Reformation Day Sermon

(This is my sermon, more or less, that I will preach this Sunday)

A few people I know, mostly women from my home church in Tennessee, came to a retreat a few years ago here in Georgia. They came from different places in life, as all of us do, and they came on this retreat to get away from something and be together…and to experience a little bit of spirituality.

Over the course of the weekend, they were talking and I happened to be there visiting. One of the retreat speakers asked what they would do if they had one year left to live, and they knew they only had one year. I know these women pretty well, but I was amazed at the responses. One said she would divorce her husband of 30 years and go out with a whole bunch of people. One said she would quit her job, a job she worked hard for, including a PhD a few years back, but she would quit it and go travel all around Europe. Another said she’d tell everyone exactly what she thought of them, and it wasn’t all pretty. The other responses were similar. If they had one year to live, they would make BIG, sweeping, changes in their lives.

I also read a book recently that I just saw is on the top of the bestseller’s list. It’s called Eat, Pray, Love. It’s about a women who didn’t have a disease or anything, but who decided that she was going to do what she would do if she only had one year to live…she was going to do exactly what she wanted and needed to do to find healing, and to find God, and to find love in her life.

Just like my friend wanted to do, but hasn’t done yet as far as I know, she quit her job, divorced her husband, and moved to Italy to eat and just enjoy life for four months. In an interview, she said that her American friends were shocked…one of them said, “You can DO that?” The Italians were not surprised that someone would want to come to Italy just to enjoy themselves…they are the pros, and so that’s what she did. Then, she went to India for four months to live in an ashram and meditate and pray. She had amazing experiences of the presence of God, because she took that whole time to be quiet and to listen to the voice of God speaking to her. Then she went to Indonesia, to try to figure out how to put it all together, and has more adventures there, ending up finding someone to love, which she never expected.

Now. You might say that this experience of this woman is unusual, and for sure, it is, because she’s the only one I know who’s done this, written a book about it, and ended up on the bestseller list for sure. My friends who talked about only having one year were really just imagining it…they wouldn’t really LIVE like that, right? People don’t just do that, unless they actually have this happen to them.

But why not? Especially for Christians, why not? Especially for Lutheran Christians, on this day of Reformation, WHY NOT?

You might remember that Martin Luther had an experience that changed his whole life, and that changed all of our lives too, because here we are in a Lutheran church, 500 or so years after the fact. He was a monk, and had tried everything to earn God’s love and forgiveness. He had whipped himself…he had walked up stairs on his knees…he had said who KNOWS how many Hail Mary’s, trying to get himself right with God, trying to earn God’s love. And he couldn’t, he couldn’t ever do enough, and he felt terrible about this. What else is there? What else can I do to earn the love of God?

And then it came to him, while he was reading our lesson for today, Romans. There’s nothing else you can do. In fact, there’s nothing you can do to earn the love of God, simple as that. Faith comes through the grace of God, not by anything we do…it’s a gift, like that moment of inspiration was a gift to Martin Luther from the Holy Spirit, opening his mind to understand the love of God through the Word, through scripture.

To Martin Luther, this meant that he was free. For the first time in his life, he was free to pray, or not. To sin, or not. To get married, or not. He was set free by these words from a lifetime of slavery to sin…and his particular sin was thinking that he could earn God’s love if he were just a little better, did just a few more things on the checklist. He was now free from that sin. Can you imagine? He was so free that he went out and stood up to the Pope, his boss, on matters that he didn’t agree on, like that the church shouldn’t make people pay to get their relatives out of purgatory or hell. He was so free that he DID get married, married a nun, in fact, had a bunch of kids, led, basically, a seminary from their house, preached a bunch of sermons, wrote a lot of songs, and, from what we can tell, had a lot of fun. After he was freed by the Word of God, yes, he had a lot of hard work to do, but he had a lot of fun with his life, with his family, with his students.

Because when we are set free by God in Jesus Christ, what are we set free FOR? To live as though we still had a thousand years to go on a treadmill and we hated every step? Not so much, I think.

If you had one year left to live, what would you do? This theme keeps coming back in books, movies, TV. On a recent TV show a woman gets told that she is dying. That they are releasing her to hospice care because there’s no more that they can do. She starts crying hysterically and the doctors can’t figure it out, until they realize that they had messed up the room numbers and told the wrong person. Before they can find her, she checks herself out of the hospital, quits her job, dumps her loser boyfriend, and books a flight to a tropical island to live out the rest of her days. When told that she’s actually NOT dying, then, she REALLY gets upset!

What would you do? God sets us free, not necessary to go to tropical islands, but to continue our journey into the heart of God, as the people of God, knowing that we can make mistakes, we can mess it all up, we can sin boldly, as Luther says, knowing that we are free to do all that. The Bible verse says, “It’s for FREEDOM that Christ has set us free.” Sounds simple, but so many times we as the humans we are try to set all kinds of rules about how Christ has set us free and WHO Christ has set free and what we should be doing for that freedom when it’s really just for FREEDOM that Christ has set us free. For freedom. That’s all. It’s a gift, and one that we cannot possibly repay. We simply live in our freedom, maybe as we would live as if someone told us we had one year left, or one week, or one day, because Jesus has already died and risen again for us to give us that freedom, that life more abundantly, in his name.

What would YOU do?