Beloved, grace, mercy, and peace to you from God, the creator and giver of every good gift. Amen.
It’s Reformation Sunday…. and once again, we gather to remember and give thanks for Martin Luther and the courage he had in standing up against injustice in the Church. We hear the Scriptures that formed his understandings of God at work in the world and we sing the song that reminds us of what we all need to hear: “A mighty fortress is our God. Though life be wrenched away, they cannot win the day.”
Today, the Protestant Reformation is 502 years old. Luther nailed his 95 theses or arguments to the door of Castle Church in Wittenberg, Germany in 1517. Two years before that, In 1515, coffee had been introduced in Europe. This just goes to show what can happen when a pastor is well caffeinated!
A few years ago, we showed the movie “Luther” to our confirmation students. Afterward, Jackson exclaimed “I didn’t know our church was started by a rebel!”
To put it another way, Luther put the PROTEST in Protestant.
A brief reminder: Luther was a Roman Catholic priest who had taken issue with the practice of paying money to the church to lessen the time our loved ones had to spend in purgatory. This practice was shaky theologically AND in many other ways. So Luther penned 95 arguments against the practice. You can find them and lots of other fun facts about Luther at www.Luther.de. I commend the site to you.
It’s safe to say that Luther did not mince words when he wrote the 95 theses or in any of his writings that followed. He was a man with a sarcastic edge and a harsh view of hierarchy. Theses #11 reads “Those tares of changing the canonical penalty to the penalty of purgatory were evidently sown while the bishops slept!”
It is also true and important to remember that, as Luther got older, he held viewpoints that were difficult; views about the pope and our Jewish siblings. These troubling pieces ought to keep us humble and doing the work of on going self examination and on going reformation.
Luther was a man who had the law of God written on his heart, to borrow a phrase from the prophet Jeremiah this morning. He was a student of Scripture, not just for the sake of learning more. He found in Scripture the living breathing Word of God. And it was that understanding that compelled him to speak out in protest against injustice. It was that understanding that compelled him to pen 95 ways that the Church he was a part of was in error and nail them to the Church door.
The example Luther offers us reminds us that our beloved Lutheran Church, our particular way of being Christians in the world, is built on protest. It is built on speaking out against injustice in the world. It is built on this very prophetic act.
Other ways of being Christian in the world are built on an idea of earning one’s salvation. But Luther’s theological understandings are so heavily influenced by Paul’s writing in the book of Romans, that they resulted in the Lutheran shorthand for our faith understanding: We are saved by grace through faith. Saved by grace through faith. Paul writes that “we hold that a person is justified by faith apart from works prescribed by the law.” This was the bedrock of Luther’s faith and understanding. And that same grace is what Jesus describes as the means by which we are set free.
So, if we are not busy earning our salvation, then, friends, we ought to be busy responding to it. If we begin every day with by remembering that we have been set free by this grace….and we move out in that freedom….imagine what is possible.
This understanding of the Gospel is what compelled Dietrich Bonhoeffer to stand up against the injustices and atrocities committed by the Nazi regime in Germany. It is why he stayed to speak out against those injustices even when the Church in Germany would not, and even when he was offered a safer post in the United States. Bonhoeffer’s words, like Luther’s, still break open the grace of God today and still call us to the work of the Reformation. Bonhoeffer said “The ultimate test of a moral society is the kind of world that it leaves to its children.”
Nadia Bolz Weber is another Lutheran voice whose understandings of the Gospel of grace move us out of our own spaces of comfort and into the world. A pastor and author and theologian she writes: “God’s grace is not defined as God being forgiving to us even though we sin. Grace is when God is a source of wholeness, which makes up for my failings. My failings hurt me and others and even the planet, and God’s grace to me is that my brokenness is not the final word.”
Karl Barth, Lutheran theologian says that “Grace must find expression in life, otherwise it is not grace.” Think about that Grace must find expression in life….otherwise it is not grace.
This gift that God intends for us is not given to us so that we might tuck it away between some tissue paper in the drawer, so to speak. This gift is given to us to free us….to unshackle us from fear….and to send us out into the world to work for the sake of others and to protest and reform those things that are not in keeping with God’s call for justice.
Now, lest we become inhibited by our natural fears or lest we pause to ask “Isn’t this too political? God doesn’t want us to take sides.” let’s carry with us the words of yet another Lutheran theologian and pastor and prophet…Barbara Lundblad who reminds us that “The Bible takes sides. The Bible is biased. From Exodus to the Gospels, the Bible takes sides with children, widows, orphans, immigrants and refugees.” [1]
Now, all of these amazing Lutheran prophets can inspire and move us all day long. And I hope they do. Their words are too important to be relegated to history or a book or a sermon archive.
And here is another truth about their words that I hope we will carry with us as we go forward into the world. Doing the work of God in the world will actually make us better people. And we don’t NEED to be better people for any other reason than it is a sign of our growth as disciples, a sign of our commitment to our faith, and a chance to build a more just world for all.
So this is my final quote to share this morning and it is, from Theses #44. Luther writes: “Because love grows by works of love, {humanity} becomes better.”[2] Hear it again: “Because love grows by works of love, humanity becomes better.”
When we engage in works of love….and to be clear those are not intended to be what Bonhoeffer called “cheap grace” works, but things that stretch us. That require us to take a risk. That may, in fact cost us, just as they cost Bonhoeffer his life. When we engage in speaking out for the marginalized or helping those without homes, or providing food to the hungry, or safety to the refugee….then love grows….and then we as individuals and humanity as a whole become better. There is no risk in loving those who love us first. There is no risk in caring for those who also care for us. There is no risk in entertaining friends instead of strangers. Those things are lovely and they makes us feel good but they do not stretch us into the fullness of all that God desires for us and from us.
We have been saved by grace through faith, so that we might move out into the broken places in the world and engage in works of love for the sake of those God loves. We are already saved….by grace….through faith. We have been made free by Jesus the Christ, so people of God, go forth… in protest, in reform, and be free indeed.
Thanks
be to God and let the Church say…Amen.
[1] Lundblad, Barbara. June 24, 2018 sermon. Evangelical Church of the Holy Trinity, NYC
[2] Luther, Martin. Theses #44, emended for inclusion.