“If you continue in my word, you will know the truth and the truth will make you free.”
—John 8:31–33
Happy Reformation Day, my fellow Lutherans as well as to all “aspiring Lutherans” who may be present. The gospel just read is appointed every year on Reformation Sunday because it typifies the Lutheran approach to faith and life. Thus, the title of my sermon is From Truth to Freedom.
You may have noticed that in the Gospels of Matthew, Mark and Luke, the so-called Synoptic Gospels, Jesus speaks continuously about in the Kingdom of God. Not so in the Gospel of John, where he barely mentions it. In the Gospel of John, it’s all about one word—Truth. John and Jesus speak truth, with Jesus going so far as to say, “I am the truth.”
Now, wherever there is truth, there is misunderstanding. The words are clear, but people just don’t get it. Catholic teachers long ago called it “Invincible Ignorance.” And this is nowhere truer than in this Gospel. Jesus’s listeners repeatedly misunderstand everything he says. For example: in John 4 when he meets the Samaritan woman at the well, he says, “I will give you living water”. She replies, “You don’t even have a bucket!” Or in the chapter before, he tells the great teacher Nicodemus “You must be born again,” and Nicodemus goes to wondering how a person might return to his mother’s womb. Did Jesus roll his eyes? In our text, he says, my truth “will make you free,” and his listeners think he is talking about politics. They say, “We’ve never been in bondage to anyone.” They lied, of course, conveniently forgetting the Egyptians, Assyrians, Babylonians, Seleucids, and the Romans. There are times when the Gospel of John reads like a comedy routine.
And there are other times, when this gospel reads like a tragedy. As when a bruised and bleeding Jesus finds himself standing before Pontius Pilate on trial for his life.. Once again, this time through swollen lips, Jesus steadfastly insists, “I have come to testify to the truth,” To which Pilate cynically replies, What is Truth?
Wherever there is truth, there are cynics. A cynic is a person who know the price of everything and the value of nothing.
Wherever there is truth, there are lies. Truth has a way of attracting lies the way honey attracts flies. It’s been estimated that from all sources in our media culture, you and I are subject to a minimum of 5,000 messages a day. In an election year it seems more like 50,000! We are subject to more lying than truth-telling. Which means, all day long, we are subconsciously or consciously burdened with the calculation, should I believe that or not? This is the tragedy of living in the modern world—not that there are so many lies, but that we lose our capacity to believe anything.
Jesus offers a path through the wasteland. If you continue in the word of God, (and that’s what we Lutherans want to do—“continue,”—the truth will find you out, and it will lead you to something called “freedom.”
So, all you and I have to do in the next few minutes is figure out the meaning of truth and that most American of words: freedom You’ve got 15 minutes. You may open your Blue Books. No one can do the work for us. Not the politicians , pundits, or influencers. Not even AI, especially not AI, because AI does not have the Holy Spirit. But we do.
Fortunately for us, we have a guide named Martin Luther who in his own time and way followed the same path from truth to freedom. He did not consult the philosophers on the matter of truth, nor the politicians on freedom. He followed the word of God.
We don’t follow the word of God in isolation from what’s going on around us, and, of course, neither did Luther. Even if that were possible (which it isn’t)it would not be wise. I’m always impressed when I see teens or young people doing their homework or writing term papers with the TV on or music blaring. I want to ask, How can you do what you need to do with that racket? The fact is, none of us follows the word of God in a noise-free environment. And by noise, I mean more than a barking dog or blaring TV. We are straining to hear the Word of God in one of the noisiest cultures imaginable, in what one writer calls the Age of Anger. How are you going to “keep hope alive,” as the Rev. Jesse Jackson used to say, when “hope” seems to be on life support, in the age of Anger? In an age when everybody seems to be shouting at everyone else, when the usual disagreements one might expect in a democracy explode into anger and beyond anger into hatred and beyond hatred into barbarism and a frightening unknown? In the year 1919 the great Irish poet William Butler Yeats wrote the poem the 20th century and, I fear, for our 21st as well. It’s called “The Second Coming,” and it includes these lines. “Things fall apart/ the centre cannot hold; mere anarchy is loosed upon the world.”
Nature itself seems to echo the Age of Anger—in the form of fires, tsunamis, flooding, and unbearable heat. We heard it a few minutes ago as we chanted Psalm 46: “the mountains shake in the heart of the sea; the nations are in an uproar, the kingdoms are tottering.” Then the Psalmist adds in the voice of God: Shh!” Be still and know that I am God.”
Like us, Martin Luther read the word of God in tumultuous times. Europe’s kingdoms were tottering. His life was in danger. Luther didn’t read the Word of God the way one might read a novel or the newspaper. He read the scripture as if his life depended on it. In fact, he didn’t exactly read the bible; he sort of tackled it, or interrogated it, as if to say, “If this is true, what does this have to do with me and more importantly, my church?” Luther once said that just as Moses beat on the rock to produce water for the thirsty children of Israel, “so I beat on the Word of God, “as it were, until it gives me the nourishment I desperately need.
The God Luther met in the Bible terrified him. And what terrified him most? It was the phrase “the righteousness of God” as Paul spoke about it in Romans. As a master of the Greek language, Luther knew that “righteousness” has the connotation, “justice,” and he wanted no part of the justice of God. When he read “righteousness” the only word he heard was “Guilty!” It was a classic case of misunderstanding, the misconstrual of grace for judgment.
Shortly before he died, Luther wrote a brief memoir about his struggle for the grace of God. After meditating day and night on this phrase “the righteousness of God,” he says, he came to understand that there is another kind of righteousness, a righteousness so generous that it wants nothing more than to give itself away. There is the righteousness of the prude, to whom everybody and every situation is an offense. You don’t want a God like that. And there is the righteousness of the lover, who wants only to give to others. When he got this figured out, it was an aha moment not only for Luther but for the whole church: “Here I felt that I was born again, and had entered paradise itself thorough open gates."
This is the truth that will make you free. The truth always leads to freedom. That’s why all dictators fear the truth more than anything else.
Which brings us to freedom: There are two kinds of freedom: freedom from and freedom for. There is a freedom from whatever it is that holds you in bondage, and freedom for a new way of walking in this world.
Every day of the week (and twice on Sunday) we are assured that we are forgiven through the sacrifice of our Lord. Our sins do not cling to us as if by static electricity; they are not preserved in a Museum of Sin; They are (in the wonderful Greek expression) aphemi “sent away.” There is no burden so heavy that can’t be “sent away.” For many of us, the shorthand expression for this burden is the past—some sin or betrayal, some hatred that has somehow weaseled its way into us, which is hard to shake. As the great southern writer, William Faulkner once said, “The past is never dead. It’s not even past.” O, to be free from all that Not merely to lay your burden down, but to have someone who loves you lift it off your shoulders, then to clap our shoulders as if to say, You are free to walk a new way.
Freedom for, on the other hand, is trickier. Freedom for asks the question, What are you going to do with the gift? How will it shape your life?
We Lutherans are not so well known for the outward expression of our freedom. (That may be an understatement). I remember when I was a young pastor I used to envy the more vocal and expressive churches across town. But I came to understand that during a sermon a slight twitch of a Germanic eyebrow was Lutheran for “Hallelujah! Preach brother!”
Historically, we Lutherans kept to ourselves, just as our forefathers and mothers kept to themselves. After all, we were an immigrant church. My own great grandfather and mother came to this country unable to speak the language of this country. They were strangers who spoke what must have sounded like a guttural language. They ate un-American foods like the feast we enjoyed Wednesday at the October Fest: wiener-schnitzel and Sauerbraten—(I did miss Pig’s Knuckles). They struggled to be Americans. Perhaps there is something in our denomination’s DNA that explains Lutheranism’s huge global ministry to refugees and immigrants.
As a separate people, our piety was more inward and personal. It was addressed to a gentile Savior, shepherd, and friend. We were not as comfortable with the messianic fire-brand who strides into his home synagogue in Nazareth to preach his first sermon and puts a charge into his unsuspecting congregation: “The spirit of the lord is upon me; he has sent me to proclaim good news to the poor, recovery of sight to the blind, and to set at liberty all who are oppressed.” That was God’s own freedom for in action!
The first kind of freedom took a weight off Luther’s soul. It led directly, as it always does, to freedom for. That freedom empowered him to publicly oppose the most powerful institution of his day, It empowered him to stride into an assembly hall, and to stand before the Emperor of the Holy Roman Empire and select princes of Germany and say, Unless you can show me where the word of God is wrong, my answer is “No. Nein!” “Here I stand. God help me.”
God’s truth has always empowered people of faith in all walks of life to stand up. Most recently, on the world stage, it was an American catholic named Leo, who said to an American named Donald, ‘I am not a politician, but the message of the gospel was not meant to be abused as it is. I have no fear of speaking for the gospel and standing up for peace.’ You could almost hear an Amen! all the way from Wittenberg. We Lutherans remember him in our prayers.
I would be the first to admit our exercise of freedom is not quite that dramatic! It rarely makes news. It boils down to this: The freedom Jesus gives empowers us to do what is right, and to do it in such a way that honors God and helps God’s children. As the prophet Micah says, What does the Lord require of you but to do justice, love mercy, and walk humbly with your God?”
Whenever we step into the voting booth (since that is on our minds), we are acting politically and theologically. Two questions are swirling about our heads in that small space. The politicians ask some version of the question, “Are you (or the country) better off now than you were two years ago?” But the prophet also asks, “What does the Lord require of me?
We Lutherans are famous for being an obedient people who honor the authorities. And: we Lutherans are famous for being a freed people who follow the Lord wherever his path takes us.
Jesus once asked the question, “Who was neighbor to the man who had fallen into the ditch? The question nowadays might be rephrased, What about the guys who are digging the ditches? Or the people who harvest our crops, pave our roads, and clean up after us? Do they deserve the exercise of my freedom in Christ?
These are big questions, not for others to answer, but for us. But know this: there is a path you can follow from who we are in this place to our responsibilities in the country we love. There is a path. It doesn’t only run from the pulpit to the public square. Not only from a pope or bishops. There is a path. It runs from the pew to the public square. You and I are always on that Jesus-road from truth to freedom.
Where does it end? Well, eventually, you know where. More than 150 years ago, an unfree people living in an unfree country sang, “Oh, freedom. Oh, freedom over me. Before I’ll be a slave, I’d be buried in my grave, and go home to my Lord and be free.”
Sermons are meant for the ear, not the eye.
Thanks for taking that into account.
Richard Lischer
St. Paul’s Lutheran Church
Durham, NC
October 25, 2026