Creative Parenting

Reformation Sunday – October 28, 2012

Jeremiah 31:31-34; Romans 3:19-28; and John 8:31-36

³¹Then Jesus said to the Jews who had believed in him, “If you continue in my word, you are truly my disciples; ³²and you will know the truth, and the truth will make you free.” ³³They 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’?” 

³⁴Jesus answered them, “Very truly, I tell you, everyone who commits sin is a slave to sin. ³⁵The slave does not have a permanent place in the household; the son has a place there forever. ³⁶So if the Son makes you free, you will be free indeed. (John 8:31-36, NRSV)

I was a stubborn child, and so my parents learned early on that arguing with me wasn’t very productive and that it would require some creative parenting. One time when I was 3, I decided that I did not want to wear a coat on a chilly day. Rather than argue, my mom told me that I was old enough to make up my own mind, but that she needed to finish getting ready and I should wait for her on the porch. I went out to wait, very proud of myself for being an independent and grown up young man, confident in my own decision-making ability. My mom waited just on the other side of the front door. When she finally joined me on the porch I had decided that maybe I did want a coat after all, and she had one at the ready. I think, at least for a while, that I didn’t argue about wearing a coat when it was suggested.

But then it’s not just three year olds who are sometimes stubborn about things they don’t know much about. Jesus’ conversation partners in the gospel reading today are adamant that they are independent people. “WE are children of Abraham,” they said. “WE have never been slaves to anyone. And we don’t have to wear a coat if we don’t want to!” Jesus is offering life to them, a message of God’s ever-present forgiveness and grace but they are convinced they have everything under control. They already have the truth and don’t appreciate anyone saying otherwise. The verses we just read are only a portion of a much larger back-and-forth argument about the finer points of Jesus’ teaching about himself. Jesus is over and over again pointing them to the ways in which their desperate attempts to win God’s love are not necessary, and all they want to do is tell him that they have it figured out already. This is going to require some creative parenting on God’s part.

We, too, are more like stubborn children than we’d sometimes like to admit. There was a time in not-too-distant history when this last-Sunday-in-October celebration of the Reformation was a time for reveling in our own rightness. We are Lutherans! We have never been slaves to anyone! WE know the truth.

Sometimes New Englanders have a reputation for the same kind of attitude, having a corner on the way things ought to be. We have a historic commitment to freedom, a commitment to progressive values that let people be who they are, so “what do you mean by saying, ‘You will be made free’?”

And at the risk of further bombarding you with thoughts of the upcoming election, how often do we hear political statements that talk about freedom and truth? But how often are they really trying to cover up the underlying premise, “We are democrats, or we are republicans, or we are independents, we have never been slaves to anyone or anything! And WE can set you free!”

How would you fill in the blank for yourself? I am ______ and I have never been a slave to anyone.

The problem is, that like the descendants of Abraham, our perception of freedom is skewed. The Hebrew people had been subject to the Egyptians, the Babylonians, and the Romans, just to name the major ones prior to Jesus’ time. We construct for ourselves a reality in which our individual selves or the groups to which we belong have it all figured out. We have constructed a reality in which we control our own destiny. Like the Jewish leaders talking to Jesus, and like every group that has broken the covenant with God before and since, we have been more interested in our independence than in our life. We are like children standing outside waiting in the cold, and realizing that all our freedom has gotten us is discomfort.

If we were slaves in God’s kingdom and not children, or if we had a God who treated us fairly in response, we would freeze to death in our own freedom. But what we celebrate on Reformation Sunday is that we don’t have a God who treats us fairly. We have a stubborn God who will not stop loving us, who will not stop holding out a lifeline to us until we are safely in God’s arms for good. We have a God who does not wait until we are lost, but who stands ready with a warm coat grieving that it could not have started keeping us warm sooner, and yet also loving us enough to respect our misguided willfulness. We have a God who employs creative parenting.

In the language of Jeremiah, God will forget all the we have done wrong. God will forget that we have ignored the covenant and mistreated one another. God will forget that we have stubbornly insisted on our own way of living. And then God will write a new covenant on our hearts such that we will not forget who we are and to whom we belong.

In Paul’s language we are justified by grace as a gift through Christ. We are set free from the burden that none of us is without sin because God has chosen to ignore the evidence against us and declare us righteous.

And in Jesus’ language in the gospel of John, God will set us free. Not the kind of freedom to do whatever we please, not the kind of freedom to become the most successful person we can be, but the kind of freedom to discover who we are: to discover that we have not been as free and independent as we think and to discover that God has already made us children of God in spite of it all.

And so God calls us together in these broken assemblies of people we call churches, churches that are always in need of being reformed, always needing God’s grace. God calls us together so that we can hear the words of the new covenant and the promise that through baptism we are made new. God calls us together to be fed with bread and wine, to experience together another reminder of God’s constant care for us despite our resistance.

And Today we welcome new members to Immanuel – people that God has called to be among us in this time and place. We invite them to join with us in sharing that good news of God with the world. We invite them to share with us their gifts and ideas, their wisdom and experiences, that together we might stumble forward as the church, reminding each other of God’s stubbornness to declare us members of God’s household no matter how much we might mess it up.

Because every time we forget the ways in which God has cared for us over and over again, and when we forget that sometimes our own will does not get us very far, God is still there waiting for us, already having forgotten our stubbornness and desperately wanting to wrap us in a coat and set us along our way again.

-Pastor Steven Wilco