Pastor Detweiler’s sermon from Reformation Sunday, Oct. 26, 2008

Romans 3:19-28; John 8:31-36

There was a billboard a few years ago that proclaimed “The Basic Truth (with a capital “T”): Good taste. Low cost.” It was a cigarette ad – for Basic cigarettes. Of course, it isn’t the Truth with a capital “T.” Cigarettes are not basic to life, even if what it said about those cigarettes might have been true.

We use the word “Truth” differently in the church, as we see in today’s gospel. What the Jews who had believed in him said to Jesus – that they had never been slaves to anyone – was an out and out lie. They had been slaves in Egypt when God sent Moses to rescue them. Later they had been carried off from Jerusalem to Babylon to be slaves and God rescued them yet again. And in the time in which they were speaking, they were under Roman domination, another kind of slavery.

In John’s gospel, whenever Jesus speaks, the words have technical or sometimes double meanings. Here the words “Truth” and “Slavery” refer to particular ideas. Jesus uses the term “slavery” to refer to spiritual, not physical, slavery. They are slaves to sin, he says, which is the inability to think and do what is right in God’s eyes. They think that they do not need what Jesus brings, and that shows they are slaves to sin.

In John’s gospel, truth begins with the premise that we are sinners – that we are not able to approach God. That is the basic truth about us. But John wants us to know the Truth with a capital “T.” For John, that is Jesus Christ.

Jesus is the Truth, embodies the Truth; embodies the righteousness and fullness of God because of his death and resurrection. He is the only one whom death has not destroyed. Truth is eternal – it lasts forever. Jesus is the only one who has been raised from death, so he is the only one who is eternal with God, and therefore he alone is and embodies the Truth.

This is a vastly different understanding of truth from the one we live with most days. We see this in political campaigns where truth seems to be relative to the perspective of the speaker. Younger generations have a more relative concept of truth than older ones. My understanding of Truth with a capital “T” and your truth can be completely different.

Some believe that the thinking that has led to this relative concept of truth was unleashed by the Reformation. Modern ideas of freedom are certainly part of the legacy of the Reformation. Before it there was little freedom of thought or action. But the ideas about truth and freedom that arose out of the Reformation have been greatly distorted and abused.

Now we believe that as long as we don’t hurt anyone else we should be free to think and do whatever we want. The most important story is our personal one, and we chose to write it the way we want to.

A week ago our oldest daughter, Amanda, married Tom in New York City. Since their engagement almost a year ago it has been interesting to listen to her talk about the process of planning their wedding. She found herself pushing back against the notion that the wedding was all about her and Tom – that they were writing their own story and it mattered more than anything else.

Wisely, most brides don’t believe that: that they write their own story. They know, and our common wedding practices reinforce, that the couple’s story is only one aspect of the wedding. The public nature of weddings is an acknowledgement of the rootedness of the couple’s life story with that of family, friends, and God in Christ. The Truth of what is taking place is much larger than a focus on the couple being married.

The Reformers saw the Truth and our individual stories as rooted in the church – the community of God’s people. The church in turn was rooted in the word of God as it was known in the Bible. They did not believe that we are free to think and do whatever we want, but that the source of authority needed to shift from the church to the word of God.

Martin Luther did not believe that we write our own story because our story is altered by the story of Jesus’ death and resurrection. In baptism the story of God’s actions to save and rescue us and the world from self-centeredness becomes our story. Our personal story is written by God who chooses us in Christ.

Paul says that we and the whole world are held accountable to God – none of us measure up to God’s standards. “All have sinned and fall short of the glory of God.” That is the truth about us apart from God and apart from faith in Jesus Christ. But the Truth with a capital “T” – the Truth that sets us free – is “that we are now justified by his grace as a gift through the redemption that is in Christ Jesus.”

We haven’t earned or deserved God’s grace and forgiveness, but he gives it as a gift. Freedom in the New Testament means something different from our common ideas about that word. When John and Paul use that word “freedom,” they mean freedom for accountability, responsibility, sacrifice, community, and service and freedom from eternal death. Our personal story – the Truth about us – is driven by our connection through baptism to Christ and his people.

The fact that God gives the Truth – his Son – and the freedom to live with him forever as his follower makes us part of a community – the church – that gathers around the story of God’s revelation of eternal Truth. We are held accountable by that community for our words and actions. We are not out on our own, justified as individuals, but as part of the community of faith in Jesus Christ. The church is to be a believable community that witnesses to the Truth of Jesus Christ as something lasting.

That is why the church has standards of what it means to grow in faith as disciples of Jesus Christ. We are expected to pray for each other, for those in need and for the world. We are expected to read the Bible every day and study it with other people so the Truth takes root and grows in us. Our accountability to God and each other means that we give sacrificially of what we have to advance the proclamation of the Truth of Jesus Christ. And it means that the worship materials and music we use are expressive not only of our tastes and culture, but stretch us to see our connection to the church across the ages and cultures.

In Jesus Christ we have been given the Truth with a capital “T,” the Truth that sets us free from eternal death. Through our baptism into his death and resurrection we are accountable for our witness in words and actions to that Truth, and our use of the freedom we have in him.

On this Reformation Sunday, let us commit ourselves anew to following the Truth that is Jesus Christ so our lives and our life together can be a witness to the freedom and hope we have in him.