Sermon
10-30-16
Grace and peace to you from God our father and from our
Lord and savior Jesus the Christ. Amen.
499 years ago on October 31st a little known
theology professor named Martin Luther posted a list of his 95 thoughts on the
state of the church. I heard it said somewhere that if Martin Luther had lived
today, he would have posted “the 95 Tweets” instead. That church door in
Wittenburg, Germany was the Facebook of his day, and the printing press was the
internet, and thanks to both, Martin Luther’s posts were the first in history
to go truly viral. And thus the Reformation was born.
500 years ago the actions of Martin Luther were inspired
by these questions: Who is God? What is God like? And how is God at work in our lives? Questions
we still wrestle with today - which is why, 499 years later, the Reformation still matters. When Luther nailed those 95 Theses on the church door on
1517, little did he know that he would blow the world wide open and re-form the
course of his life into something completely different than he had ever
expected.
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| Pine Lake at Sunset |
Though we may
very rarely encounter a day like October 31st, 1517, there are days
in OUR lives when we are re-formed
and set on a path we don’t expect. For example, little did I know that working at a Lutheran Bible Camp in central
Wisconsin would change MY life forever, and set my path toward a call to ordained
ministry. The very path that led me here today.
In the three summers I worked at that camp, I got to know
some of the repeats. Amanda was one of these campers who came year after year. Amanda
was born with fetal alcohol syndrome. She struggled with a traumatic childhood,
developmental delays, and behavior challenges. She required the constant help
and support of one the counselors. But she loved being at camp and singing camp
songs. Her favorite camp song, which she sang constantly, was a rocked out
version of that old favorite you all know “Jesus loves me.”
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| Me as a counselor at Pine Lake Camp |
This one goes a little differently than the one you
remember, though. To demonstrate, I’m going to need all of your help. This
version is call and response, so I’ll to sing a line, and you’ll sing it back,
ok? We’re going to skip the first verse – because we all know that one - and go
right to the second verse. Ready?
Jesus loves me! …
He who died! …
Heaven’s gate to! …
Open
wide!
Awesome job, you would all be fantastic campers! So
imagine Amanda and her counselor belting out this song as they walked around
camp. Only Amanda’s version was a little different. She sang it this way –
Jesus loves me! …
Open Wide!
Jesus loves me? Open wide? Yes. Amanda is right. From the
mouth of someone who the world considers broken and incomplete, comes a
beautiful statement of truth that has stayed with me all these years later.
Jesus loves me. Open wide.
For this Reformation Day, we’re skipping over Luke to
take brief trip over to the Gospel of John. In this gospel, Jesus is continually
opening wide the horizons of people’s notions about God. It is in John,
Jesus says, I am the bread of life, I am the light of the world, I am the good
shepherd, I am the resurrection and the life, I and my father are one…
In
John
Jesus confuses Nicodeums talk of being born anew and gives us John 3:16, “For
God so loved the world that he gave
his only son…
”
… In John,
Jesus gives hope and living water to the woman at the well, and she opens her
mouth to testify to this encounter.
… In John Jesus
opens the tomb of Lazarus and calls
him out of the darkness of death.
…In John, Jesus
challenges people to open their
eyes, minds, and hearts to the fact that the Word of God became flesh and was
walking among them.
And here in this section of John, Jesus talks to a crowd,
and some of them listening believe in him. But, in true Jesus-fashion, he throws them
this curve ball, and says “Continue - or abide - in my word, and you will know
the truth, and the truth will make you free.
And the people wondered at what Jesus said, as they often
did… they wondered in true “Lutheran fashion” - What does this mean? Or, as Martin Luther wrote often
in the Small Catechism– Was ist Das? What is
this?
Yes, Jesus’ people listening may have been under the
occupation of Rome, and many empires before that. But they had held out, they had
survived with their traditions and ethnicity intact. They had kept themselves
separate, they had kept the Law. They refused to completely submit. Therefore, because they still worshiped God as
their ancestors did, weren’t they already
free?
We as Americans can relate to their objections. Our
country is based on the idea that we are
free – free from unfair taxation without representation, free from having
our religion dictated to us, free to speak out against oppression. “I am not in
bondage to anyone. I can worship how I want, buy what I want, keep to myself,
and am a pretty decent person. I don’t do any of the “biggies” like steal,
cheat, lie, murder.”
Then, again, in true Jesus fashion, Jesus throws us a
curveball. What about sin?
It’s not just about NOT doing bad things. It’s also about NOT doing GOOD things too. If you have
downloaded Luther’s Small Catechism on your smart phone, you can look up the 8th
commandment, for example, and see under Luther’s explanation, “Was ist Das?”
What is this? - The 8th commandment isn’t just “bearing false
witness” against our neighbor in say, a court of law. It’s also about “speaking well about them and interpreting everything they do in the best possible light.” As a wise man I know likes to
ask, “How are we doing?”
I like to pretend that Paul is wrong. “All have sinned?”
Not me, right? But, Paul writes in Romans 7 that “…I do not do the good I want,
but the evil I do not want is what I do.” We admit it every week in the
confession that we are captured and trapped by sin and cannot free ourselves.
We sin in what we think, say, and do. We sin in things we do AND things we neglect
to do. We fail at the greatest commandment – loving God and our neighbors.
As Paul also wrote to the Christians in Rome, he reminds
them and us that no one has “made it,” no one perfectly keeps these
commandments, no one is free from sin, that all that have fallen short of the
glory of God. Who, Paul askes, will save us from this body of death? Is this
the state that God leaves us in? Is this the last word on who God is?
Paul, Martin Luther, and Amanda the camper refuse to
think so.
Paul wrote– “Thanks be to God in Jesus Christ our Lord”
in Romans 7 and in Romans 3 “They are now justified by his grace as a gift.”
Luther wrote – “Be a sinner, and sin boldly, but trust in
Christ more boldly still, and rejoice in Christ who is the victor over sin,
death, and the world.”
And Amanda the camper sang – “Jesus loves me, open wide!”
Jesus loves me, so
much so that he opens his arms wide in his death on the cross, so that
those who are lost and those who are bound by sin and death are forgiven and
made free. These open arms welcome us into the household of God, to a place at
the table where we belong, forever and ever, because Jesus the son of God has
made it so.
Jesus loves me, so
much so that he burst open the tomb
of death that tried so hard to bind him and hold him down. Three days later he
cracked death wide open, so that through Jesus’ resurrection we may be
re-vived.
Jesus loves me, so
that we are no longer a slave to sin, but are free as God’s children. But this
freedom is not given to us for its own sake. Luther wrote, that in Christ’s
freedom we become “a dutiful servant of all.” Jesus gives us this freedom so
that we will be open wide to the needs of our neighbors. We
do not get to keep the grace that God has given us to ourselves. It is meant to
be shared.
What does sharing this freedom and grace look like? It
can look like holding the door open for a mom whose toddler is having a
meltdown. It can look like having the courage to point out that a racist or
sexist joke isn’t funny. It can look like risking feeling awkward in welcoming
a new person. It looks like receiving the body and blood of Jesus, given and
shed for you.
Like a parent who feeds their children good things by
saying, “open wide!” we desperately need this reminder, at least weekly, even
daily. Because we so often forget. We too often forget that – to adapt another
passage from Romans, nothing can separate us from the love of Jesus – not
illness, not unemployment, not addition, not divorce, not past mistakes or anything
else in all creation will be able to separate us from the love of God that has
shown to us in Jesus Christ.
Jesus loves you. Open wide. Open wide, re-member, and be
re-formed. Thanks be to God. Amen.
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