Advent Lutheran Church

"Coming Clean About Sin (Reformation/Confirmation)"

            Grace and peace to you from God the Creator and the Lord Jesus.  Amen.

            This is indeed the day we celebrate the Reformation, the beginning of the Protestant movement within Christianity; and there is a lot to celebrate.  As a boy growing up in Minnesota, I remember celebrating the Reformation with potlucks and choir concerts and red banners and lutefisk.  By the way, if you haven’t encountered lutefisk up to this point in your life, you have already been richly blessed.

But in fact the ways that we celebrated the Reformation had nothing to do with the Reformation, or Martin Luther, or Lutheranism.  Lutheranism has nothing to do with Garrison Keillor and the News From Lake Wobegone, Sven and Olie jokes, or coffee.  Instead, the Scripture readings that are appointed to be read every Reformation Sunday point us to a topic that we would really rather not hear about: Sin.

I point this out because I am grateful to be a part of a unique strand of Lutheranism: The Evangelical Lutheran Church in America – “evangelical” having to do with “Good News,” and I believe that Lutheranism has good news for this world, good news about God’s grace and mercy and forgiveness.

In a culture like ours, however – a culture that puts a high premium on self-help and therapy and high self-esteem – the topic of sin is not a popular one.  It was no more popular, in fact, back in Jesus’ day.  But Jesus does not flinch – then or now – from addressing sin, people’s bondage to it, and the only way out of it to freedom.

Sin and freedom are at the heart of this conversation that Jesus has with these people in church in our Gospel lesson.  These very probably were people who were beginning to come to faith in Jesus, to begin to believe that he was indeed who he said he was, the Son of God.  They weren’t quite all the way there yet, but were curious enough to want to know more about him.  He says, “If you continue to listen to me, to take my words into yourselves and let them guide your living, you will come to know the truth, and knowing that truth will lead you into greater freedom than you ever thought possible.”

They think he’s talking about freedom in a political sense, a physical sense; and they say, “We’ve never not been free.”  But Jesus is talking about spiritual freedom, and says, “Anyone who settles for a life of sin surrenders to that life and is enslaved by it.  The only way out of that slavery is through trusting in me and living your life through me.”

I understand from people who are in the business of starting new churches that there is a desire among some church planters to do away with the Confession and Forgiveness, with which we began our worship service this morning.  Why?  Because people do not want to hear that they are sinners, that they are bad.  But this objection comes, I believe, from a gross misunderstanding of what sin is, and what it is not.  Many people seem to think that sin is an issue of morality, so that to be a sinner means to be immoral.  And if we’re not people who cheat on our taxes or our spouses or our partners or go around murdering people or stealing, we don’t want to spend our Sunday mornings listening to someone imply that we do.  Like the people in our Gospel lesson we say to Jesus, “Sure, we might get off track slightly now and then and do something that we’re not supposed to do, but it’s not as if that’s  in our DNA, like we’re enslaved to that sort of thing.”

And Jesus simply looks at us square in the eye and offers us the Truth.  The Truth, it turns out, is Jesus himself; he is the key that unlocks the prison of sin.  It’s the key that we can never create ourselves, because, as Luther reminds us, sin is “the self curved in on itself”: sin is not an activity but a condition, a condition from which we cannot escape.

Here’s an illustration.  Imagine that I were to say to our choir, “You folks are absolutely terrific; I think the world of you, so how about this.  Susan and I are going to be out of town this Friday night, so why don’t you all come over to the house and have a party.  You’ve got the run of the place; the refrigerator will be stocked, the pantry will be stocked, come over and have a great time.  Oh, there’s only one thing: I’ve got this thing in the garage, it’s private and personal and I don’t want anyone tinkering with it.  So the garage is off-limits, but the rest of the place is completely yours – have a great time.”

Now, what’s the first thing that the choir is going to do when they get to my house on Friday night?  Of course – they’re heading right to the garage!  It’s exactly what I would do, and so would you!  It’s just about the oldest story in the Book: God says to Adam and Eve, “This garden is for you, so enjoy the life that I’ve created for you.  But the tree in the garden is mine, so you must not touch it; but the rest of the garden is yours.”  They can’t keep their hands off that tree, and the rest is history.  Sin is a condition of our lives that we cannot alter.

One of the great gifts that Luther gave to the Church was language around sin and freedom.  He indicated that Scripture has a built-in sin detector, and it’s called The Law.  As our second lesson reminds us, “through the law comes the knowledge of sin.”  The law is anything that convicts our conscience.  It could be a violation of the 10 Commandments, or it could be the realization that we cannot consistently, perfectly live up to even our own values.

The law carries a good news/bad news dynamic.  The bad news, of course, is that it reveals to us our sin, our shortcomings, our failings.  The good news is that it is the truth – we all sin and fall short, miss the mark.  But hearing that truth, acknowledging that truth for ourselves, coming clean about that truth drives us to the foot of the cross where we can finally hear God’s word of grace and forgiveness.  The law convicts us, but the Gospel sets us free and does for us what we can never do for ourselves – bring us into right relationship with God.

Several years ago a friend came to me, in trouble.  He was a lawyer, and had lived his life according to a very clear precept: if you play by the rules and do what you’re supposed to do, everything will turn out all right.  By and large, that life ethic had worked out very well for him.  Until he found himself in the middle of a divorce.  He was familiar with the Bible, he knew how God feels about divorce; and he also realized that divorce was the only life-giving alternative in his circumstance.  He was stuck.

At one point he said to me, with tears in his eyes, “Look, I just want to be able to stand before God on Judgment Day with a clear conscience.”  And I said to him with words that must have come from the Spirit: “My friend, if you were able to stand before God with a clear conscience, you would not need Jesus.”  The look on his face was a mixture of pain – the pain of recognizing that, try as he might, he was not able – and relief, the relief in knowing that he stood next to the Christ, who made him able to stand before God.

The truth is that we are, all of us, both sinner and saint at the same time, driven to the cross by the law that shows us who we are, and set free by the Gospel that shows us who we are in Christ.  That’s the truth that is being claimed by 16 of our wonderful young people today as they affirm their baptism in the Rite of Confirmation.  Last week, as they read their statements of faith, it was fascinating to notice a certain theme that found its way through many of those statements.  The theme was intimacy with God, the belief that God is with them in every circumstance of life, that God knows them for exactly who they are, and that they are loved no matter what.  Confirmands, whatever else you have learned in the last three years, that message is God’s most precious word to you.  And to us all.

So we come here again and again to hear the truth that we are forgiven and accepted by God without condition, no strings attached.  It’s important for us to hear that truth, because we live in the midst of some noisy voices that tell us a false narrative: that we are what we do and we are what we make and we are what other people say about us.  In the midst of those voices it is important to hear God’s truth about us.

We come here again and again to receive the body and blood of Christ so that we can carry the living Christ into God’s hurting and beautiful world.

We come here again and again to remind ourselves that we are what God has made us: forgiven, fed, and sent for the sake of the world.

Amen.