"Then Jesus said to the Jews who had believed in him, 'If you continue in my word, you are truly my disciples; 32and you will know the truth, and the truth will make you free.' 33They answered him, 'We are descendants of Abraham and have never been slaves to anyone. What do you mean by saying, ‘You will be made free’?” 34Jesus answered them, 'Very truly, I tell you, everyone who commits sin is a slave to sin. 35The slave does not have a permanent place in the household; the son has a place there forever. 36So if the Son makes you free, you will be free indeed.'"
One of my favorite paintings is one that you may have seen last year at the Art Institute of Chicago’s Homer and Hopper exhibition. It’s an Edward Hopper painting that’s so simple, it doesn’t seem to be worthy of even mentioning, so simple it doesn’t seem to deserve any praise. It’s called “Sun in an Empty Room.” It is simply a picture of an empty room on the second floor of a house, with the fading light of a sunny late afternoon, light covering about half of the wall next to an open window, giving it a glow. There is such beauty in the simplicity of it, beauty that appears in there being both emptiness and fullness there at the same time.
We know what these empty rooms in our lives look like. We’ve seen it: in rooms we have just moved out of, or in rooms we’ve looked at as we looked to purchase a home or rent an apartment, or sitting in an empty classroom before everyone else comes in, or the room we clean out after a loved one has died, or the more recently common emptiness of a foreclosed house. There is a sense of both emptiness and of a fullness in these barren spaces—both of what has been left behind, and of what has yet to be created and come to fruition out of that barrenness.
On the one hand it’s scary to see a space empty, and we have that itch to fill empty space as quickly as possible. We don’t want there to be nothing there! And on the other hand, empty rooms await the creation of new experiences, new people, new memories waiting to be told, stories ready to be born out of the nothingness before us.
Right now, we are going through a time when our world and the mainline protestant church—including the ELCA—stand at a moment where we face many empty rooms. We are becoming a church of empty cathedrals. In this age, many are calling the “room-cleaning” happening in the world “post-modernity.” In the church, one person, Phyllis Tickle, calls this emptying The Great Emergence. (Barker Books, 2009) The foundations of our world and the church have been stripped bare, and the rug has been taken out from underneath us. When we face these times of emptiness, of decline in membership, we sit back and wonder, “what happened?” But this is not the first time such a world-changing movement has been happening. The closet was also cleaned out and the room was emptied and re-formed and re-configured during the Reformation of the 1500’s, so that the Spirit could break through, and give new life. We again find the rooms of the church getting cleared and emptied out in front of our eyes.
In the time leading up to the Great Reformation the room became empty as the church went directly to the people: though the invention of the printing press, through the Wycliffe translation of the bible into the vernacular, and through the advent of mystics who experienced direct spiritual connection to God outside of the formal church. All this set the stage for the breakthrough insights of Luther and the Reformers.
In our time, a confluence of events have preceded our own time, and have emptied out not just the church but emptied out our certainty about the world and church centering around ourselves: with the advent of the theories of Darwin, Einstein, Heisenberg and Karl Marx; the rapid technological and scientific development of the automobile and the atom bomb; with the breakdown of traditional definitions of family and gender roles; and with the dawning of the information age via the internet.
And so in this time leading up to today, what lies ahead? We do not know. But to deny the foundational ways our world has changed…to deny that the world children today inherit is a vastly different than the world we inherited, is to not see that the room in front of us has indeed been emptied out. This is neither good nor bad, it has and is happening. And at its worst, our denial of change locks us up, and turns the church into a room, a house, where we claim to be the master. In denying change we deny the ultimate change we all face, of death.
But even as we face the emptiness, the clearing away of assumptions, the rapid quickening of time, the scariness of what is now more than ever an unknown future, God still gives us promise and hope in what can still come forth…in what can be created out of that gift of spaciousness. For we know in Christ spaciousness, emptiness is does not mean death. In the image of the empty tomb of Christ, we know that God does not let emptiness have the final word, that out of silence does come speech in praise of God who does promise to bring new life out of death, to bring the presence of the Spirit. As we all stand in the midst of emptiness, we stand as beggars at the foot of the cross. The empty room stuns us to silence but it is in that emptiness where God meets us in Christ, who births something new where nothing new is supposed to come out of.
In all of today’s lessons for Reformation Sunday, we hear of a God who points us to that place of emptiness which is God’s opportunity to create a new covenant, a new righteousness, a new freedom, granting us grace to move forward. Even in the midst of their having broken a covenant already with Yahweh, Yahweh “will make a new covenant” with the Israelites that will be written on their hearts, Jeremiah testifies. Paul proclaims that out of the silence of failing to live up to God’s expectations for us, God brings us into right relationship through Christ, “to prove at the present time that he himself is righteous and that he justifies the one who has faith in Jesus.” (Rom 3:26) And John testifies to Jesus’ embrace of us all as our master, who is in control of the empty rooms of our lives, of our church. This master is indeed a master who does not enslave us to empty rooms, but who liberates us from captivity to freedom.
As we face what seems like an unknown, uncertain, unwritten future, God turns that emptiness, that space and that freedom that lies ahead of us, into God’s opportunity to breathe new life into us. Confirmands, as you today face what is a new beginning in the future of your journey with God, God pours out again today the gift of the Spirit. God turns emptiness into a gift, a generous gift, a gift through which God can re-shape and re-form us into a church where we look at the future in hope …where we look at the future and see spaciousness for the Spirit to work in us. What if in Christ, we confessed to our desire to make the church our own, so that God could empty us and so direct us in God’s leading us forward? For so many of us at United Lutheran Church, it is so easy to take on many, many roles and forget that this is not just a place of activity, but also a place where we can live together within the graciously empty spaciousness that God gifts to us in Christ. What if we saw moments of space and time in our day—in the car, walking to school, coming home from work—as moments when God might be speaking and breathing something new into our lives? During the week, this room in this church lies empty, but God fills it with the Spirit. Know you are always welcome in this space, to come and listen in the emptiness for God’s Spirit calling you forward.
In the unwritten future of our church that is still emerging, in the unknown future of how God will use this church room and our empty rooms to transform lives, God justifies and covenants with us to be spacious and gracious right now. God loves us and so gives us space and gives us freedom to follow where the Spirit will lead us. May that Spirit indeed draw us together as a people who have a master, a master in Christ who sets us free from resisting emptiness, free to go forth into the unknown with the wind at our backs. The church goes forward today, with God’s Spirit written on our hearts, to go where God leads us…to follow where the Spirit—not we, but the Spirit—will lead us. Amen.
