The Truth that Makes Us Free

Rebecca Sheridan
Sunday, October 26, 2025
John 8:31-36

    I like to meet a friend in Manhattan about once a month or so for lunch and a city adventure.  Just a few weeks ago, we met up in Grand Central Station and never left, because there was a temporary exhibit featuring Humans of New York, as well as live music in the main concourse with music students from Julliard. It was such a fun time!  If you’re not familiar with the concept of Humans of New York, photographer Brandon Stanton has photographed and interviewed over 10,000 people, just telling stories of ordinary New Yorkers in their own words, accompanied by photographs.  One area of the exhibit featured photos accompanied by statements from women who had been incarcerated for decades but now living freely in the city.  What struck me in this particular exhibit was a quote from one of these featured women – “Every day I’m learning to be free.”  “Every day I’m learning to be free.”
    On this Reformation Sunday, we are helping one another learn to be free – free from sin, death and the devil, so we might be fully alive in Christ, by the grace and love of God.  In our gospel for this morning, Jesus speaks powerful words about truth and freedom that seem incredibly relevant in our current context.  What is freedom – when it comes to protecting our first amendment rights, for example -freedom of speech, freedom of the press, religious freedom and separation of church and state, freedom to peacefully assemble and protest?  How is Christian freedom different from our American understanding?  And another big question, what is the truth that Jesus speaks of?  As Pilate asks later on in John’s gospel when Jesus is put on trial, what is truth?
    We can imagine how someone who has been incarcerated for decades would struggle to learn how to be free once released from prison.  We also struggle, whether we are aware of it or not, to be free from the devil and all his empty promises.  Jesus is addressing a lie that those who believe in him are telling themselves here in our gospel for today:  “We have never been slaves to anyone!”  Hmmm, well, if you know anything of the book of Exodus, or of most of the prophets, the Jewish people actually did experience hundreds of years of slavery in Egypt, and then exile under the Assyrian and Babylonian empires.  In Jesus’ time, not all Jews were Roman citizens, and were living under oppression and persecution for their faith.  They were not particularly free; certainly not living in a free and democratic society as we know it today.  And as Jesus tells his believers, even if they didn’t accept the truth of their history as slaves and oppressed peoples, “everyone who commits sin is a slave to sin.”  Our reading from Romans backs this up – “all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God.”  
Sin is the great equalizer.  We cannot escape it – it is a condition of being human.  I have found in my ministry that the best Christians are the ones who know firsthand the power of sin in their lives – those who have struggled with addiction or alcoholism, those who have been imprisoned for their crimes, those who have lived with abuse or poverty.  When we acknowledge the pervasiveness of sin and that it is not someone else’s problem but MY problem and MY responsibility – that I have not loved God or others as I ought, that I have failed to do what I know I should do and that I cannot free myself from those sins – I need help from God to do that, THEN we understand on a deep human level what this woman is saying, “every day, I am learning to be free.”  Living in freedom as a Christian is not about seeing ourselves as better than others, it’s actually placing ourselves in the same boat as others.  We are all sinners in need of a Savior. Without Christ, we are not whole or free.  Only in Christ, do we have the possibility of new life and true freedom.
    The Reformation came about because of a man named Martin Luther who recognized his enslavement to sin so well his confessor priest told him to stop coming until he had a real sin to confess.  Like many of us, Luther wrestled heavily with feelings of guilt, shame, and self-doubt.  But Luther also recognized a lot of people were slaves to the Roman church at the time, to a hierarchical system that said some people were holier than others because of their works, and that if you had enough money, you could buy your salvation with these papers called indulgences.  If you read anything about this time in history in the Western church, you know Luther was not the only Reformer.  The Holy Spirit used his words and the power of the new technology, the printing press, to speak to what many people were already thinking and feeling.  Luther clarified and restated what Paul had written to the Romans centuries before:  “we are justified by God’s grace as a gift…a person is justified by faith apart from works prescribed by the law.” True freedom is recognizing that even if you are in prison, or caught in systems above your control to free yourself from, if you place your faith in the saving grace of Jesus Christ, you are free indeed.  Christ came to set us free.  Our particular Lutheran good news is that Jesus makes us free – this is grace, a gift from God, the undeserved love of God we experience over and over again through Christ Jesus our Lord.  This grace helps us learn to be free.
    The truth is very tricky these days.  We know that AI can make images and videos go viral on social media convincing us things happened that haven’t actually happened.  We worship the gods of Fox News and MSNBC as the truth.    We are slaves to our phones, slaves to our jobs, slaves to fear and outrage that politicians and the media are using to emotionally manipulate us and divide us...the list could go on.  Today, we stood up with Izzy and renounced the devil, the powers of this world and the sin that draws us from God.  Those are lies.    What is the truth?  Who can we trust?  Well, in John 14 Jesus reveals this most powerful truth – “I am the way, the truth, and the life.”  Jesus offers us a way of freedom and life, living in the truth of the good news that he died and was raised not just for you, but for all of us struggling to be free.      
Martin Luther said in one of his most famous works, The Freedom of a Christian, “A Christian is a perfectly free Lord of all, subject to none.  A Christian is a perfectly dutiful servant to all, subject to all.”  What he meant, is that because of our faith in Christ, NOTHING and NO ONE else is in control of our lives.  We worship God, creator of all, nothing else.  God alone saves. We serve Christ, above all else.  Yet, our faith convicts us to live lives of service to others – freely, not because we have to to be “better” or “good enough” Christians, but because when we start to learn what it really means to live free, we want that gift for others.  We don’t want to rest until everyone is free.  May the Holy Spirit continue to move in and among us and work through the church so that we might help others learn to truly be free and know this freedom that we have in Christ.  Thanks be to God!  Amen.