Transcript
LUNDBLAD: It's wonderful to be with you. I share with you tonight a reading from the Gospel of John, the eighth chapter, beginning with the 31st verse. "Then Jesus said to the Jews who had believed in Him, 'If you continue in my Word, you are truly my disciples,
and you will know the truth, and the truth will make you free.' They answered Jesus, 'We are descendants of Abraham and have never been slaves to anyone. What do you mean by saying, "You will be made free"?' Jesus answered them, 'Very truly
I tell you, everyone who commits sin is a slave to sin. The slave does not have a permanent place in the household. The son has a place there forever, so if the son makes you free, you will be free indeed.'" This is the gospel for this night.
I come here tonight, a Lutheran, backed by a Baptist choir, onto Presbyterian holy ground, armed with a gospel text from Reformation Sunday, which a Presbyterian
friend of mine calls "Luther Day." I can almost hear the pounding of Martin Luther's hammer on the Wittenberg Church doors, pounding out the rhythm of this reformation text, "And you will know the truth, and the truth will make you free."
But these strong, liberating words come to us in the middle of a chapter which begins and ends with the threat to stone someone to death. What is it about this truth
that is so threatening? What is the connection between this Word of truth and the threat to pick up stones and kill? I invite you to come back with me to the first part of this chapter. Now I know, since I have taught
some Presbyterians at various seminaries that Presbyterian students have to pass a Bible content exam, so that even though you don't have the Bibles open before you, you will remember how the eighth chapter begins. But if there are perhaps some Lutherans who have wandered in here, I will remind you that if you look at the beginning of the eighth chapter of John,
you may find that it begins with the twelfth verse. And those who are curious will go looking for the other 11. You may find in your Bible a footnote that directs you to the bottom of the page, and there you will find the story, or in the new RSV Bible you will find the beginning of John 8 in brackets
because there is some doubt about its authenticity. But if you go to the margins, or if you look between the brackets, you will find the story of the woman who was brought to Jesus, accused of adultery. She has lived
in the margins for centuries. And indeed she seems to be a victim of the truth, or at least the facts, for she has been caught in the act of adultery. Not rumor, not speculation, not
"did you hear," but, "We caught her." And it isn't speculation what to do with her. In the law, Moses says that she must be stoned to death. They have all the facts on their side,
but are they willing to hear the truth? The story is strange. Jesus doesn't argue. He says nothing, but He bends down and writes something on the ground.
We never know what it is, which is unfortunate because if we knew, then maybe we would know exactly what Jesus meant by the truth. It would be handy, wouldn't it, if they could have just lifted that dirt up and handed it down through the centuries. Perhaps He began
to write the sins of all those in the circle, according to the ancient custom of Jeremiah, but we don't even know if He wrote words. We only know that He bent down to enter the silent world of the woman accused, and then when He stood up, He said to those in the
circle, "Let him who is without sin cast the first stone." Then He bends down again, and He writes something else on the ground, and again to our frustration we do not know what it is. We only know that when He looked up, everyone was gone except the woman.
She has not, up to this point, spoken a word, and nobody has asked her her side of the story. She has been completely silent, and it is into her silence that Jesus has bent low, and then
there is a poignant moment when the narrator says to us that Jesus looked up, and we can only assume that He is looking up at her. And I'm wondering if anybody every in her life had ever looked up at her or looked up to her before.
And then Jesus breaks the silence, and for the first time in this story, someone speaks directly to her, and He says, "Woman, where are they? Has no one condemned you?" And only then, for the first time in the story,
her silence is broken. "No, Lord." And then Jesus says to her, "Neither do I condemn you. Go and sin no more." We will quickly point out that last part. Jesus said, "Go and sin no more." Lest people hear only
the first part, "Neither do I condemn you," and think that adultery is all right, so be sure to emphasize, preachers, when you preach this text, "Go and sin no more." After all, we who preach must be careful of an erosion of the truth.
But what is the truth? Had Jesus somehow discerned the truth when He bent down
and entered into the silent world of this woman accused? We don't know, of course, because we'll never know what Jesus wrote on the ground, and Jesus doesn't tell us what He was thinking. But it is very clear that the authorities and the leaders were very worried about the erosion of what they thought was the truth, and so by the
end of this very eighth chapter of John, they have picked up stones not to throw at the woman but to throw at Jesus. The truth seemed to be eroding all around them. They felt as though they were standing on shaky ground, and so they took up stones, John tells us, to throw at Jesus, but
He hid Himself and went out of the temple. Why such a violent reaction to the one who stood in the midst of them and said, "You will know the truth, and the truth will make you free"? Perhaps they were still smarting from Jesus's seeming alliance with this woman accused of adultery.
Or again, they were visibly upset that Jesus had claimed to have seen Abraham. "You are not yet 50 years old," they said to Jesus, and again, you see, the facts were on their side. He wasn't yet 50 years old, and He never would be.
For you and I, we know that this threat that Jesus proclaimed in the midst of the people would follow Him to the very end of His life, not too much longer after this time, and that He would be brought Himself into the vicious circle, all by Himself, to stand before Pilate.
"So you are a king?" Pilate asked. "You say that I am a king. For this I was born, and for this I have come into the world to bear witness
to the truth. Everyone who is of the truth hears my voice." Then Pilate said to Jesus, "What is truth?" And Jesus is silent.
There is only silence, but in the silence is the answer, for the one who is standing there in the vicious circle of both religious leaders and the power of the state, this one standing there in silence is, Himself,
the truth. We should have heard it from the beginning of John, "And the Word became flesh," he wrote, "and dwelt among us, full of grace and truth." And yet that word we have heard so many times,
it spins round in our head like a record played too many times, and we no longer hear how crazy and absurd it is. The philosophers who first heard such a Word, who believed indeed in the notion of an eternal logos, an idea, a creative power that was with God from the very beginning, you could see them, almost
hear them being with John throughout that prologue, until he comes to that 14th verse when he says, "And this eternal all-knowing creative Word became flesh and dwelt among us, full of grace and truth." It was absurd.
It was crazy. You didn't say such a thing about an eternal, creating logos. We will only begin to get close to how crazy this was, for someone to say such a thing. If we can borrow a phrase,
indeed a paraphrase of this gospel text for tonight, from our sister Flannery O'Connor, the great Southern writer of our own century, who in her letters collected together in the book called Habit of Being, she writes, "You will know the truth, and the truth will make
you odd." You and I, gathered in this room, whether we are ordained or laypeople, you and I are called to bear witness to a truth that will
make us odd in the eyes of the world, that will, in the words of Martin Luther King Jr. make us "maladjusted" in the eyes of the world. And sisters and brothers, I believe with all my heart that it is a word which bids us, all of us, learn to bend
low to those places where people have been silenced and have not been allowed to speak the truth, that those of us who believe in this one named Jesus Christ, we must dare to bend down to those places
where truth has not been allowed to be spoken. We must do what our sister Nell Morton, departed theologian of our own time, bids us do, when she says that we, you and I, must "hear silence into speech."
But it is a very frightening task, for voices which are silenced have often been silenced for a reason. For generations, indeed for centuries, the voices of women
who were battered were silenced. It is almost impossible to believe that the first shelters for battered women did not happen in this country until the early 1970s, and that now those of us who are in the churches, who sometimes feel
like we have heard too much about violence in the home would perhaps have heard nothing at all without the tireless work of people like Reverend Marie Fortune, who started her ministry on a shoestring and a prayer in Seattle, some 12 years ago, her one agenda to get people to
listen to the voices of battered women. I know, as an ordained pastor of the church, that I stand in a long line of clergy who have been more interested in saving marriages than in saving women's lives. Someone finally dared to listen to the voices which were speaking
in silence. Some years ago, I spoke at a seminary in the South. A woman who was a member of the senior class told me that every woman in her class was a survivor of either sexual abuse or incest, and I said to a friend of mine who worked for a national Lutheran
organization in Chicago, I said, "Why do all these women end up in the seminary?" And she said to me, "Barbara, you simply have no idea how many, many thousands of stories there are in the land. You are just beginning to hear."
I never heard the word "incest" growing up. I never heard about sexual abuse. Silence was the rule. Don't tell anybody. Keep the shade down. If you told anybody, who would believe you
anyway? Or for those pastors, ministers, priests, who have abused women in their parishes, the answer for years and years until very recently, "Find him a parish in another synod, another conference, another diocese, another
Presbytery. But don't say anything to anybody." Sadly, in the last months, I have come to realize that my own denomination -- and perhaps it is true for many others -- has begun to pay attention to these
voices because of the threat of million-dollar lawsuits. And the in-house legal counsel of the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America spends more than half of his time doing nothing but listening to stories of sexual abuse.
There are stories living still in silence, and if we would know the truth, we must, you and I, dare to bend low to those places where we have not been listening.
It scares us to death, and at a time when the churches are very, very worried about money, my own as well as yours. We don't want anything threatening to be spoken, or to be
brought out of silence. We barely dare yet to stammer the words, "Gay man, lesbian woman."
But there are stories living in the silence which Jesus bids us hear, not so that we will be relevant or "with it," but so that we will hear the whole truth. You will know the truth, and the truth will make you
odd. You will be in the minority. They will vote against you. You will speak, and many will laugh. You will insist on listening to someone who has never been heard, and they will say
to you, "When is the church going to get to its business and preach the gospel?" And then, sisters and brothers, you and I must say, "We have been called to proclaim the truth, and even if it makes us odd, we must proclaim this truth, and even if it bids us bend lower than we've ever been before, so that we can
look up into faces we have only discounted, we must speak. For we do not speak on our own account, but on the one who comes into our midst, who takes us in all of our oddness
and continues to say to you and to me, "You will know the truth. You will know the truth. Keep listening and you will know the truth, and the truth will make you odd, but sisters and brothers, this truth will set you free." Amen.