

We sometimes say prayer is a wrestling with God. We struggle to be heard, to say what needs saying. We struggle with God’s apparent silence, we wrestle with God over the world’s problems and God’s apparent inactivity. Like Jesus’ widow, we’re invited to persistently bring our concerns to God, even if it means wrestling all night.

But what if God initiates the wrestling? What if God says “I’ve got an issue with you”? What if we’re the ones with the problem ears, the lack of action, and God has to wrestle with us to change us?

Jacob certainly needed a shake-up if he was to be God’s chosen successor as leader.

He’s been a complete jerk up to this point. Cheating his brother and uncle, treating his wife Leah as second class. Now, on his way back home with a wealth of flocks, eleven children, two wives, and a couple maids, he hears his brother is coming to meet him with 400 armed men. The last they saw each other, Esau wanted to kill Jacob.

So Jacob acts the ultimate coward. He sends his wives, maids, children, and flocks across the river to be the front line of his entourage, and he hides in the back. Knowing nothing of Esau’s current state of mind, fearing his brother’s army, Jacob says, “women and children first. I’m not facing that threat.”

Not who God needs to head this family that is meant to bless the world with knowledge of the one God who loves and cares for all. So God finds him cowering in the back, on the other side of the river, and has it out. They wrestle all night.

In the morning God blesses Jacob and gives him a new name, Israel, “the one who strives with God.” God needed to challenge Jacob, struggle with him, to make him into who God needed him to be. And what if that’s what Jesus is saying, too?

This parable seems clear in meaning.

Describing someone cold and unjust who ultimately does the right thing, Jesus says, as he has before, “how much more will God” – who, we’re meant to understand, isn’t cold or unjust – “how much more will God answer you when you persist in your prayer?”

But Jacob’s night by the river raises a different thought: what if God is the widow?

This is a parable, after all. Jesus taught directly sometimes, statements of truth, command, wisdom. But sometimes he told stories that invited the imagination to ponder, dwell, consider. If he wanted to tell us to pray persistently, he could have. And did. But he also told this story.

And Jesus’ parables are like jewels that, when you pick them up and turn them in the light, cast all kinds of different rays. There’s no reason not to take this story and consider it from Jacob’s perspective.

What if God is the widow here?

That makes you and me the ones who don’t fear God or respect people.

The ones God comes to again and again and again and again, asking, “grant me justice.”

God sees the pain and suffering of this world with eyes older than yours and mine and with a heart breaking for this beloved creation, for these beloved creatures. God sees the oppression, the racism, the hatred of strangers, the threatening of the most vulnerable, the destruction of fair government, the breaking down of protections for those in need, and wonders, “who is going to do my justice?”

It’s so easy to blame God, to be dismayed that God lets bad things happen. But maybe it’s God who is dismayed at us. God who is frustrated with us. God who comes to you and me again and again and again and again and asks, “when will you do my justice? When will you save my children?”

It’s hard to argue we don’t need a little shake-up, too.

We get stuck, fail to act. We go about our ways doing what we want, without facing that even the smallest decisions we make every day affect this world and its problems.

What if prayer is God needing to get your attention? God needing to wrestle with you and say, “what will it take for you to get going, to work with others, to realize that the justice that needs to happen is my dream, my vision, my desire, but it won’t happen without you?”

In our Prayer of the Day we prayed for a softer version of this wrestling, “inspire us to seek your enduring justice for all this suffering world.” Inspire us. Not “wrestle with us.” Maybe we fear a wrestling match, but are open to inspiration from God. Either way, the path forward is pretty clear.

There’s no mystery what God desires to happen in this world.

Scripture is full of it. And lots of wise, caring, godly people have lots of good ideas to bring God’s justice, mercy, and peace to this world. Even the threat of a U.S. government that will be authoritarian and not democratic is stoppable if enough people stand up and are counted, if enough people say, “no more,” at the ballot box, at protests, with letters and statements and action. And if enough people said “no more” to hunger and oppression and racist systems in this country, they’d collapse very quickly.

That’s what God wants to wrestle out with you and me: you are needed, as you are, with what you can bring. And all that’s left is for you and me to decide if we’re finally going to answer God’s persistence or, like the judge, keep ignoring it, hoping God will go away.

The beautiful thing is that the result of God’s wrestling is blessing, and a new you.

God and Jacob have it out, and God blesses Jacob, names him, and sends him off to be the leader God needs. The widow finally breaks the judge’s indifference and receives the justice she needs.

And so God wants your attention, needs to wrestle with your objections, your resistance, your fear, your reluctance, your confusion, your lack of self-confidence, to convince you that you are the answer to God’s prayer. And somehow in that wrestling, you are made new. Your ears are opened to God’s needs, your whole being embraces God’s sending you out as the one God needs for justice to happen in this world.

Obviously, it will take more than you, more than me. But that’s God’s to deal with. When it comes to Jacob, or the judge, or you and me, God needs individual attention, an individual wrestle.

And, blessed by God, you and I will be God’s blessing for the justice God so deeply desires to see in this world.

In the name of the Father, and of the + Son, and of the Holy Spirit.  Amen