In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. He was in the world, and the world came into being through him; yet the world did not know him. He came to what was his own, and his own people did not accept him. But to all who received him, who believed in his name, he gave power to become children of God, who were born, not of blood or of the will of the flesh or of the will of man, but of God.
And the Word became flesh and lived among us, and we have seen his glory, the glory as of a father’s only son, full of grace and truth. (John testified to him and cried out, “This was he of whom I said, ‘He who comes after me ranks ahead of me because he was before me.’”) From his fullness we have all received, grace upon grace. The law indeed was given through Moses; grace and truth came through Jesus Christ. No one has ever seen God. It is God the only Son, who is close to the Father’s heart, who has made him known.

Did you make any New Year’s resolutions? Have you already broken your New Year’s resolution?

I typically am not one to make resolutions. However, this year I decided to give it a shot. For a while now I have not been happy with how I’ve been taking care of myself. Not enough exercise, too much junk food…you know the story. So, this year I have made a resolution to do something about it.

I might not have had the courage to address this problem had it not been for someone telling me, “Don’t worry about keeping those New Year’s resolutions. You only have to deal with them halfway through February and then you can give them up for Lent!”

I have heard that one of the keys to achieving a goal is to have a solid understanding of where you are going – a picture in your mind of where you would like to be within a certain time frame. For example, athletes make certain performance goals and work out accordingly. People who work likely have a goal of a certain amount of money or a certain job title. Parents have a picture of what kind of person they would like their child to grow up being and this affects how they interact with the child.

If we do not have goals that we are working toward, there is a huge risk that we are not going anywhere.

I know some of you have already made resolutions, some of you have already broken your resolutions, and some of you don’t want to make resolutions. Regardless of your position, I have a challenge for each one of you – a resolution I want you to make:

I want you to be incredible.

After reading today’s Gospel lesson, to expect anything less of you would be unfaithful and demeaning to you.

Buried there, deep in the verbose verbiage of John’s introduction to the Gospel, lies a powerful phrase that demands our attention and action.

Verse 12 reads, “But to all who received him, who believed in his name, he gave power to become children of God.”

As you begin this New Year, Christ is inviting you to know deep in your heart that you can be more than you are today only because of the incredible grace that God has infused with your life.
As you begin this New Year you are invited to know deep in your heart that your life matters.
As children of God, we must expect and demand that we would do incredible things with our lives.

This realization hit me hard yesterday. I got home around 8am, after the middle school and high school overnight lock-in and was eager to go to bed for the first time in 24 hours. I wasn’t asleep long before I woke up and I felt awful…emotionally awful.

In my half-slumbering state I had a thought that terrified me. I honestly don’t remember what the exact thought was. All I know is that I woke up very concerned and slightly scared. Honestly, it was a feeling that reminded me of the time in my life where I felt most distant from God.

Lying there, half awake, I tried to find something to speak peace to my soul. I started thinking about the events of the past week: my vacation with family in Ohio, presiding at a funeral this week, New Year’s Eve, the incredible Ohio State Buckeye victory in the Sugar Bowl, the fun of the lock-in, and also the sermon I had prepared for today. However, nothing was comforting me, not even the words I was prepared to proclaim to you today. I was in a dark place and I couldn’t glean any hope out of my own message. But then I remembered that line from John’s gospel. “But to all who received him, who believed in his name, he gave power to become children of God.”

That…that message gave me hope. That gave me even more hope than the fun vacation memories, the Ohio State victory, or being locked in the church with 20 teenagers for 12 hours!

And so I reworked the sermon that failed to fill me with peace, and focused more on the incredible message and responsibility in the words, “But to all who received him, who believed in his name, he gave power to become children of God.”

That message means that you and I have the potential to be like Christ. We have a potential within our hearts and souls for peace, a potential for joy, a potential for hope, a potential for love, a potential for forgiveness that is greater than we can possibly imagine.

Try to grasp the significance of that truth. We no longer have to live lives filled with inner conflict, anger, resentment, fear, hatred, guilt or rejection. Sure, those emotions will make their way into our hearts and minds, but by the power of God’s Holy Spirit we can become new people, God’s people, incredible people filled with peace and hope more powerful than the emotions that threaten to destroy ourselves or others.

My deepest desire for all of you today is for you to understand that God exists within you and because of that you are incredible and you can do incredible things on behalf of others.

I want this church to continue to find new ways to be an incredible church – a group of incredible people who are energized by Christ’s presence and being a force for good in the community, nation, and world.

Now, you don’t have to believe me. You can go home and say, “Ah our pastor…so young and naïve. Do you think he really believes we could do something incredible?” You have the right to read this text, to hear the good news, and not let it impact your life at all.

But know this, I will do everything I can to make you believe that you are incredible. That’s what I am called to do. That’s my new year’s resolution.

So, all together, let us embark on another year with raised expectations and the understanding that God has called us to become his children…his incredible children who can bear words and actions of peace, hope, joy, love, and grace to this world.

John 8:31-36

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 said to him, “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, “Anyone who commits sin is a slave to sin. The slave does not have a permanent place in the household, but the Son has a place there forever. So, if the Son makes you free, you will be free, indeed.”

Oddly enough, I had slavery on the brain this week even before I started to consider this Gospel for Reformation Sunday. Many of you know we had a pretty meaningful evening last Sunday, watching this documentary about human trafficking called Sex and Money. I learned at least one new thing that night which was deeply profound for me and that I’m still stewing about. But before I go there, you should know that I’m no prude about this subject. I was a Psychology, Criminology major in college, remember, and I’ve done my fair share of thinking about these sorts of things. I even watch plenty of documentaries, like that one, in my free time, much to my wife’s dismay (She thinks it’s a bit weird how interested I am in the world of criminal behavior.)

And despite what I feel like I know – or knew – about it all, it wouldn’t have taken much to convince me that it might be worth considering that something like prostitution would/could, maybe even should be legalized in more places. Morality and ethics aside, I can get behind the notion that it would save lots of time and money on the part of law enforcement, the court and criminal justice systems, jails and prisons, and all the rest. I can even see that in some instances, like prostitution for example, there are grown people making adult decisions about what they do with their lives, their bodies and their money.

If it were legal – prostitution, I mean – at least it could be regulated, the argument goes. If it were legal, at least there could be mandatory testing and treatment for diseases. If it were legal, the workers would have more opportunity to manage their own affairs, more power over their own money, more control over their own well-being, less of a chance they’d be taken advantage by their pimps.

But the most enlightening part of the documentary we saw last Sunday came when a woman (I wasn’t taking notes, so I’m not sure if she was a psychologist, a sociologist, a professor, a lawyer, or what), but she said something about being thankful that during the days of the abolition movement in our own country, she was glad no one ever proposed the notion that there might be better, safer, more fair ways to regulate the owning of African people as slaves. It was an all or nothing sort of deal. It was either going to be all okay or it would all be deemed an abomination. And thankfully, of course, it was all abolished, from a legal, cultural perspective anyway.

Her point was that there is no way to pretend – or that we should ever be convinced – that slavery is okay; that you can regulate or make fair or keep safe or make right the enslavement of another human being – whether it’s Africans during the 18th Century or boys and girls, or men and women in this day and age.

Like I said, I’m no prude about this. I can imagine there are grown men and grown women who make adult, informed, considered, consenting decisions about their participation in the work of prostitution. But, if you believe the statistics, this just isn’t true for too many, if not the vast majority, of workers in that field – and it’s the point at which good ol’ fashioned prostitution begins to look a lot more like modern day “human trafficking” and slavery.

For instance, the average age of entry into the human trafficking industry is 12 years old.

Some statistics suggest that 1 in 3 young people is solicited for sex within 48 hours of running away or becoming homeless in the U.S.

The average price for a human being in the world is $90.

And finally, if a woman survives all of that and "decides” to make it a way of life, the average prostitute, in an effort to escape abuse and violence of all kinds, leaves and goes back to her pimp 5-7 times before getting away from him for good, if she ever does. It’s all very much like any abusive relationship. The victims are convinced they are loved and in love with these men. They are groomed into believing this is what they’re worth; how life is; that they don’t have any other option so that this is what they want, even, for themselves.

These women live so long under such mind-numbing, mind-controlling, mind-warping conditions that they believe they are deciding, choosing, consenting to this way of life. Which is where – believe it or not – this Reformation Gospel comes to mind. For most of us, it may not be as shocking or as shameful or as dark as the world of human trafficking, but for others it may just be.

Either way, my favorite moment in this Gospel is when the Jews who were listening to Jesus say, “We are descendants of Abraham and have never been slaves to anyone. What do you mean by saying, ‘You will be made free.’?”

The truth, of course, is that they come from a long history of slavery, these Jews. Jesus could have said, “Are you crazy? Are you serious? Are you so ignorant of your past that you don’t know? How can you say you’ve never been slaves to anyone? As Jews, we’ve been slaves as often as we haven’t, it seems. What about all those generations in Egypt? Or all those years in Assyria? What about the fact that, even now, centuries later, we’re living under the rule of Rome and none of us is as ‘free’ as we’d like to be?

And none of that is really even what Jesus is talking about or referring to or getting at, except that it highlights how readily we allow ourselves to misunderstand the reality of our circumstances.

See, Jesus isn’t talking about freedom from some social, political, or cultural kinds of slavery the way we – and those First Century Jews in his audience – are inclined to assume. Jesus is talking about freedom from the helpless state of our souls and freedom from the slavery of sin that binds everyone of us.

“Whoever commits sin is a slave to sin,” Jesus says. “Whoever commits sin is a slave.”

So, could I see a show of hands? Who among us is without sin in the eyes of God?

So, we’re clear about this. We get it. Like Paul says, we all sin and we all fall short of the glory of God. Like it or not. It’s just the way it is. We’re sinners. Losers. Broken. Enslaved. Bound. Helpless.

And, like the Jews of Jesus day, there are Pharisees among us, and pastors and pimps and people living next door, too, who try to convince us, and trick us and fool us into believing we need them and their rules and their ways to be free.

But Jesus shows up and says none of that will do. He says we need someone bigger and something better than anything in this world to set us free. Specifically, he says, “the slave does not have a permanent place in the household, but the son has a place there forever. So if the son makes you free, you will be free indeed.”

The world is filled with people just like you and me: sinful, broken, enslaved, fearful, helpless people who are either so numbed by or immune to their sins, or so overwhelmed by the gravity and the shame of their sinful ways, that they can’t imagine being released or freed or forgiven or allowed in to the good graces of their Creator. And there are also those enslaved by their ability to be or to appear flawless, bound by their need for perfection because they can’t bear to disappoint their family, their friends, themselves or their score-keeping, sin-counting, judgment-casting, fear-mongering God.

But Jesus Christ – the Son who has a place in the household of God’s heaven forever – makes room for us all there: Pharisees and free people; the pimp and the prostitute; the sinner and the saint. Because of this good news and by God’s abundant, amazing, all-consuming grace we are invited to be more hopeful than we are helpless and to live like liberated people – sinners, forgiven; not dead, but alive; not bound, but free; not afraid but full of hope. And no matter how far away we think we are from the ugly, scary, shameful ways of the world around us, we have prayers to offer and arms to open and resources to give and good news to share, in Jesus’ name, with all those who haven’t heard or come to believe any of this, just yet.

Amen

(While it’s true we’re called to leave judgment and forgiveness, redemption and the eternal state of our souls up to the grace of God, there are things we can and should do to free people who are bound, in this world, by the kind of stuff I talked about here. Check out www.purchased.org if you want to learn more or find some ways to help or get involved.)

"Be Incredible" – John 1: 1, 10-18

"Pimps, Prostitutes, Pharisees and Freedom" – John 8:31-36