Reformation
Jn
8:31-36
10/25/15
If you have watched NFL football –
or really any sports recently – you probably have noticed an avalanche of ads
for the companies “Fan Duel” and “Draft Kings.” It seems like these ads are constantly
on TV – and in fact they are. In the
week leading up to the start of the NFL season, Draft Kings was the
television’s No. 1 advertiser as it showed a commercial every minute and a
half. Fan Duel cannot have been far
behind.
“Fan Duel” and “Draft Kings” have
cashed in on the fantasy football craze – a game in which people select their
own team of players and then compete against other people based on the
individual statistics of players they select and put in their line up each
week.
Fantasy football is huge. Millions of people take part in leagues,
sometimes just for bragging rights at the end of the football season and sometimes
for the sum of money which all the participants have contributed. What Fan Duel
and Draft Kings have done is to place this process online in one week
formats. Instead of waiting a whole
season, people can play a week at a time.
People pay money to play, and then they can win money each week.
Now that may sound like gambling to
you. But according to the law – with the
exception of Washington, Louisiana, Arizona, Montana, Iowa and now Nevada –
it’s not because a 2006 exemption says that the term “‘bet’ or ‘wager’ … does
not include … participation in any fantasy or simulation sports game.”
What legislators did not foresee in
2006 was how online fantasy football would explode in popularity. In particular
it has been extremely popular with 18-35 year old males. And that is now being recognized as a real problem
because young men are the people who are most susceptible to becoming problem
gamblers. Research has shown that
gambling can be addictive. It stimulates
the brain’s reward systems much like drugs do.
People, usually men, fall into patterns in which they find themselves
unable to stop gambling. They continue
to gamble in spite of the fact it is obviously destroying their finances, their
marriage and their family. The thrill of
gambling becomes a slavery that controls and destroys their lives.
In the Gospel lesson for the
Festival of the Reformation, Jesus addresses an unrecognized slavery. He speaks about the slavery of sin and
declares that only he can set people free. We describe the Lutheran Reformation
that Martin Luther started as being about Scripture alone, grace alone and
faith alone. And this is absolutely
true. But our text this morning reminds
us that the Lutheran Reformation was also about recognizing the true depths of
sin so that the glory of the Gospel could come clear.
In our text this morning, Jesus is
in Jerusalem and he is in a running discussion with those who oppose him, even
as others are listening to the conversation.
Jesus had said, “I am going away, and you will seek me, and you will die
in your sin. Where I am going, you cannot come.” The Jews were puzzled by this,
so Jesus added, “You are from below; I am from above. You are of this world; I
am not of this world. I told you that you would die in your sins, for unless
you believe that I am he you will die in your sins.”
Our Lord declared that only faith in
him could rescue people from their sins.
He said that he was from above.
The Jews were even more puzzled and so they asked, “Who are you?” Jesus
said that he was what he had been telling them from the beginning, and that he
had been speaking what he heard from the One who sent him. The Jews did not
understand that he had been speaking to them about the Father. So Jesus said to
them, “When you have lifted up the Son of Man, then you will know that I am he,
and that I do nothing on my own authority, but speak just as the Father taught
me. And he who sent me is with me. He has not left me alone, for I always do
the things that are pleasing to him.” And as he was saying these things, many
believed in him.
In our text Jesus now says to those
who believed in him, “If you abide in my word, you are truly my disciples, and
you will know the truth, and the truth will set you free.” Yet this prompts the response, “We are
offspring of Abraham and have never been enslaved to anyone. How is it that you
say, ‘You will become free’?” In spite
of their long history of subjugation, they declared that they had never been
enslaved to anyone. And so Jesus replied,
“Truly, truly, I say to you, everyone who practices sin is a slave to sin. The
slave does not remain in the house forever; the son remains forever. So if the
Son sets you free, you will be free indeed.”
Human beings want to believe that we
are ok. We want to believe that we are our own masters and that we can take
care of everything on our own. The first
temptation was the suggestion that we could be like God, and we’ve been trying
to play that role ever since.
Now if you are a Christian, it
becomes rather obvious very quickly that everything is not ok. The Law revealed in
God’s Word shows us our sin. It shows
that we mess up in thought, word and deed.
And the central event of Scripture is the death of Jesus Christ on the
cross for the forgiveness of sins. You can’t avoid the fact that sin is a real
problem and that God has acted in Jesus Christ to do something about it.
But even after granting this, it
doesn’t mean that you have to give up totally on the idea that we can take care
of things – that we can be like God. You
just have to modify things a little.
That is what the medieval Church had done. She recognized that God’s grace was necessary
for forgiveness and salvation. But she set it up in a way that God’s grace
equipped the Christian to do his or her part in order to achieve full
salvation.
And so at the beginning of the
sixteenth century, being a Christian was about
doing. In fact the Church had made
up the “evangelical counsels” of poverty (the renunciation of private
property), chastity (the renunciation of marriage) and obedience to religious
superiors that were said to go over and above the Ten Commandments in obtaining
merit before God. To be “religious” was
to become a monk or a nun and take up the performance of these evangelical
counsels.
Martin Luther did this. And he did
it all the way. He was the monk’s monk. And what he found was that his doing – even
when it was supposed to be assisted by God’s grace – could never bring him
peace. It could never bring him peace
because Luther knew that his doing was always plagued by sin. It was never perfect. It was never pure. It was never holy.
The flip side of Luther’s discovery
of the Gospel is the recognition that ever since the Fall we are warped and
twisted by sin. We have lost the image
of God. Rather than loving and serving
God and our neighbor we are turned in on ourselves. We have a God. It’s the unholy trinity of me, myself and
I. And even after we have been reborn
through the work of the Spirit in Holy Baptism, this old Adam continues to
cling to us. St. Paul described this as
the Spirit and the flesh when told the Galatians, “For the desires of the flesh
are against the Spirit, and the desires of the Spirit are against the flesh,
for these are opposed to each other, to keep you from doing the things you want
to do.”
Because this is so, any version of
Christianity that gives a role to our doing in order to attain full salvation –
or in order to achieve assurance that
we are in fact a believer and are saved – is doomed to failure. It is doomed because it has failed to come to
terms with what God’s Word teaches about fallen humanity. Martin Luther’s experience told him that
something was very wrong. His study of
Scripture revealed what that problem was – the true depths of our slavery to
sin.
Yet at the same time, as Luther
studied God’s Word the Gospel that provides the answer to this slavery became
clear. In our text today Jesus says, “If
you abide in my word, you are truly my disciples, and you will know the truth,
and the truth will set you free.” Luther
discovered that the Church had not been abiding in Christ’s word. She had lost
sight of the fact that Jesus alone has provided forgiveness and salvation
through his death and resurrection.
There is nothing to add. There is
nothing to do. There is nothing that we
can do.
Jesus says in our text this morning,
“Truly, truly, I say to you, everyone who practices sin is a slave to sin. The
slave does not remain in the house forever; the son remains forever. So if the
Son sets you free, you will be free indeed.”
Jesus the Son of God has set you
free. It is completely a matter of
God’s grace. It is an undeserved
gift. It is a gift that is simply
received by faith – by believing in Jesus who died on the cross and rose from
the dead.
In Romans chapter 4 St. Paul defines
this faith as the opposite of doing. He wrote, “For what does the Scripture say? ‘Abraham
believed God, and it was counted to him as righteousness.’ Now to the one who
works, his wages are not counted as a gift but as his due. And to the one who
does not work but believes in him who justifies the ungodly, his faith is
counted as righteousness.” The
illustration that I use with the catechumens is this. If I tell you I am going to give you a
million dollars, what can you do to make that happen? Nothing!
All you can “do” is trust me and wait to receive it. In the same way
faith passively receives the blessing of forgiveness that Christ has won. After all, as Jesus says in our text today,
it is the Son who sets you free – you
have nothing to do with it.
The truth about human beings is a
bummer. Spiritually we are completely messed up from the moment we are
conceived. Physically we are headed for
death from that first moment when we are alive.
Sin has caused all of this. Even
when we have been made a new creation in Christ through the work of the Holy
Spirit in baptism, we still have the old Adam clinging to us and fighting
against the good every step of the way.
The Spirit does enable us to begin to love God and our neighbor instead
of ourselves, but this love is never perfect.
The Good News of the Gospel that
Luther rediscovered in the Reformation is that Christ saves us in spite of this
sin. Indeed, he saves us because of this sin – because we are
completely incapable of doing anything to free ourselves from the slavery of
sin. Instead by God’s grace, Jesus
Christ has done everything for us. And he says to all those who believe in hin,
“So if the Son sets you free, you will be free indeed.”
