Sermon Manuscript for Sunday, October 25

Back to the Word, Toward True Freedom

John 8:31-36

The Cracked Liberty Bell

1. This year, 2026, marks exactly 250 years since the United States declared its independence. On July 4th, celebrations of the 250th anniversary were held all across the country, and many people traveled to Philadelphia to see Independence Hall and the Liberty Bell that stands near it. Have any of you seen that bell in person? I have not seen it myself, but I remember being surprised by two things when I looked at photographs of it and learned its history.

2. The first was that a verse of Scripture is engraved on it. Leviticus 25:10, the command to proclaim liberty to all the inhabitants of the land in the fiftieth year, the year of Jubilee, runs around the top of the bell. In other words, when America first sang of freedom, the very first thing it held on to was the Word of God.

3. But what surprised me even more was that the bell has a large crack in it. Ever since it cracked, it has not been able to ring properly. It is a bell engraved with the command to proclaim liberty, and yet that very bell, because of its crack, cannot make a sound. And what is even more ironic is that when this bell was first made, countless people in this land were still living as slaves.

4. The people who first began calling it the "Liberty Bell" were not the government, but Christians who were crying out for the abolition of slavery. You could say they did it in order to ask, "We have engraved a command to proclaim liberty, so why are we still holding human beings as slaves?"

5. I began to wonder whether that cracked bell might be a picture of all of us. We all talk about freedom. We say America is the land of the free, and we, too, crossed the Pacific with hopes of that freedom. But is it possible that there is a crack inside of us, so that we live without being able to sound the note of freedom as we should?

6. Even this year, at its 250th anniversary, this nation is still arguing, in many different voices, over what freedom actually is. For some, freedom means that no one interferes with me. For others, freedom is a right that everyone should share together. There is only one word, "freedom," and yet what it means is so different from person to person.

7. The British philosopher Isaiah Berlin explained freedom by dividing it into two kinds. One is "freedom from." It is the state in which no one oppresses or interferes with me, the state of being untied from what bound me. The other is "freedom to." It is the freedom, once released, to become the person I ought to become, the freedom to move toward something.

8. But most of the time we only think about the first kind of freedom. We think that as long as we are released, we are free. But if, after being released, we do not know where to go, can we really call that freedom?

9. Another person, the German-born social psychologist Erich Fromm, wrote a book titled Escape from Freedom. He says that people cannot bear freedom as well as we might think. Freedom brings choices, and choices bring responsibility, and that responsibility is so heavy that people would rather hand their freedom over to someone else and simply live as they are told. In other words, even while we say we want freedom, when freedom is actually given to us, we run away from it.

10. Today is Reformation Sunday. As you well know, on October 31, 1517, Martin Luther posted his Ninety-Five Theses on the church door in Wittenberg, and the Reformation began. Three years later, Luther wrote a short work called On the Freedom of a Christian. In it, Luther places two very paradoxical sentences side by side.

11. A Christian is a perfectly free lord of all, subject to none; and at the same time, a Christian is a perfectly dutiful servant of all, subject to all. What does this mean? It means that a person who has received freedom in Christ becomes someone who uses that freedom to serve their neighbor. In Berlin's terms, we could say that "freedom from" leads on to "freedom to."

12. And where did Luther discover this freedom? Not in the institutions of the church, and not in the authority of the pope. He found it in the Word. That is why the first confession of the Reformers was "Scripture alone," Sola Scriptura. The Reformation was a movement that moved forward, but at the same time it was a movement back to the Word. This is why I chose today's sermon title: "Back to the Word, Toward True Freedom."

13. And I think this title also touches the very place where our Yeolin Church is standing right now. Last week, the sale of our Oakland church building was completed. Over the past several months, we have gone through a season of escrow and paperwork, numbers and schedules, meetings and decisions.

14. I want to take this moment to sincerely thank the members of our Board of Trustees who worked so hard for this. But today, I would like us to set all of that down for a moment and look at it once more before the Word. I hope this can be a time for us to examine and confirm why we did this, and what God is expecting of us in this situation.

The Wound That Hurts When Touched

15. Let me ask you something. Have you ever had a wound that hurt so much you would not let anyone come near it? I remember, as a child, falling and scraping my knee badly. When my mother came over with the red antiseptic, before it even touched me I would wave her hands away, crying, "Don't, don't!" and clutch the wound. But what happens to a wound that we hide like that and won't let anyone touch? It gets infected, it festers, and it hurts even more. And even though we know this, there are times we try to protect that wound to the very end.

16. I believe the people in today's passage were exactly such people, carrying exactly such a wound. If you look closely at verse 31, the people Jesus is speaking to are not those who opposed Him, but "the Jews who had believed in him." They were people who had heard His words, believed, and decided to follow Him. And what Jesus said to them was in fact a gracious word: "If you continue in my word, you are truly my disciples; and you will know the truth, and the truth will make you free." Is there anything in these words to be angry about?

17. And yet the people's reaction was as though salt had been poured into an open wound. Verse 33: "We are descendants of Abraham and have never been slaves to anyone. What do you mean by saying, 'You will be made free'?" Why did they react this way? Because to them, "you will be made free" sounded like "you are not free right now."

18. But was it really true that they had never been slaves to anyone? No, it was not. It would not be an exaggeration to say that the history of Israel is a history of slavery. There were more than four hundred years of slavery in Egypt, making bricks. The northern kingdom was carried off by Assyria and scattered. And the southern kingdom of Judah walked nearly a thousand miles into captivity in Babylon, where they sat by the rivers and wept.

19. And what about the time of Jesus? Roman soldiers walked their streets, and the coins they paid in taxes bore the face of the Roman emperor. Every time a Roman soldier passed by, every time they held a coin stamped with the emperor's face, their old wounds must have throbbed and ached all over again.

20. So the claim "we have never been slaves to anyone" was simply not true. "We have never been slaves!" sounds to me like the voice of a wound that has not healed. To admit the wound was to admit weakness, and because they did not want to appear weak, it seems they chose instead to act as if it had never happened.

21. Many of you have probably seen the film The Shawshank Redemption. In that film there is an old man named Brooks. He came into the prison as a young man and spent nearly fifty years inside. He ran the prison library and was even respected by his fellow inmates. But when his parole is finally granted, instead of rejoicing, he is afraid. He is even willing to harm a fellow inmate if it means he can stay in prison.

22. In the end he does go out, but he cannot adjust to the world outside, and he makes a tragic choice. His body had been released, but his heart remained locked behind those walls to the very end. The film calls this being "institutionalized." At first you hate the walls, but as time goes by you get used to them, and eventually you cannot live without them.

23. The story of the circus elephant is similar. If you tie a baby elephant to a stake with a thin rope, no matter how hard it struggles, it cannot break free. After failing a few times, the elephant will not try to break that thin rope even when it is fully grown, even though by then a single lift of its leg would pull the stake right out of the ground. What binds that elephant is not the rope, but its memory of the rope.

24. Beloved church family, don't we have walls and ropes like these, too? Most of us immigrants carry memories of living in someone else's land, constantly watching how others see us. Memories of turning away without saying what we wanted to say because of our broken English; memories of feeling small in front of our children's teachers at school; memories of working hard and still never being recognized. It is the same for immigrant churches. There were days when we borrowed another congregation's building and worshiped in the afternoon, days when every Sunday we had to put the chairs back and leave the kitchen spotless before we left. And through the moving and the construction, I think there are also memories within us of being worn out in body and spirit, and of feeling hurt by one another.

25. But rather than bringing those wounds out into the open, we are more used to covering them over and saying, "We're fine. We don't have any problems." Jesus says in verse 34, "Very truly, I tell you, everyone who commits sin is a slave to sin." A wound that is not cared for does not simply stay a wound. Little by little it becomes a rope that binds us, a wall that holds us in. And insisting that we are free when we are not may itself be the clearest evidence that we are bound.

Back to the Word

26. Then what did Jesus do in front of these people who hid their wounds and pushed back? He did not back away. If you read John chapter 8 to the end, you will see that the people keep arguing and pushing back, but Jesus keeps the conversation going all the way to the end.

27. Here I see the way Jesus loves. To keep speaking even to those who push Him away because of their wounds, to keep showing them a new way beyond those wounds to the very end: this, we can say, is the love of Jesus. This is exactly what our Wesleyan tradition calls prevenient grace. It is the grace by which God comes to us first and speaks to us first, before we ever seek God, and even while we are pushing God away.

28. And that conversation begins with one very small word: "If you continue in my word." It is this little word, "if." It is a condition, but it is not a threat. It is an invitation. It means that a choice has been set before us. Will we keep standing there, hiding our wounds, or will we open those wounds before the Word? That choice is ours.

29. Viktor Frankl, the psychiatrist who survived Auschwitz, tells a story in his book Man's Search for Meaning. In the camps, everything was taken from people: their names, their families, their clothes, even their hair. But there was one thing that could never be taken away, even when everything else had been, and that was the freedom to choose one's attitude in any given circumstance. Even in the same camp, some people gave their last piece of bread to the person next to them. Frankl says that in that very choice lies the last of the human freedoms.

30. Yes. The very fact that we are able to choose is good news. The people in today's passage chose to clutch their wounds and back away to the very end. But we can make a different choice. And the starting point of that choice is "if you continue in my word."

31. The word translated here as "continue," or "abide," is the Greek word meno (μένω). It is a very important word in John's Gospel. When Jesus says in the parable of the vine in chapter 15, "Abide in me," it is this same word. It does not mean hearing the Word once and moving on; it means making your home in the Word and living there. That is what meno means. In other words, becoming a disciple is not about knowing the Word, but about living in the Word.

32. Among America's national holidays there is a day called Juneteenth. President Lincoln signed the Emancipation Proclamation on January 1, 1863. But the enslaved Black people in Galveston, Texas, did not hear the news that they were free until June 19, 1865, two and a half years later. Think about that. Legally, they had already been free for two and a half years. But because they did not know it, for those two and a half years they still worked like slaves, were beaten like slaves, and lived like slaves. Freedom had already been proclaimed, but because they did not know the truth, they could not live in that freedom. "You will know the truth, and the truth will make you free." These words could not come alive more vividly than this.

33. Church family, when we look back on the road we have walked while closing out the Oakland building, honestly, it has been a season of business, a season where the work came first. What needed to be finished by when, how much we would receive and how much we would repay: it was a way of seeing that was focused on getting to the goal. That was not wrong. Had we not done it that way, the work would never have been finished. But now I believe it is time to close the meeting minutes for a moment and open the Bible. Why did we do this? What is God expecting of us in this situation?

34. There is an old Chinese saying, eum-su-sa-won (飮水思源): "When you drink the water, remember the source." When you drink, think about where the water came from, and about the person who dug the well. Standing before that question, this saying came to my mind. That Oakland building was not a building we built.

35. It was a church that those who kept the faith in this land before us offered to God, gathering their offerings penny by penny. And we received that building, freely, through the Annual Conference. In fact, many immigrant churches in America were established in just this way. Immigrant churches have inherited and worshiped in churches that those who came to this land before them built with their sweat. And our Yeolin Church has received such a building from the Conference not once, but twice. How grateful we should be!

36. But I don't think this should end with simply "We received it, and that's nice." What is freely received comes with responsibility. To remember the prayers and devotion of those whose lives are in every brick of that building is not some grand thing; I believe it is the very least courtesy we can offer. And if we have only received, then we now have an obligation to give something as well. Jesus Himself, when He sent out His disciples, told them that since they had received without cost, they should give without cost. To go back to the Word means to go back to the place where we remember this grace we have received, to the place where we remember those who dug the well.

Not as Slaves, but as Children

37. Now let us look at verses 35 and 36: "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." Here the idea of "remaining" appears again. What is the difference between a slave and a son? A slave stays in the house only as long as he is useful. When the work is finished, or when the master no longer needs him, he must leave. But a son is different. That house is his own home. He remains there forever.

38. Here, the Greek word for "make free," eleutheroo (ἐλευθερόω), means to release a slave and change his status to that of a free person. It is a change of status: from slave to son, from someone living as a lodger in another's house to a child living in the Father's own home.

39. So the freedom Jesus speaks of is not simply being released from something. True freedom is the place where we remain as children in the Father's house. It occurred to me that this was exactly what Brooks in Shawshank never had. He walked out beyond the walls, but he had no "home" to go to. Freedom in which the body is released but there is no place to belong can become another kind of prison.

40. And I would like to look at this freedom in a slightly different way as well. Freedom is the opposite of slavery, but I also think freedom is the courage and the decision to cross over from the space of life that has been holding us into a new space. Think of the people of the Exodus. God delivered them out of Egypt, but they still had to step forward at the edge of the Red Sea.

41. And every time things got hard in the wilderness, they complained, "Let's just go back to Egypt. There we sat by the fleshpots and ate our fill of bread." What Fromm called "escape from freedom" was happening right there in that wilderness. Freedom was something given to them, and at the same time it was a road they had to choose again and walk into every single day.

42. Beloved Yeolin Church family, I believe we are standing right now at the edge of that Red Sea. After everything is settled, the proceeds from the building sale will come to about 1.3 million dollars. Of that, 500,000 dollars will go to repaying the loan we received from the Conference when we moved. The Church Council has formed a task force to prayerfully consider how to use the remaining funds. Renovating the church parsonage will likely cost around 200,000 dollars; we will offer a tithe to the Conference; and we need to complete the work we could not finish during our last construction because the funds ran short. And above all, I would like to propose that we set aside about 400,000 dollars as a fund for future generations.

43. As you well know, money from the sale of a church building is not money to be used for operating expenses. It is the devotion that our forebears in faith offered to God, now taking a different form. That is why I believe the task force's direction of setting this money aside for future generations is a wise choice, the most meaningful way to use what we have freely received.

44. There is a story handed down in the Jewish Talmud. An old man was planting a carob tree by the roadside. A passerby asked him, "How many years will it take for this tree to bear fruit?" The old man answered, "About seventy years." "But sir, do you really expect to live long enough to eat its fruit?" And the old man is said to have replied, "When I was born into this world, there were already trees bearing fruit. My ancestors planted them for me. So I, too, am planting for my descendants." It occurred to me that the fund we are setting aside today is exactly that carob tree. We have eaten the fruit of trees our forebears planted. Now it is our turn to plant trees whose fruit we may never see.

45. Once all of this is shared out, honestly, there will be almost nothing left in our hands. Some of you may worry, "Shouldn't we keep at least a little in reserve?" But I wonder whether this might actually be a confession of freedom: freedom from the anxiety that says we must stockpile in order to feel safe, freedom to move from the place of only receiving to the place of giving. As Luther said, the person who is free in Christ becomes someone who serves with that freedom. This is not something for us to boast about. This is the very least courtesy we owe for the grace we have received.

46. And this freedom was not given for us to enjoy alone. It is freedom given so that we can be released from what has bound us, the hurt feelings and wounds of the past, our individual calculations and stubbornness, and join our strength together to build up one community. Those who worship in Korean and those who worship in English, the elders who have kept this church for so many years and the young adults just beginning their walk of faith, all of us here now and the next generation still to come: the community we build together is what we can call the Son's house, the Father's house.

To the Children's Table

47. Today, as we finish hearing the Word, we will come forward to the Lord's Table. As I meditated on today's passage, this Communion table looked very different to me. A servant stands beside the table and serves. But a child sits at the table. It occurred to me that the Lord invites us to this table today to confirm once again that we are not slaves, but children who remain forever in the Father's house.

48. John Wesley called Holy Communion a means of grace. That means it is not a place only for those who are completely healed or perfect. It is a place where we come just as we are, with wounds that have not yet fully healed, opening those wounds before the Lord. And the One who binds up those wounds is the One who was wounded for us. Even the hands and side of the risen Lord still bore the marks of the nails and the spear. The Lord did not hide His wounds. Instead, He showed them and blessed His disciples with peace.

49. The people in today's passage chose to clutch their wounds and back away to the very end. Then what will we choose today? Will we hide our wounds and say, "We don't have any problems"? Or will we open those wounds before the Word, and before the Lord's Table?

50. I think again of that cracked Liberty Bell I mentioned at the beginning. Because of its crack, that bell can no longer ring, but people did not throw it away. Instead, they made that cracked bell a symbol of freedom. I believe our church, and each one of us, is like that. All of us are cracked somewhere. But the Lord does not throw us away, cracked as we are. He calls us back to the Word and leads us into true freedom. And someday, when our lives ring out again, that sound will not be our own sound, but the sound of the Son who has set us free.

51. We have been given the grace of being able to choose: the choice to return to the Word, and the choice to cross over into true freedom. Today, as you receive the bread and the cup at this table, I pray that you will hear the voice of the Lord who has called us not slaves, but children.

"So if the Son makes you free, you will be free indeed."

Beloved Yeolin Church family, I love you.