Reformation Sunday
Sermon
SERMONS ON THE GOSPEL READINGS
Series I, Cycle A
The key idea in this passage in the Fourth Gospel is truth. Jesus says, "If you continue in my word, you are truly my disciples, and you will know the truth, and the truth will make you free."
Truth has taken a beating in the past century. We have come to a supposedly post--modern era in which a lot of people think that there isn't any real truth that's true for you just as much as it's true for me. We're told that there are no grand narratives about reality that are true for everybody - just "whatever works for you." There's truth for women and truth for men, truth for rich and for poor, for Christians and Muslims and atheists and many other faiths and non--faiths - but who's to say that one person's truth is true for another? Sometimes a basis for that idea of the relativity of truth is claimed in Einstein's theory of relativity. "After all," people says, "Einstein showed that everything is relative."
Well, as a matter of fact, Einstein didn't say any such thing. Some things do depend on your point of view. Whether a car appears to be moving or standing still depends on whether you are moving or standing still. But even in physics, which is what Einstein was talking about, there are some things that are true for everybody. One of Einstein's basic ideas was that the speed of light in a vacuum is the same for everybody, regardless of their state of motion. That is not relative but absolute. While people may measure different values for the physical quantities, Einstein said that the form of physical laws is the same for everyone.
What Einstein said was that the things that are absolute in the world are not the things that our common sense leads us to expect. Some things that our common sense lead us to think will be the same for everybody actually depend on the way an observer is moving. Two clocks that are in motion with respect to one another don't keep the same time, and if that conflicts with common sense, so much the worse for common sense. On the other hand, it's hard to understand how the speed of a beam of light can always be the same, no matter how fast you chase after it - but it is.
The real truths about the world are subtle and often surprising. You have to be willing to abandon preconceived ideas and to work hard in order to find them. Whatever some individual scientists might say about truth, scientists in general do believe that there really are truths to be discovered by studying the world. If they didn't, they wouldn't devote their lives to scientific work.
The Bible certainly leads us to expect that there is such a thing as truth, and that it can be known by us. "Grace and truth came through Jesus Christ" the prologue of our Gospel of John tells us. Today, in the long debate in the eighth chapter of that gospel that we read part of, Jesus promises that his disciples will really know the truth, and that that truth will liberate them.
What is this "truth" that Jesus is talking about? We hear all kinds of claims to truth in today's public square. There are political and scientific and economic claims, liberal and conservative claims, and plenty of different religious claims. For the Jews to whom Jesus was speaking in Jerusalem, the truth was that their descent from Abraham set them apart and made them God's special people. We could spend a lot of time analyzing all the different truth claims of today and yesterday, and can recognize a certain amount of truth in many of them, but we're kidding ourselves if we think that they set us free in the fullest sense. The Jews say that they "have never been slaves to anyone" - as they stand under the watchful eye of the Roman occupation authorities.
Let's cut to the chase. What the Gospel of John, as part of Holy Scripture, presents as the truth is Jesus Christ. If we remain in his word - if we hear him, listen to him, know him, and stay with him - if we continue in his word - we will be knowing him who is the truth. In another place in this gospel, Jesus says, "I am the way, and the truth, and the life." The point isn't so much that he is three separate things - way and truth and life - as that he is the truth who is the way to life.
The truth Jesus speaks of is not a collection of true statements or theorems that have been proved but a person. When he stands before Pilate on Good Friday he will say, "Everyone who belongs to the truth listens to my voice." Pilate, the brutal Roman politician, might have accepted as truth some statement like Mao's "Power grows from the barrel of a gun." But he says sarcastically, "What is truth?" and turns away - as so many have done since - with the one who is the truth standing right in front of him.
It wouldn't have been at all surprising for Pontius Pilate to have said "power grows from the sword" or something like that. The belief that real power requires the domination and destruction of others is one of those common sense ideas that, like it or not, seems to be true of the way the world is. The idea that the one who will be condemned by Pilate and crucified is the truth seems absurd. As with Einstein's theory, so here: The real truths are not those of common sense. Empires and tyrants who have relied on domination and destruction have passed away, while Christ crucified is, as Paul said, "the power of God and the wisdom of God."
Jesus Christ is the truth in a double sense. He is, on the one hand, the fullest expression of what humanity is supposed to be, the truth of what creation is all about. On the other hand he is, as we confess in the Nicene Creed, "true God from true God." We can know the truth about ourselves and about God not in an abstract idea or principle which might be discovered anywhere but in Jesus of Nazareth: "The Word became flesh." It is the person born of Mary, nailed to the cross, and seen alive on the third day, who is the truth in which we are told to remain.
If you know this truth, if you continue in Jesus and keep your faith anchored in him, you are free. Specifically, Jesus says that you are free from sin. All the things that keep you apart from God, all the sins that keep your life from being as completely human as God intends it to be, have lost their power over you. You are no longer in slavery. That is the gospel, the good news - that you are free because God has come to be with us, to share our humanity and to free us by his dying and rising.
Today is Reformation Sunday. October 31 is the anniversary of Luther's posting of his ninety--five theses and on this Sunday that historical event, and the whole reformation of the sixteenth century, are often remembered by Protestant churches. Reforming is something that the church has frequently needed throughout the centuries, not least of all today. The church is one, holy, catholic, and apostolic, but its members are human beings who make mistakes. Parts of the church can lose their focus, get fuzzy about their purpose, and get off the right road and find themselves lost in the woods.
It's easy to see how that can happen if we remember what the church is supposed to be focused on, Jesus Christ, and if enough people take their eyes off him things can go wrong. That was happening as far back as the ministry of Saint Paul, even among churches that Paul himself had founded. Some people came to those churches in Galatia and were persuading them that it wasn't enough to believe in Jesus Christ, but that they had to add all the Old Testament laws and rituals as well. Paul's response was uncompromising: "You foolish Galatians! Who has bewitched you? It was before your eyes that Jesus Christ was publicly exhibited as crucified!" That is the truth; not circumcision and rules about food.
At the time of what is called the Reformation in the sixteenth century, the problem again was a loss of focus on Christ. The western church had become so concerned with the human response to God's grace, with the need for people to do good works and the difficulties of living a holy life, that many Christians no longer felt that they could trust completely, with 100 percent assurance, in Jesus Christ, for salvation. The essential message which the Reformation proclaimed was, "Yes, you can trust in Christ alone." All those other slogans - grace alone, faith alone, scripture alone - have their point in the insistence upon Christ alone. He is the one through whom grace and truth have come, the one in whom we are to believe, the one to whom scripture bears witness.
Reformation Day used to be celebrated in my own Lutheran tradition in a kind of triumphalistic way, as an "Isn't it great to be Lutheran?" festival. But it was never the intention of Luther - or for that matter of Calvin and other reformers - to start a new church. What they wanted to do was precisely to reform, or renew, the church catholic by recalling it to the basic truth of the gospel, the truth of Jesus Christ. There have been Christians called to that work of reformation throughout the centuries - we could think of Francis of Assisi in the thirteenth. However, we may understand what Protestants and Roman Catholics did in the sixteenth century, the state of the church and the state of the world today are too perilous for any Christians to be spending their time refighting the battles of 500 years ago.
The goal of genuine reformation is to bring the church of Jesus Christ to unity in the truth. That does not mean that Protestant and Orthodox and Roman Catholic Christians all have to express the truth in the same way, speak the same theological language, or organize their church polities in the same way. It's a little like the situation in Einstein's theory, in which some things are relative but there are absolutes. Here the absolute on which all Christians must agree is the centrality of Christ. He is the criterion of truth for the ways in which churches organize themselves and speak and act.
The church's unity in the truth is for the sake of its mission in the world, a world which is divided among many different truth claims and assertions that there is no truth. It is a world divided along religious and political and economic lines, a world in which conflict is continually breaking out, and threatening to break out, between people of different religions, different ethnic groups, or with different economic interests. In this world, the church is called to be a light to the nations, to be a means by which divisions are healed by making the truth known.
That will not happen simply by making true statements about Christ. We must, of course, always be ready to speak the truth, but suspicion and hatred are not overcome just by reciting the creed, true as it may be. As the truth is incarnate in Jesus Christ, and as the church is the Body of Christ in the world, we are called to express the truth of Christ in the ways in which we live and treat others and care for God's creation. From the level of one on one dealings with our neighbor to the global level, the people of God are called to be a light to the nations - to share the light of Christ in words and in deeds.
George L. Murphy
Truth has taken a beating in the past century. We have come to a supposedly post--modern era in which a lot of people think that there isn't any real truth that's true for you just as much as it's true for me. We're told that there are no grand narratives about reality that are true for everybody - just "whatever works for you." There's truth for women and truth for men, truth for rich and for poor, for Christians and Muslims and atheists and many other faiths and non--faiths - but who's to say that one person's truth is true for another? Sometimes a basis for that idea of the relativity of truth is claimed in Einstein's theory of relativity. "After all," people says, "Einstein showed that everything is relative."
Well, as a matter of fact, Einstein didn't say any such thing. Some things do depend on your point of view. Whether a car appears to be moving or standing still depends on whether you are moving or standing still. But even in physics, which is what Einstein was talking about, there are some things that are true for everybody. One of Einstein's basic ideas was that the speed of light in a vacuum is the same for everybody, regardless of their state of motion. That is not relative but absolute. While people may measure different values for the physical quantities, Einstein said that the form of physical laws is the same for everyone.
What Einstein said was that the things that are absolute in the world are not the things that our common sense leads us to expect. Some things that our common sense lead us to think will be the same for everybody actually depend on the way an observer is moving. Two clocks that are in motion with respect to one another don't keep the same time, and if that conflicts with common sense, so much the worse for common sense. On the other hand, it's hard to understand how the speed of a beam of light can always be the same, no matter how fast you chase after it - but it is.
The real truths about the world are subtle and often surprising. You have to be willing to abandon preconceived ideas and to work hard in order to find them. Whatever some individual scientists might say about truth, scientists in general do believe that there really are truths to be discovered by studying the world. If they didn't, they wouldn't devote their lives to scientific work.
The Bible certainly leads us to expect that there is such a thing as truth, and that it can be known by us. "Grace and truth came through Jesus Christ" the prologue of our Gospel of John tells us. Today, in the long debate in the eighth chapter of that gospel that we read part of, Jesus promises that his disciples will really know the truth, and that that truth will liberate them.
What is this "truth" that Jesus is talking about? We hear all kinds of claims to truth in today's public square. There are political and scientific and economic claims, liberal and conservative claims, and plenty of different religious claims. For the Jews to whom Jesus was speaking in Jerusalem, the truth was that their descent from Abraham set them apart and made them God's special people. We could spend a lot of time analyzing all the different truth claims of today and yesterday, and can recognize a certain amount of truth in many of them, but we're kidding ourselves if we think that they set us free in the fullest sense. The Jews say that they "have never been slaves to anyone" - as they stand under the watchful eye of the Roman occupation authorities.
Let's cut to the chase. What the Gospel of John, as part of Holy Scripture, presents as the truth is Jesus Christ. If we remain in his word - if we hear him, listen to him, know him, and stay with him - if we continue in his word - we will be knowing him who is the truth. In another place in this gospel, Jesus says, "I am the way, and the truth, and the life." The point isn't so much that he is three separate things - way and truth and life - as that he is the truth who is the way to life.
The truth Jesus speaks of is not a collection of true statements or theorems that have been proved but a person. When he stands before Pilate on Good Friday he will say, "Everyone who belongs to the truth listens to my voice." Pilate, the brutal Roman politician, might have accepted as truth some statement like Mao's "Power grows from the barrel of a gun." But he says sarcastically, "What is truth?" and turns away - as so many have done since - with the one who is the truth standing right in front of him.
It wouldn't have been at all surprising for Pontius Pilate to have said "power grows from the sword" or something like that. The belief that real power requires the domination and destruction of others is one of those common sense ideas that, like it or not, seems to be true of the way the world is. The idea that the one who will be condemned by Pilate and crucified is the truth seems absurd. As with Einstein's theory, so here: The real truths are not those of common sense. Empires and tyrants who have relied on domination and destruction have passed away, while Christ crucified is, as Paul said, "the power of God and the wisdom of God."
Jesus Christ is the truth in a double sense. He is, on the one hand, the fullest expression of what humanity is supposed to be, the truth of what creation is all about. On the other hand he is, as we confess in the Nicene Creed, "true God from true God." We can know the truth about ourselves and about God not in an abstract idea or principle which might be discovered anywhere but in Jesus of Nazareth: "The Word became flesh." It is the person born of Mary, nailed to the cross, and seen alive on the third day, who is the truth in which we are told to remain.
If you know this truth, if you continue in Jesus and keep your faith anchored in him, you are free. Specifically, Jesus says that you are free from sin. All the things that keep you apart from God, all the sins that keep your life from being as completely human as God intends it to be, have lost their power over you. You are no longer in slavery. That is the gospel, the good news - that you are free because God has come to be with us, to share our humanity and to free us by his dying and rising.
Today is Reformation Sunday. October 31 is the anniversary of Luther's posting of his ninety--five theses and on this Sunday that historical event, and the whole reformation of the sixteenth century, are often remembered by Protestant churches. Reforming is something that the church has frequently needed throughout the centuries, not least of all today. The church is one, holy, catholic, and apostolic, but its members are human beings who make mistakes. Parts of the church can lose their focus, get fuzzy about their purpose, and get off the right road and find themselves lost in the woods.
It's easy to see how that can happen if we remember what the church is supposed to be focused on, Jesus Christ, and if enough people take their eyes off him things can go wrong. That was happening as far back as the ministry of Saint Paul, even among churches that Paul himself had founded. Some people came to those churches in Galatia and were persuading them that it wasn't enough to believe in Jesus Christ, but that they had to add all the Old Testament laws and rituals as well. Paul's response was uncompromising: "You foolish Galatians! Who has bewitched you? It was before your eyes that Jesus Christ was publicly exhibited as crucified!" That is the truth; not circumcision and rules about food.
At the time of what is called the Reformation in the sixteenth century, the problem again was a loss of focus on Christ. The western church had become so concerned with the human response to God's grace, with the need for people to do good works and the difficulties of living a holy life, that many Christians no longer felt that they could trust completely, with 100 percent assurance, in Jesus Christ, for salvation. The essential message which the Reformation proclaimed was, "Yes, you can trust in Christ alone." All those other slogans - grace alone, faith alone, scripture alone - have their point in the insistence upon Christ alone. He is the one through whom grace and truth have come, the one in whom we are to believe, the one to whom scripture bears witness.
Reformation Day used to be celebrated in my own Lutheran tradition in a kind of triumphalistic way, as an "Isn't it great to be Lutheran?" festival. But it was never the intention of Luther - or for that matter of Calvin and other reformers - to start a new church. What they wanted to do was precisely to reform, or renew, the church catholic by recalling it to the basic truth of the gospel, the truth of Jesus Christ. There have been Christians called to that work of reformation throughout the centuries - we could think of Francis of Assisi in the thirteenth. However, we may understand what Protestants and Roman Catholics did in the sixteenth century, the state of the church and the state of the world today are too perilous for any Christians to be spending their time refighting the battles of 500 years ago.
The goal of genuine reformation is to bring the church of Jesus Christ to unity in the truth. That does not mean that Protestant and Orthodox and Roman Catholic Christians all have to express the truth in the same way, speak the same theological language, or organize their church polities in the same way. It's a little like the situation in Einstein's theory, in which some things are relative but there are absolutes. Here the absolute on which all Christians must agree is the centrality of Christ. He is the criterion of truth for the ways in which churches organize themselves and speak and act.
The church's unity in the truth is for the sake of its mission in the world, a world which is divided among many different truth claims and assertions that there is no truth. It is a world divided along religious and political and economic lines, a world in which conflict is continually breaking out, and threatening to break out, between people of different religions, different ethnic groups, or with different economic interests. In this world, the church is called to be a light to the nations, to be a means by which divisions are healed by making the truth known.
That will not happen simply by making true statements about Christ. We must, of course, always be ready to speak the truth, but suspicion and hatred are not overcome just by reciting the creed, true as it may be. As the truth is incarnate in Jesus Christ, and as the church is the Body of Christ in the world, we are called to express the truth of Christ in the ways in which we live and treat others and care for God's creation. From the level of one on one dealings with our neighbor to the global level, the people of God are called to be a light to the nations - to share the light of Christ in words and in deeds.
George L. Murphy
