Gospel: John
8:31-36
1st Reading: Jeremiah 31:31-34
2nd Reading: Romans 3:19-28
Reform us, O God,
reform us.
You made us very
good, O God, in your image, generous and caring and compassionate, a
beautiful creation working together with every other part. And you
created us to be in relationship with you. But you also did not make
us robots. You gave us free will, so we would be free to make our
own choices. This freedom sometimes causes us great joy and
sometimes causes us great harm. We give you thanks O God that we
have minds of our own, that life is more interesting because it could
go any number of directions, and that you stay in relationship with
us, even when we wander away.
You made this
beautiful child, Pepper. She reminds us of more innocent times, when
life was simpler. She is certainly in your image, O God, good and
loving and curious and creative, but as she moves through life, we
teach her our bad habits. Her choices are currently mostly about
getting her own needs met, which she needs to survive. She also
already shows compassion and forgiveness to family and friends and
acquaintances and strangers. We will try to guide her by being good
examples, by teaching her our values of love and forgiveness, by
reading to her stories from the Bible and helping her to understand
the faith journey of those who have gone before and sharing the love
of Jesus with her. Yet she will see that we make compromises, that
we break your laws, that we are hypocrites. She will decide for
herself, as she grows, which paths to take. She will bump up against
decisions that don't have a right answer, in which someone will get
hurt either way. She will take paths when the consequences aren't
clear, otherwise she will be choosing to be paralyzed, which is a
damaging path all on its own. She is beautiful and made in your
image and will experience great joy in life and hopefully even change
the world for the better, and she will bump up against people who
will hurt her feelings, whose waste of resources make her life
harder, who tempt her to go against her values, and she will sin and
she will fall and she will have wounds and brokenness and eventually
she will die. This is the path of all of us. But you will never
abandon her, O God. That's your promise. You never abandon us. You
continue to write your love upon our hearts and be our God, no matter
how many times we go astray or ignore you or break your covenant.
We pray to you,
whatever stage we are in life, to make a new covenant with us and
reform us, O God, reform us.
You made your
church, O God, of people—came among us as Jesus to be the head of
the church. It started out a bunch of bumbling Disciples, people who
knew your Son, people who wanted to hand down the stories so people
would know your love for us through the life and death of Jesus.
Sometimes the church was on track and sometimes it was not revealing
your love and life. We give you thanks for the reformer Martin
Luther, who spoke out against injustice in his time, the sin of the
church which was charging people for salvation, taking the free gift
of God's love and grace, and making people pay to spring their loved
ones from purgatory into heaven. The church was not reflecting your
love—it was too busy building fancy cathedrals, elevating corrupt
clergy, and keeping the poor and illiterate afraid and ignorant. So
at great risk to himself, because he couldn't participate in a system
like this without endangering his soul or misusing the Gospel, Martin
Luther spoke up. He tried to start a dialog. Many priests, several
kings and princes, and many regular folks joined him in the dialogue.
The Pope and those in power tried to squelch the conversation,
excommunicated him, and called for his execution.
Today, we are proud
of our history, but we cannot boast. It is excluded. We all fall
short. You call us to repentance, again and again, to turn around,
to be aware of our sins and errors, and to follow your Gospel way.
Your servant, Martin Luther said that we must always be reforming,
finding the injustices that we all participate in, the way we enslave
and injure one another, the ways we deny the Gospel by our actions,
and we must reform to better reflect your love and speak it clearly
in our context to those who need it most.
Our congregation
doesn't purposely injure anyone, but we are a long way from what you
taught us. We have rooms downstairs in this building that sit empty,
not serving those in need. We use language in worship that isn't
straight-forward to people of our time. We use energy to heat this
building that pollutes the earth and makes people sick. We expect
people to come to us to hear the Gospel, when you told us to “Go
and make disciples of all nations.” We worship our own comfort,
our money, our nice cars and clothes, our cupboards full of food. We
mistake these for salvation and signs of your favor. Reform us, O God,
reform us.
God, you created
the heavens and earth beautiful and very good. This part of the
world is especially beautiful to us—the green hills, the mountains,
the rivers, the birds, the fish. And yet we lament the death of
hundreds of species a day because of our carelessness and
selfishness. We lament the pouring of poisons into our air and
water. We lament the depletion of the soil, the handing over of
power over our crops to a few corporations who do not have the best
interest of your planet in mind. The poor bear the brunt of our ruin
of your good creation, while the rich can move places that are
cleaner and dump their waste far away. We lament our indifference,
our helplessness, our unwillingness to be inconvenienced in order to
renew creation so that life may abound, so that our children won't
have to fight each other for the few resources that are left, so that
Pepper can live in freedom and hope.
Reform us, O God,
reform us.
God, you created us
and the church and this world, this universe good. Yet, we all have
sinned and fall short of your glory. And so our mouths are silenced,
every mouth. What can we say, when we have broken the covenant, when
we have betrayed your trust, when we have divorced you in order to
follow others? We have no excuse. We have nothing to boast about.
Into this silence,
God finally gets a word in edgewise. God says to us, “I will make
a new covenant with you. I will be your God, and you will be my
people, and I will forgive you and love you.”
In Romans God says
to us that God doesn't give us the commandments so that we can brag
that we fulfilled them all, but so that we realize how helpless we
are and turn to God for help. All have fallen short, all have
sinned, all are wounded. So all are granted a free gift, God's love,
God's forgiveness, relationship with God. All fall short: all are
justified by God's grace as a gift. “Justified” is an unfamiliar
word. In this case, it means to declare innocent or guiltless;
absolve; acquit. We are acquitted because of God's grace.
We all fall short.
No one can brag or say they are better than anyone else. We all are
acquitted, so we can't put anybody down. All are acquitted, not only
the person who sinned worse than you sitting here in this room, or
the other Christians who are mean and ruin it for the rest of us.
All these are now justified, acquitted, but also included are Muslims
and Jewish people, agnostics and athiests and Humanists,
the rich and poor, the old and young, Republicans, Democrats, Green
Party, Libertarians, and Independents. We know Donald Trump and
Hillary Clinton have sinned and fallen short of the glory of God, and
we know that even they are justified by God's grace as a gift. God
claims absolutely everyone. Some say those other groups are left out
because the Bible says here this is through faith in Jesus Christ, so
it depends on our faith. However, verse 22 can also be translated
this way, “through the faith of Jesus Christ.” Therefore it
might not be our faith that does it, which we know waivers and isn't
that reliable, and it seems more likely to me that it is the faith of
Jesus Christ, which is strong and true which assures our place in
God's family.
When we read this
scripture, we are reminded that none of us can earn God's love, and
that we all fall short. We find out that he loves, forgives, and
accepts us as his own. Then we learn that everyone else is in the
same boat, so when we meet other people on the journey of life, we
would do well to see them as our equal, rather than boast or put them
down. We are invited instead to see them as a child of God, just
like we are.
We have been slaves
to sin and all this bad news. Sometimes we see it, sometimes we
don't. A lot of times we are blind to our own slavery. We are often
blind to sin of humanity, the church, and toward the creation. We
often don't see how we are enslaved to our busy schedules, or to
keeping up appearances, or to our possessions, worshiping them,
focusing on them. God opens our eyes to our sin, not to make us feel
bad and paralyze us, but to free us to act in the best interest of
this broken world. We are freed from slavery to sin, freed from
repeating the mistakes of trying to earn God's love. We are freed,
not to do whatever we want, but to serve this broken and hurting
world, and to be reformed again and again into God's image.
Reform us, O God,
reform us!
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