“Freed to Live”
Reformation Day B (Pr. 25)–
John 8:31-36
Brothers and sisters in Christ, Grace and Peace to you from our Triune God, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.
What would your be reaction be if I told you, “You people are all slaves! You must be freed before you can live as free men and women?” Something along the lines of “What color is the sky in your world, buddy?” Or “When did the boat from
We are free, are we not? Free to worship, free to move about the country and, in most cases, the world. Free to choose our friends and our enemies. Free to speak our minds. Most of us are free from want and hunger. People come to this country because is it a free nation. We are the heirs of a country and a society founded on the self-evident truth that all men are created equal. slavery was abolished 140 years ago. What do you mean we need to be freed to live?”
Sounds like the words of the Jews in the gospel today as they challenge Jesus’ assertion that no one is truly free unless they continue in his word and live as his disciples. Jesus asserts that true freedom does happen because of your ancestry or heritage.
We could even add that the kind of freedom Jesus is talking about does not come from a political system. The great Russian writer Alexander Solzhenitsyn said that his soul never felt freer than when he was imprisoned in Soviet forced labor camps in Siberia for many years. There all his belongings, his health, everything was stripped from his life and he had to confront himself and who he really was in the eyes of God.
Jesus is saying something similar today. True freedom begins in Christ, the Son: through his word, his grace, and the faith we receive in that grace and by that word. Furthermore, this freedom does appear out of thin air. It begins with the act, the event, of being freed. Someone has to do the freeing, and that someone is Christ. Unless you believe in me, you are doomed to remain a slave to sin. You may live, but it is not life, but living death. Strangely enough, the musical form we call the blues also grew out of the experience of enslavement, this time in
The first blues tune I remember hearing and recognizing as the blues was “The House of the Rising Sun”. It was recorded by a white British band called the Animals around 1964. Since it was one of the first blues tunes I learned to play, the words stick with me today. It begins:
There is a house in
A tale of suffering, sin and woe (the heart of the blues) follows. It ends with the singer returning to
And a warning to the listeners:
Oh mother, tell your children / Not to do what I have done.
Spend your life in sin and misery / in the House of the Rising Sun.
Can you feel the regret, the despair, the hopelessness, the bondage to sin like a ball and chain that the singer cannot shake loose? It is a gut-wrenching cry from the soul.
When we speak the words in the Brief Order of Confession -- “we are in bondage to sin and cannot free ourselves” I often think of that song. It’s not to imagine the prodigal son living with the pigs there in that far country of his sin, singing a couple of choruses of House of the Rising Son.
Martin Luther spoke of the bondage to sin as he bondage of our human will to sin. Luther wrote: . . . one should despair completely of oneself and by no means rely upon one’s free will, even to perform the smallest of works . . . when one acknowledges that inability . . . and humbly seeks the grace of God . . . God will not deny us his grace.
The bad news is: on our own, we will always end up in the House of the Rising Son. The good news is: God loves the blues. It moves him, this crying of his children to Him, seeking their Father as they realize they are utterly lost without him. He hears them as they warn others “not to do what I have done.”
Blues also grew from “Call and Response” as one group of slaves working a field would call out in song and another group, a few rows over, would sing a response.
In today’s gospel, we hear Jesus’ response to the call of all who find themselves enslaved to sin.
Jesus calls to us that there is a way, a single way, to freedom. There is a way back from the Pit of sin to which are bound. It Jesus’ freedom road, where Jesus himself is the way. Our gospel shows us four signs on that road that make it a road not only of freedom but of life.
The first sign says: “Continue in my Word”. Hear me and keep my word in your heart. Get to know my voice; it is the only one you can trust with your life. (Word alone. Sola scriptura)
The second sign, a ways down the road, says: “Be my disciples” Make my word part of your daily life. Believe in me and follow me as I walk ahead of you. (Faith alone. Sola fides.)
The third sign, a few miles further on, reads: “Know the Truth”. By hearing my word and obeying as only a disciple can do, you will receive the truth of my relationship to you.
And just around the bend and over a hill, the fourth sign says, “The truth sets you free.” Freed from committing sin, freed to live in faith obedience, and gratitude.
That road, which is your life and mine, become a road of freedom and life on when we obey the signs.Why? because those road signs, those words of Jesus, attest to the presence of God’s grace at each step of our life. Luther proclaimed that God’s grace seeks us out and finds us -- wherever we are on the road -- to claim us through the life, death and resurrection of his Son.
Luther also wrote, “If I am to find comfort, have peace in my conscience, and be rid of sin, then I must believe as children do. You know, another way of saying grace alone, faith alone, word alone is “Jesus loves me this I know for the bible tells me so.” Luther nailed it: believe as children do. It’s not hard; it’s child’s play.
And that is all God asks of us -- that our lives reflect the crying of a lost child who has finally been found by its father again. A child who has been freed through grace to receive a faith that shatters sin and transforms the child’s life. This word of divine grace is what liberates us from sin -- no one or nothing else! That is the great cry of the reformation that we celebrate today
For that saving grace is what Jesus is about: salvation, reconciliation of parent and child through faith in the Savior, the Savior who became a child like us. And our only response can be to cling to him for all we are worth. For without him, we are worthless. But in him, we are redeemed, transformed, utterly changed.
And I’m not talking only about heaven. I am talking about today. I am talking about Hope for today and tomorrow. That I do not need to fear Monday, because God has given me Jesus and the grace that transforms my life. No longer must I live condemned to sin and misery in the House of the Rising Sun. Instead, by faith I cling to my Savior, and find I am freed to live in the household of the Risen Son, which is a Kingdom of new life and joy and thanksgiving where the blues are transformed into an unending anthem of praise.
Amen.
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