Free At Last

The scriptures referred to are Jeremiah 31:31-34, Romans 3:19-28 and John 8:31-36.

James Gunn, who made the Guardians of the Galaxy films for Marvel, is now one of the people in charge of making films for DC Comics, Marvel's rival. He has also made horror films. One of those was Brightburn, which was basically a darker take on a superhero. In it an adolescent boy discovers he has superpowers, very much like Superboy. But he uses it to stalk a girl he has a crush on and kill anyone who gets in his way. He also is getting a message from the spaceship in which he came to earth. It is “Take the world.” And let's face it: in real life anyone as powerful as Superman would likely become a monster and a tyrant. As Lord Acton said, power corrupts and absolute power corrupts absolutely. It's rare for someone to have the power to do something and yet resist doing it.

Which probably is why in his reboot of the Superman franchise, Gunn had to figure out why Clark Kent is such a boy scout. In that film, when the message left for him by his Kryptonian parents is decoded by Lex Luthor, it is also for him to conquer the world, a message Clark did not hear before. So why is Superman so good? It is because of the parents who actually raised him, George and Martha Kent. They were good and kind and moral people who passed that on to him. According to the comics, he was raised as a Methodist. So he was raised to avoid harm, to do good and to serve society.

But what about the influence of his genes? Studies of identical twins seem to show that about 40% to 50% of our personality traits are inherited. The other 50 to 60% comes from the environment in which we were raised, like whether our parents were warm and responsive, or were abusive or neglectful. Yet we are still capable of change. Teenagers and even adults from 20 to 40 years old show this ability to change from the way they were raised. For example, two famous men came out of similar situations, but chose very different paths. Both were raised to think that their grandparents were their parents but later found out that the woman they thought was their sister was really their birth mother. One of those men was Ted Bundy, the serial killer; the other was actor and 3 time Oscar winner Jack Nicholson. Your past need not determine your future.

Neuroplasticity, or the brain's ability to change, persists even into old age. Anna Moses didn't take up painting until she was in her late 70s and became a world-famous folk artist known as Grandma Moses. Julia Child published her first cookbook at 50. Nola Ochs enrolled in college at 95, becoming the world's oldest college graduate. Anthony Flew was a leading voice for atheism for 66 years until he changed his mind and admitted that there is a God. Every second of your life is a second chance at life.

God knows this. So he did not give up on his people, though they did not stay faithful to his covenant with them. They did not love him with their whole heart and they did not love their neighbors as themselves. He was especially displeased with their king who set the tone for the people of Judah. Addressing King Jehoiakim, he says, “Sure to be judged is the king who builds his palace using injustice and treats people unfairly while adding its upper rooms. He makes his countrymen work for him for nothing. He does not pay them for their labor. He says, 'I will build myself a large palace with spacious upper rooms.' He cuts windows in its walls, panels it with cedar, and paints its rooms red. Does it make you any more of a king that you outstrip everyone else in building with cedar? Just think about your father. He was content that he had food and drink. He did what was just and right. So things went well with him. He upheld the cause of the poor and needy. So things went well for Judah. The Lord says, 'That is a good example of what it means to know me.' But you are always thinking and looking for ways to increase your wealth by dishonest means. Your eyes and your heart are set on killing some innocent person and committing fraud and oppression.” (Jeremiah 22:13-16) People thought the king just automatically had God's blessing and they were taking the wrong lessons from his actions.

Yet God knows that his people can change. He says, “The days are surely coming, says the Lord, when I will make a new covenant with the house of Israel and the house of Judah.” It will be unlike the covenant he made with them when they left Egypt, the covenant they broke. He says, “But this is the covenant that I will make with the house of Israel after those days, says the Lord: I will put my law within them, and I will write it on their hearts, and I will be their God, and they shall be my people. No longer shall they teach one another or say to each other, 'Know the Lord,' for they shall all know me, from the least of them to the greatest, says the Lord, for I will forgive their iniquity and remember their sin no more.”

Real change begins with a change of heart. And remember that in Biblical times, the heart was considered the center of both thought and will. So to repent, to change your life, you have to change how you think and how you decide to act. As someone said, one definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results. Yet humans are so committed to staying the same that they resist change even when it is an obvious improvement. As a nurse, I have noticed that people rarely make major changes in their lifestyle until it becomes too painful not to change. A heart attack or a health scare will often convince a person to change their habits when family, friends and loved ones were unable to persuade them to do so. But I have also seen people refuse to change even then. I have seen people on continuous oxygen or who were getting breathing treatments choose to keep smoking.

Change starts with realizing you have a problem. But that alone isn't enough. When I was in a skid row ministry during college, we were taught that the first step in helping someone with a drinking problem was to get them to admit they were an alcoholic. So we were shocked when the homeless guys we met readily admitted to being alcoholics. But to them it meant, “I'm an alcoholic so I can't help myself.” All they wanted from us was money so they could buy some beer or wine. The word “addiction” comes from the Latin word used of someone who was so far in debt that they were legally bound or enslaved to the person they owed. Which is why Jesus says in our gospel that “everyone who commits a sin is a slave to sin.”

Someone in AA once summarized the first 3 steps in that 12 step program this way: (1) I can't. (2) God can. (3) I'm gonna let him. And those are basically what Paul is talking about in Romans. “All have sinned and fall short of the glory of God,” he says in our passage. But merely knowing that we have violated God's moral law can't save us. It's like knowing that you have cancer. That knowledge alone won't cure you. It should spur you to go to a doctor and get help. I had a friend who had what looked like a mole the size of a silver dollar on her arm. All of us who worked with her asked if she had seen a doctor. She said she had. But that wasn't the truth. Because she was afraid of needles and doctors she didn't get it checked or biopsied. She tried picking it off by herself. It was melanoma: skin cancer. It metastasized to her brain. First it disabled her, as if she had had a stroke, and then, in just a month, it killed her. Had she gone to the doctor when she first noticed it growing, he could have saved her.

That's where faith comes in. We can't save ourselves but if we turn to God and trust him, he can save us from the moral and spiritual illnesses we call sins. Untreated these unhealthy thoughts, words and acts can spread to other parts of our life, make us worse off and eventually lead to spiritual death. So we need to trust God, the way someone with a mole that is getting larger, changing color or has irregular borders should trust a doctor to check it and treat it. Without that trust, without that faith in God's power and goodness, he cannot save a person, any more than a doctor, however skilled, can save someone who rejects his expertise and help. God is love and love requires consent.

This is Reformation Sunday. It commemorates the October day in 1517 that Martin Luther nailed to the door of the church in Wittenberg his 95 theses, or ideas he wanted to debate concerning the Roman Catholic Church's practices. These came from what he had learned when teaching the Bible as a professor of moral theology at the local university. What triggered his response was that, to raise money, his bishop and the pope were selling indulgences, which bypassed the need to repent and change one's life in order to receive forgiveness. It would be like paying your doctor to issue a certificate saying you were healthy without you actually having to to stop smoking or drinking or overeating. Luther challenged this by saying the pope did not have such authority. Repentance wasn't an external system but an inner process. We are forgiven when we repent, turn to our loving God and trust in him alone. We cannot earn this; it is the free gift of our gracious God. That is why it is good news. Like it was to Luther who was a very conscientious monk, not because he loved God but because he feared and even hated him for requiring us to be perfect if we were to be accepted by him. When he realized this wasn't true and that he had gotten the wrong idea about God from what his church said and not from what the Bible said, it changed his life and his attitude towards God. He wanted others to know this good news.

And while doing good works cannot save us, God will, through the gift of his Spirit in our life, help us to gain the ability to do what is right. Through the Spirit, we experience daily renewal, spiritual growth and the ability to produce the good works God has prepared for us to do, like loving our neighbor. After the surgeons saved my life and put me back together, the physical therapists helped me learn how to use my repaired limbs to walk again. That was always the goal of the healthcare team. The goal of what Jesus did on the cross and what the Spirit does in our lives is to restore us to spiritual health so we can walk with God and be with him, the source of all good things.

Luther didn't want to start a new church but to reform it. And there have been other times when popes and monastic leaders worked to clean up corruption in the church and promote love of our neighbor, through the building of hospitals and providing charity for the poor. In response to the Protestant Reformation, the Roman Catholic Church banned abuses like the sale of indulgences. In the modern era, various denominations have had dialogues with each other about repairing church unity. In 1999, the Roman Catholic Church and the World Lutheran Federation agreed that our salvation is based on God's grace through faith in him, as Luther had said.

I think it's time for another reformation. We need to repent from seeking earthly power, the way the church did in the Middle Ages, when popes had armies and tried to make kings subject to them. When Satan offered him all the kingdoms of this world, Jesus refused them, yet some Christians have sought to possess political power even if it means compromising Jesus' values. (Matthew 4:8-10) We need to repent of our worship of money and our idolatry of earthly success. (Matthew 6:24; Luke 18:25) We need to repent our neglect of the poor and our oppression of foreigners in our land, whom God keeps telling us throughout the Bible not to mistreat. (Isaiah 1:17; Jeremiah 5:28-29; Leviticus 19:33-34)

We need to rethink our priorities and the way we look at these things. We need to admit our spiritual poverty and mourn our sinful actions. We need to ask God for forgiveness and to write on our hearts his commandments to love him and love others as we do ourselves. We need to renew our hunger and thirst for righteousness. We need to recommit ourselves to being humble, merciful, pure in heart and peacemakers. But we can only do this if we are free from our slavery to sin, to its spiritually unhealthy habits of body, mind and spirit. And we can only do that if we turn to Jesus and put our whole trust in his power, goodness and forgiveness. Because as Jesus says in today's gospel, “if the Son makes you free, you will be free indeed.”