Grace to you and peace from God our Father and the Lord Jesus Christ. Amen.

“And you will know the truth, and the truth will set you free.”

These words may seem full of promise, but they also contain a threat. We have learned to hear these words as belonging on some library or inscribed on a cathedral of learning. Study hard, exercise your mind, and you will be free. We are near some of the most outstanding institutions of learning in the world. The results of research and thought have gone far in the mission to relieve suffering and to organize human communities in ways that enhance the possibilities of life.

I am saddened by the low status of learning, research, and scholarship in our society today. I am also appalled that it is the religious communities that have encouraged this development toward disparagement of education. Two examples:

Citizens of Alabama are being challenged to reject revisions of their constitution which are clearly discriminatory racially. Those provisions were ruled invalid decades ago, but the state never officially altered the wording of their constitution. Christians in the state are opposing the change because it also calls for the elimination of these words.¹

There is no constitutional right to education in Alabama.

Some conservative Christians do not want to remove this clause for fear that the poorer school districts would use it to sue for more support which would result in higher taxes. To their minds to take away the words rejecting any constitutional claim to education would imply that there is a constitutional right to education.

Perhaps these Christians do not think that the truth learned in schools can set people free. . . or perhaps they do.

A second arena where conservative Christians have wanted to put the breaks on learning has been in the teaching of creationism. This is a view committed to the belief that chapters 1 and 2 of Genesis are accurate historical and scientific accounts of the creation event. Creationists want our science textbooks to use these stories as the foundation for a scientific explanation of creation’s coming to be. All data is to be subjected to this belief. To follow this way of thinking is against our understanding of how we gain knowledge. Even fundamentalist Christians admit this when they accuse the science community of bias. They call foul when scientists attempt to establish their own hypotheses and reject to quickly the hypothesis of creationists.

I think it is time to be very clear on what it means to know the truth and to be set free by that truth.

Today is Reformation Sunday. It is a day to reclaim the rich heritage of faith which reformers like Luther, Melanchthon, and Calvin delivered to the world. They refined the mission of the church. The reformers not only sought to reform the theology and practice of the church. They also brought a revolution in society which divested the church of much wealth, altered the hierarchies of the political order, and brought about a revolution in the educational system. It was in the lands of the Reformation that science and learning took root. Philipp Melanchthon was the consummate renaissance man. His own achievements in scholarship were matched by his efforts at overhauling the school systems of Europe. For the reformers education was basic to being human and imperative for being Christian.

It was the reformers’ love of the Bible which compelled them to educate every person. Their devotion to the Bible resulted from high regard for the Bible over other church traditions. It was the Bible which delivered to them a truth that would set them free. I am not sure if Luther believed the creation stories as accurate scientific and historical accounts. I am sure of one thing. In his translation and exegesis of these stories and others, Luther distinguished between all the material of the Bible and its purpose. He writes in a preface to the Bible.

All the true and proper sacred writings agree on one point. They all preach and promote Christ. The proper touchstone for evaluating the books is whether we find that they truly promote Christ or not, for all scripture bears witness to Christ. Sensational

It is this distinction that allowed Luther and those who stood in his tradition to distinguish between the truths of scholarship and science and the truth of scripture. The truth which is discovered, say, in the Genome project may be a truth that lengthens our life expectancy beyond our dreams. But the Genome project will not tell us how we are to live and die. The truths of science and faith are really different truths when we understand this. Faith and science will conflict when science tries to tell the world that it knows the answer to the meaning of life. Faith and science will conflict when religion tries to tell science what it should find before it even begins looking.

“All scripture bears witness to Christ,” writes Luther. Luther was not so sure about Copernicus’ theory that the sun is the center of our solar system. But the theory did not seem to disturb his trust in the reliability of scripture to do it’s work. The Bible was still the manger which held the Christ and presented the Word Made Flesh to a world in desperate need of a truth that would set it free.

For Luther, Jesus Christ is the bodily Word. It was not scripture that was of the highest value. For Luther the highest value was the spoken word which proclaims Christ. Scripture bears witness to Christ. Christ is the very Word, the truth which that will set us free.

Dear congregation, how can it be that Christ is the Word? It is so by virtue of the promise that Jesus himself bore. Jesus carried out his ministry in the trust that the promise of God was being fulfilled. This is the same promise repeated by the prophet.

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. (Jeremiah 31:33)

Jesus introduced an amazing consciousness of the presence of God. He proclaimed that the rule of God was being realized, in spite of all appearances to the contrary. He showed awareness that through him the kingdom was coming to fullness in his speeches and stories about the mercy of God, in his healings and exorcisms, and in his acts of grace to all the outsiders and aliens with whom he shared table. Jesus brought a challenge to the world to see what the world was like under God’s rule of mercy and justice.

The promise which Jesus embodied undermined every human effort to achieve parity with God. Regardless of the arena in which we choose to exercise our strength, Jesus challenges us by the proclamation that God comes to the world not as respondent but as initiator. The religious and the political trusted in their own abilities to prevail in life, to outwit death, and put God on their side. Jesus manifest complete trust in God, his heavenly Father.

It is in this way that Jesus did the unimaginable. Rather than try himself to prevail over life and to outwit death, he gave himself without qualification to God. This meant that he died at the hands of human beings who killed him because they could. They detested his implied judgment of our futile efforts to live when we are frightened of death.

The resurrection of Jesus Christ is the proclamation of the church that God’s promise has not failed nor will it. The message of the resurrection is the message of God’s faithfulness. In Hebrew there is little to distinguish between the word for truth and the word for faithfulness.

Truth means faithfulness on which we can rely and in whom we can take refuge, and we ourselves will stand by what we say and live up to what is expected. Thus God everywhere in Scripture glorifies himself regarding us in the fact that he is merciful and faithful, always displaying faithfulness and love and offering us to the full both friendship and blessing.

Jesus says, “if you abide in my word you are my disciples.” The word to which he refers is himself. Not the Bible but Jesus Christ is the Word to whom the Bible bears witness. It is not our faithfulness which is the truth. It is God’s faithfulness which is the truth that sets us free to live in conformity with God’s will and in expectation that God’s kingdom is coming.

And the peace of God which surpasses all understanding guard your heart and your minds in Christ Jesus. Amen