Service for October 26 Reformation Sunday

Sermon for  October 26, 2025                                             Reformation Sunday

John 8:31-36

31 Jesus said to the Jews who had believed in him, “If you continue in my word, you are truly my disciples, 32 and you will know the truth, and the truth will make you free.” 33 They answered him, “We are descendants of Abraham and have never been slaves to anyone. What do you mean by saying, ‘You will be made free’?”  34 Jesus answered them, “Very truly, I tell you, everyone who commits sin is a slave to sin. 35 The slave does not have a permanent place in the household; the son has a place there forever. 36 So if the Son makes you free, you will be free indeed.”

Jesus is a nobody from a town in the middle of nowhere rural Palestine. He owns nothing, he hangs around with unimportant people. He may once have earned his living working alongside his father as a carpenter but during the years of his ministry, he does nothing we would recognize as work. He enjoys meals with friends. He celebrates at weddings, he mourns at funerals. He goes along with his friends as they work, fishing.

He walks all over the countryside and he talks. He speaks. That is his work. He brings a new reality into being by speaking.

The first few lines of the Gospel of John are the lens through which we hear everything John has to say, including today’s reading. John begins, “In the beginning was the Word and the Word was with God and the Word was God.  2 The Word was with God in the beginning.
3 Everything came into being through the Word, and without the Word nothing came into being.  What came into being 4through the Word was life, and the life was the light for all people.  5 The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness doesn’t extinguish the light.

Jesus speaks and there is peace. Jesus speaks and there is healing. Jesus speaks and there is forgiveness and resurrection from death to new life. Jesus speaks and the words he speaks are truth that change the world.

In the last week of his life before he is crucified, Jesus stands before the judge Pontius Pilate who asks him, “What is truth? What is truth?”

Jesus, the Word made flesh, this nobody, is such a threat to the political authorities that Pontius Pilate will sentence him to death for the crime of speaking truth into the world. “You will know the truth, and the truth will set you free.”

Pilate recognizes the threat. Truth is always a threat to the tyrant.

 When people know they are truly free they can’t be manipulated. If people know they are free they won’t be controlled by fear. If people know they are free they don’t need to worry or hoard anything, not money, not food or attention. When people know they are free they are free in ALL ways; free to love each other, to love God and to love their neighbor. When people know they are free, the whole pyramid of power, and control, of hierarchy and racism and all the isms, collapse.

Pontius Pilate and those who rely on power in all times, recognize the danger in the truth that we are free. And so they try to undermine the impact of that truth by asking, “What is truth?”

They say, “You can’t trust that source. It’s fake news. Everything is relative. It’s not my truth.”

The Reformation spoke truth into just such a time. Luther sparked the Reformation in 1517 when he nailed 95 statements to a door. 95 statements proclaiming the truth that God’s love was not for sale; that the church had gone far astray from the Gospel and was misleading people. Luther wanted his beloved church to remember the truth it had forgotten; the truth that leads to freedom; the truth that cannot be bought or sold or earned or lost. That pearl of great price that is worth selling everything for. The truth that everything, all of life is pure, unearned gift from God!

But that truth, the truth of that freedom is dangerous. It’s threatening to those with power who want to manipulate us. It’s true in every time and in every place. Which is why the church must be ALWAYS reforming. Always returning to the truth of Grace alone, Faith alone, Word alone, the motto of the Reformation. We are saved by grace alone through faith alone and this is known through the Word alone.

This is the saving truth that changed Martin Luther’s life and began a reforming movement within the Christian church; the truth that no human being is made right with God by being good or following the rules, but that we are good and acceptable and worthy of being loved because God said so.

God’s opinion on the subject of you and your worthiness has been made crystal clear on the cross, once and for all. Jesus, Son of God, suffered with us and for us on the cross, and through this great love we have been clothed in Christ’s righteousness and have already been reconciled with God.

This amazing grace is the foundation of our faith. But it’s so amazing we can hardly believe it. God’s gift of grace is so beautiful, so expansive and lifegiving that we spend our lives making up rules, laws, excuses and exceptions to try to make it more palatable to ourselves.

It is God’s pure promise that should make us feel free, but it pinches us. When I taught confirmation class one way we learned about the Lutheran understanding of God’s Word as Law and Gospel was as “pinch and promise.”

The law pinches us. It makes us uncomfortable so that we can be open to receive the promise, the gospel.

God’s Word, Genesis to Revelation, tells us the truth about ourselves, about our inability to choose the good all the time; about our tendency to fool ourselves, even about ourselves. That truth pinches. But it’s only in trusting that truth that we can begin to receive the promise – the grace in which God wants us to live.

The kids really seemed to understand that both, pinch and promise can sound alike. God’s grace, the promise that God’s love is free for us and for everyone is a free gift. But it pinches because we don’t think we are worthy or at least not worthy enough. Or we think we’re worthy but maybe our neighbors are not. We are suspicious of free gifts because we believe the lie that “you get what you pay for. That you  have to pull yourself up by your bootstraps.”

God’s grace is so counter to our tendency to think we have to earn our way in the world that we can’t believe it. It pinches us. And so we return time and time again to hear the promise, the truth of God’s grace freely given here in Words, in bread and wine, in the open acceptance of everyone; no distinctions.

Robert Capon writes, “Grace is something you can never get but can only be given. [That’s why we don’t say we TAKE communion. We RECEIVE communion. It is a gift!] There is no way to earn it or deserve it or bring it about any more than you can deserve the taste of raspberries and cream or earn good looks or bring about your own birth…A crucial eccentricity of the Christian faith is the assertion that people are saved by grace. There’s nothing you have to do. There’s nothing you have to do. There’s nothing you have to do.

In Capon’s words, “The grace of God means something like: Here is your life. You might never have been, but you are because the party wouldn’t have been complete without you. Here is the world. Beautiful and terrible things will happen. Don’t be afraid. I am with you. Nothing can ever separate us. It’s for you I created the universe. I love you. There’s only one catch. Like any other gift the gift of grace can be yours only if you’ll reach out and take it. Maybe being able to reach out and take it is a gift too.”1

May you live in the truth that God has already given you everything you need to be free. Reach out and take it. And share it with everyone. This gift multiplies and overflows as it is shared. This freedom expands as it is lived, trusting that it is pure gift. May this love of God in Christ Jesus continue to free us, and to reform our lives and our churches for our sake and for the sake of the world. 

 1 Robert Farrar Capon in Wishful Thinking