October 27, 2013 - Reformation Sunday - Re-Formed by the Truth

Re-Formed by the Truth

John 8:31-36

Reformation Sunday - October 27, 2013

Ascension Lutheran Church

*See the sermon on YouTube here

Do any of you remember the movie, The Matrix? The one with Keanu Reeves and all of the special effects that were sooo cool back in 1999? (Yeah, I know, I’m showing my age a little bit…)

The movie was set sometime in the distant future, and not a very pleasant one. See, the artificial intelligence created by human kind had risen up against humanity, and the machines had won. They've enslaved almost the entire population, but as the movie begins we don’t know that. We know only what Neo, the Keanu Reeves character, knows. By day, he goes by Thomas Anderson, who goes to his normal, boring office job, but by night, he’s Neo, a brilliant computer hacker who’s become obsessed with finding out about The Matrix, something he’s only heard whispers about, seen traces of. As the story unfolds, Neo is brought to meet with Morpheus, a man who claims to know the truth. He offers Neo a choice. Take the blue pill, and he’ll wake up back in his own bed, able to believe whatever he wants about the events that have led him to this crossroads. Or, take the red pill and keep going down the rabbit hole, following it to the truth. “But,” Morpheus warns, “ the choice is final. There’s no going back. Which do you choose?”

Which would you choose? We see Jesus offering a similar choice to his listeners in the story from John’s gospel we heard this morning. “If you continue in my word, you are truly my disciples,” he says, “and you will know the truth, and the truth will make you free.”

Now, these are people who have been tagging along after Jesus for a while. These are folks who have been listening as he teaches and liking what they hear. These are “the Jews who had believed in” Jesus. So you’d think that they’d jump eagerly at the chance to learn more, to go deeper, to know the truth and be made free. But instead, his words meet with resistance. His listeners are offended! “We come from Abraham!
We've never been slaves! What do you mean, ‘You will be made free’?”

So Jesus tries to explain what he’s getting at a different way. Because of course, we know he’s not just talking about physical slavery. He’s talking about something deeper. He’s talking about spiritual slavery. “Very truly, I tell you, everyone who commits sin is a slave to sin.”

Strong words. No avoiding what he’s saying there. We don’t read the whole passage, but if we did, we’d see what a strong reaction Jesus gets. The people kind of freak out, and this whole back and forth ensues; they call him a Samaritan, they accuse him of having a demon, and at the end of the whole scene, they pick up stones to throw at Jesus, who somehow hides and leaves the temple.

But you know it’s not just Jesus’ ancient listeners who are offended by Jesus’ words. We struggle with this very thing too, especially when we hear Jesus say, “… everyone who commits sin is a slave to sin.” Because really, who among us wants to admit to our sin? Lutherans talk a good game about everyone being both a sinner and a saint at the same time, but we don’t take the news that we are slaves to sin too kindly. Sure, we all have our struggles, but don’t you think calling us slaves is taking it a bit too far, Jesus? I mean, really! Much of the time, we don't want to acknowledge how strong sin's grip on us is. I think we’d choose the blue pill of ignorance over the red pill that leads to the truth.

But back to Neo for a minute – because Neo chooses to take the red pill. And when he does, he suddenly wakes up gasping for Breath in this pod, covered with goo, tethered in place by cables that are attached to the back of his neck and all the way down his spine and on his chest and arms and legs, and when he sits up and looks around, he sees thousands, millions of pods just like his, all containing humans; humans who don’t have any idea that they are prisoners whose energy is being harvested by the machines who need to keep them enslaved in order to ensure their own existence. And suddenly, Neo’s pod is drained, and he is dumped below, into a river of water that washes him clean. He is rescued and brought face to face with Morpheus in real life, only to learn the truth that his entire existence up to this point has been a lie, a figment of his digital imagination. Neo never knew he was a slave until he had been set free. Which is not to say that everything is sunshine and roses after that, Neo struggles to accept the truth of this new reality, and they came out with two more movies to tell the tale of the rebellion and resistance after all – but learning the truth about himself and the world around him is the beginning of his path to real freedom.

That’s how the truth works. Jesus comes into our world, the embodiment of the Truth, and he tells us that truth: about ourselves, about our sin, about the brokenness of the world around us. And sometimes it’s a hard pill to swallow. We don’t want to face the reality that we are enslaved by sin, and cannot free ourselves. We’d like to think that we can figure it out on our own, that we can get ourselves out of our own messes. But we can’t. Left to our own devices, we’d stay forever trapped by our sin, everything within us that rebels against God and tries to have its own way, all of the ways that we fall short of being the people God created us to be.

But the good news in this story is that God doesn't leave us to our own devices. We don’t have to find a way of rescuing ourselves. We aren't called to set ourselves free. No, Jesus the Son came to set us free! Like Neo, we get our first glimpse of that freedom in the water, the baptismal waters that wash us clean and make us new. But that’s not the end of the story. It may not be ask sunshine and roses after that. We continue to struggle against sin and its power every day. But as we continue in Christ's word, as we follow Jesus as disciples, we come to know Jesus, the Truth. And in the light of that truth, we are continually reshaped, remade, re-formed, changed to be more like him, changed to become the children of God that God says we are, despite all that we do and all that we are unable to do to free ourselves. If the Son has set you free, you will be free indeed. Thanks be to God.

Amen.