Reformation Sermon Transcript

In this Reformation sermon, Pastor Cristina reflects on what it means to be continually reformed in faith and life. Using scripture from Psalm 46, Romans, and John, she explores how God’s unchanging grace and the freeing truth of Christ call us to embrace change and live abundantly in love.

SCRIPTURE READINGS

Our first reading is from Psalm 46. God is our refuge and strength, a very present help in trouble. Therefore, we will not fear, though the earth should change, though the mountains shake in the heart of the sea. Though its waters roar and foam, though the mountains tremble with its tumult, there is a river whose streams make glad the city of God, the holy habitation of the Most High. God is in the midst of the city. It shall not be moved. God will help it when the morning dawns. The nations are in an uproar. The kingdoms totter. God utters, and the earth melts. The Lord of hosts is with us. The God of Jacob is our refuge. Come, behold the works of the Lord. See what desolations are brought on the earth. God makes wars cease to the ends of the earth, breaking the bow and shattering the spear, burning the shields with fire. Be still and know that I am God. I am exalted among the nations. I am exalted in the earth. The Lord of hosts is with us. The God of Jacob is our refuge.

From Romans chapter 3:19 through 28, our next reading is chapter 3 of Paul’s letter to the Romans. Now we know that whatever the law says, it speaks to those who are under the law. So that every mouth may be silenced and the whole world may be held accountable to God, for no human will be justified before God by deeds prescribed by the law, for through the law comes the knowledge of sin. But now apart from the law. The righteousness of God has been disclosed and is attested by the law and the prophets. The righteousness of God through the faith of Jesus Christ for all who believe, for there is no distinction since all have sinned and failed short. Of the glory of God they are now justified by grace as a gift through the redemption that is in Christ Jesus whom God put forward as a sacrifice of atonement by his blood effective through faith. God did this to demonstrate righteousness because in divine forbearance God had passed over the sins previously committed. It was to demonstrate at the present time God’s own righteousness so that in righteousness the one who has the faith of Jesus is justified then what becomes of boasting it is excluded through what kind of law that of works? No, rather through the law of faith, for we hold that a person is justified by faith apart from works prescribed by the law. Which is good news, by the way. Yeah, you didn’t know that, that’s some good news.

And I continue with some good news from our gospel reading in John chapter 8. Then Jesus said to the Jews who had had believed in him, if you continue in my word, you are truly my disciples, and you will know the truth and the truth will make you free. 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? So Jesus answered them very truly I tell you, everyone who commits sin is a slave to sin. The slave does not have a permanent place in the household. The son has a place there forever. So if the son makes you free. You will be free indeed. Amen. Amen.

SERMON

And that’s the good news. I don’t even know if I need a sermon after that, but I wrote one, so we’ll just go with it.

So, anybody know what today is? I know some of you put on some red, um, maybe it was your team, your team is playing today, so you threw on a little red, or maybe it’s because you were like, oh, it’s Reformation and we got to wear red, um, because that’s the day that we wear this color. Uh, and so, it’s about being reformed. It’s about reforming. That’s what today is about. It’s not that uh it’s what has been done. That’s the thing about being reformed. It’s not about what has, but it’s what will. It’s always going to be a challenge. It’s a misnomer to even consider anything to be perfect. Did anybody know that? Is there anything that is perfect, besides the love you have for your spouse? God’s love for us. It’s about the closest thing to perfection, would it not? And is it anything that we do for that, Liz? I’ll call you out. No, that’s not. I also know in this moment when I say that there’s a little bit of disappointment, um wives in this room um might have been hoping for a perfect husband, husbands in this room might have been hoping for that perfect wife and it turns out that perfection is merely impossible. It is not possible to be perfect in any way, shape, or form. And in fact, what we have learned that even in creation, nothing is perfect, because everything is constantly changing. Everything is constantly changing. We are reformed, remade, and in some ways reconstituted.

Now some of you might be thinking, oh, reconstituted. Uh, if you were like me, uh, maybe you grew up in a home that had, uh, something in their freezer that was reconstituted. Anybody have reconstituted orange juice in their home? What? Or lemonade? Mine was almost always orange juice. And that beautiful cardboard tube of goodness sat in our freezer. And all you had to do is take it out, let it thaw a little bit, add some water, and just stir it up and you would have orange juice. It’s sad because I grew up in Southern California. I had 4 orange trees growing in my backyard. And I grew up drinking reconstituted orange juice. And I kept thinking about this while I was writing my sermon and I’m like, why were we, why were we drinking reconstituted orange juice and we had 4 orange trees in our yard? But there it is.

And it’s because of this changingness, this way that we can morph from one thing to another, uh, I decided to call us shape shifters. Shape shifters are the things that are ever changing, uh, if you’ve read through any fun kind of comics and whatnot, shape shifters take the forms of many different things. Werewolves, for instance, would be considered a shapeshifter, right? By day, a human, and then when the full moon comes out, werewolf. So shape shifters, we take on ever changing characteristics in an ever changing world. Because reformation is still happening, so we haven’t stopped being reformed, we continue to be reformed every single day of our lives if we allow it.

We could hold on to everything and believe everything to be exactly as it was yesterday, today and tomorrow and never ever move from that. And we’ve probably met some people like that. Anyone met anyone who does not ever sway out of that one and only one way that they’ve ever believed things to be and you’re like, hey, but um, did you hear about that science thing that just came out this week? Didn’t you hear about what the Hubble telescope found? Didn’t you—we’re ever changing because we’re ever learning, we’re ever able to see new things. And I think that’s the best part about being human. Because we could be many different things, but as humans go, we have the opportunity to hear and to learn and to be reformed.

So it’s important today, right? So today is important. It’s important to remember that we wear red today. Many of us are wearing our red outfits, uh, because we share this time and this legacy of being Lutheran. It’s a great day to be reminded of our faithful reforming. We are shape shifters. I don’t know if we’re all werewolves, but we are shape shifters. Oh, I, we may all be vampires. I, I don’t know. I, you’re, you’re good. OK, maybe. I’m not sure, but we are shape shifters. We change.

How many people here are willing to change? Raise your hand. If you’re willing to change. I know. How many people here only can only put half of a hand up because it’s so uncomfortable to change. It’s so uncomfortable to change. But we’re called to be reformers and to be reformed. If you’re called to be reformed, what does that mean? It means you have to change. We have to change. We cannot maintain to be the same every day throughout eternity. We cannot figure out any other way of being if we’re not thinking of how we are changing. We cannot maintain this for the rest of eternity. Think about it. We cannot maintain this for the rest of eternity.

How many people know a little bit about history? Does anyone here knows a little bit about history, even, even maybe 25 years ago history, right? Some of you may even know 25 years ago history. Are we the same 25 years ago as we are today? No. What are, what are some things that we have today that we didn’t have 25 years ago? A child. A cell phone. Supersonic jets, self-driving cars, social media, cell phones, we might have had, no, no, we didn’t have cellphones yet. We had car phones, we didn’t have cellphones yet. Think of—just keep—I mean you guys could throw stuff out at me forever, right? That’s just 25 years ago. I’m not even asking to go as far back as we could be going, but I won’t remember that far back just because I’m so young. So young and I just wouldn’t know any further. I’m grounded. Yeah, I also have a 27 year old, so I probably do remember more than that.

Our world is ever changing. Our world is ever changing and our understanding of the world is ever changing. It is not stagnant, that we do not live in a stagnant world. We are constantly being reformed. So although we stand up and we’re very excited as Lutherans to be standing up on our day of remembrance for Martin Luther’s 95 theses that he wrote about how it is that we are to understand scripture, we were reforming then, we will continue, continue to reform as we understand the world around us because nothing stays the same. Nothing.

And I love this idea that we are freely bestowed love. Freely bestowed love. It’s a gift. How many people have ever gotten a gift before? You got a gift, OK. When you got that gift, did you do anything at all to deserve the gift? Oh. Melba, I’m glad that you were perfect. Were you perfectly imperfect? OK, but you’ve received a gift, right? We’ve received gifts. Um, probably most of the time we didn’t earn a gift, right? We don’t necessarily earn gifts. Sometimes we we give people thank you gifts. I don’t know if having a birthday earns you a gift. I don’t feel like a birthday earns you a gift, but people—you should be—you earned your mother a gift. It, your mother should get a gift on your birthday. That is true. That that is a very honest statement.

But we, we live in a world in which we get given things as gifts, not because of what we do. It’s not about um always being this like this thing. And sometimes they are gifts that are given because of the thing you did, right? Sometimes you get that thank you gift and it’s because of the thing you did. And while we think about that, right, because we’re thinking about our gifts, our—we do have a gift of God’s love, right? The practicality of our lives are that we have been given a gift of God’s love. It’s not a gift we have to buy. It’s not a gift of which we have to do something. We don’t have to be born. Well, maybe I guess we have to be born for it. We do have to be born in order to get that gift. That was the gift, right? Thanks, moms. Um.

We can’t do the things that we think we can do to earn that love that God gives us in any way, shape or form. It’s not the same kind of gift that you unwrap that you open up and you’re like, oh my God, I got a new hat. Oh my God, I got a new scarf. Oh my God, I got a new plant. The gift that we unwrap, and the gift that we don’t earn, and the gift we’re given is that of love. It’s the kind of love that is immeasurable. It’s the kind of love you can’t even recreate. It’s the kind of love that has no measure. And that’s the love that we get from God. And the thing about that love is—it doesn’t cost us anything. Doesn’t cost us anything.

In fact, as we were listening to our scripture, you might have heard, “You will know the truth and the truth will set you free.” Anyone hear that when I was reading it? You will know the truth and the truth will set you free. It’s an interesting moment to think the truth is gonna set me free. How is that? How does Jesus declare that in the gospel? That I will be set free when I know the truth. So then we start to think, well, what could the truth be? And I thought, yeah, what could set me free? Because that truth is so much better than anything else.

And the hearers at the time are flabbergasted, right, because they’re hearing this and they go, but we’re descendants of Abraham, and we’ve never been slaves, and we’ve always been free. How quickly we forget the long suffering history of our, our Jewish family. Stories of being slaves in Egypt, stories of the diaspora from Babylon and on, and in fact, soon to be slaves even in Rome. It’s a story that’s always happening. But John writes anyway as a reminder to who Jesus is, to the people again.

And I think it’s important to go all the way back to the beginning of John’s. I’d like to read to you the very first chapter and the very first couple of verses. “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God and the Word was God. He was in the beginning with God. All things came into being through him and without him. Not one thing came into being. What has come into being in him was life, and the life was the light of all people, and the light shines in the darkness and the darkness did not overtake it.”

John begins as a story, not the infant Jesus as we hear in our other storytellers, and we hear about birth and tales of woe and how it all happened, but instead, John takes us to the very, very beginning. The very sovereign place of the beginning where we see Christ with God in the beginning of creation. This is in fact the place in which Christ is born. As part of the Holy Spirit of God throughout, right? We have 3 persons.

And when you hear that the truth will set you free, when you hear those words, you immediately hear the voice of Jack Nicholson from Colonel Jessup in A Few Good Men. And he says, “You can’t handle the truth.” And I don’t think we can. I don’t think we can handle the truth because it’s really, really hard for us to say, I will know the truth and the truth will set me free, because in order for me to know the truth, I have to believe the truth. I have to believe that I am free. I have to believe that I have enough grace to get me moving every single day. I have to believe that it’s not the grace that I’ve given myself, but it’s the grace that God has given me.

It’s hard to imagine that we are free people sometimes because we wind ourselves up and we have these other ways of understanding ourselves. Truth is different. Truth is different than opinions also, by the way. We have a way of saying, well, that’s my truth. This is my truth. I understand it this way. Well, OK, then that is your opinion. It’s not the truth. The truth is that we have an understanding and a belief in Christ, and that is the truth. And the truth is, grace exists in the midst of all things and at all times. That is truth. Truth is not what you will ever do that will set you free. It is what Christ will do for you every single day to set you free. Not anything that you do except for belief. That’s it. It’s a simple, simple concept.

How many of us every day get up and say, I believe in Jesus and all my sins are forgiven, and walk out the front door? How many of you do it? I mean, I don’t do it every day. I should, I should put a big sign on my door before I walk out the door, like just a reminder. No, we don’t. We forget that understanding this truth because that’s the truth, and that is the truth that sets us free, that we have grace and we are loved, and there’s nothing else you’re going to do that’s gonna change that and there’s nothing you can do to make it different. There’s nothing you can do ever other than believe. That’s a simple thing—believe.

Not believe and then go do 100 things today to make God love you more, because it doesn’t work that way. It just doesn’t work that way. And to think that we have some other truth—my truth is my truth and your truth is your truth—it doesn’t work that way. Those are your opinions. And you are, by the way, welcome to all of your opinions, every single one of them. And I’ll, I’ll tell you I have a lot of opinions. If you haven’t heard them all yet today, just stop by. I’ll give you some of my opinions, even when you don’t ask for. You don’t even have to stop by. I’ll just walk over to your table and throw out some opinions because isn’t that what we do? Isn’t that what we’re really good at is giving out opinions? We all have an opinion. We have lots of opinions and we call them our truths. But the only truth we have, the only truth is that we know the truth. We have Christ and being in Christ is what sets us free.

It sets us free to be more. Imagine if you just liberated yourself not to be held down so much. Those truths that we believe in Christ, they set us free—free to do good things for the world around us. Free to love others in a way of wild abandonment. Free to choose life, free to choose a world that can be better than what we’ve ever imagined. And to continue to be reformed in so many ways because it changes the way we understand things change.

If we believed the world was flat still today, we would never travel. We would never travel. If we believed that we couldn’t do more than what we did yesterday, we never would have gone to the moon. I, I mean, imagine all the things we do because we’re willing to be set free. That we’re willing to hear what there is and that there’s more. And that we are constantly being reformed to understand that.

God never changes, but the world does. Don’t get left behind. And I, I don’t mean that like the Left Behind series either. I know, I’m like, I gotta, I gotta backtrack now that I said that out loud. Don’t be left behind in the sense that you’re holding on to things you don’t need to hold on to anymore. Because grace is a beautiful thing—to just throw it out with abandonment. Throw out all the things that you thought you needed to hold on to, unpack some luggage maybe. If you got a backpack with you, open that backpack up, throw that stuff out. Maybe you carry a—like one of those big chests with you—take that chest out, throw out that stuff too. Live your life with a little bit more abandonment and know that you’ve been reformed and you’re constantly gonna be reformed.

We may never be perfect. We live in our most imperfect selves because we’re human. But even in the midst of our imperfect self, we are just loved in abundance. That’s what Reformation is about—that we are reformed, we are made new, and we live in a place of abundance. Amen. Amen.