The Festival of the Reformation

 St. John 8:31–36

In the Name of the Father and of the + Son and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.

      A Christian is a perfectly free lord of all, subject to none.

      A Christian is a perfectly dutiful servant of all, subject to all.

These paradoxical lines were written by Martin Luther in 1520, in an essay called The Freedom of a Christian, 500 years ago. Ever since we celebrated the 500th anniversary in 2017, of Luther posting the 95 Theses, we are coming up on many more 500th anniversaries of events and writings from the Reformation. So, 1520, Luther publishes this small but very important work.

Luther begins by discussing what he calls Christian freedom, and the first thing he points out is that there is one thing necessary for sinners to be righteous, for believers to live holy lives, and for Christians to be free—one thing is needed: the Word of God. Of course, Jesus tells us this: “If you abide in My word, you are truly My disciples, and you will know the Truth, and the Truth will set you free.” This Word and Truth is the Gospel, the Good News about God’s Son, who was made flesh, and suffered death for sin, and rose from the dead in glory and victory over death and hell. 

This Word and Truth is the message Jesus was speaking to the Jews. But they did not all receive it as good news. They catch on the word “free” and rightly imply that if you are set free, you must first have been a slave. And they reject such a ridiculous idea. They were children of Abraham, God’s holy people, not slaves. They didn’t need to be set free. But the lesson to learn from Abraham is that he trusted God’s Word, His promise. Abraham believed God and it was counted to him as righteousness (Rom. 4:3). He was justified by God through faith alone in the Word alone. Or to put it another way, Abraham counted God as trustworthy. He knew that God was worthy of his trust, that God does not lie, that His promises are sure. This is what it means to know the Truth. You know God is truthful, and so He is trustworthy. 

The Jews did not consider God to be trustworthy in His promises. Instead, they relied on their works. They listened to the lie of their own hearts, their pride. And any of us can do this too, if you put anything in that place where God’s promise is supposed to go, anything you think is more worthy of your trust than God’s Word. “I’m basically a good person; I’m not a slave.” “I’m a dedicated member of this or that church; I’m not a slave.” Jesus says we are slaves to sin. And slaves remain slaves, unless they are set free by the Son.

Luther uses one of Aesop’s Fables to illustrate his point. A dog is running along beside a stream with a piece of meat in his mouth. He looks down into the water and, look, there’s another dog with another piece of meat in his mouth. The dog snaps at his reflection, lunges for the deceitful meat, while his own real piece falls into the water. He’s lost everything. If we try to get salvation with anything other than faith in the Word, we will end up losing everything.

If you could be justified by anything else, by your works, by your decency, by your smarts, then you would not need the Word at all. But the one thing we need is the Word from the Son. We are justified by faith in that Word alone. So if you do not believe in the Son’s Word, you lack all things—you’re like the sad dog who was fooled and lost everything. But if you believe, you have all things—you have Christ and everything He does. Luther writes: The promises of God give what the commandments of God demand… so that all things may be God’s alone… He alone commands, He alone fulfills. So, salvation is by God’s grace alone, His doing, not ours. And He gives this salvation as a gift—a free gift that gives freedom.

So, a Christian is free from the burden and accusation of the Law. He is free like the Son is free. Not a slave to keeping the Law, but free because it’s already done, already kept in Christ, and in the Christian by faith in Christ. Do we even imagine what a great change faith makes in us? We are fellow-kings and fellow-priests with Christ. By faith we are free, meaning we are allowed, to boldly come into the presence of God the Father, just like the very Son of God does. We are free from fear of all evil, free from the fear of sin, the fear of enemies, the fear of death. Whatever evil comes our way, we are ready to hope in the Lord and rely on His rescue. Sin is swallowed up by Christ’s righteousness. And so even death is swallowed up by Christ’s victory, and by our victory! By faith His victory becomes ours and so we are also conquerors with Him.

I’m sure you can see then that the freedom of a Christian is spiritual. And it does not always mean a care-free and easy life in this world. In fact, the more Christian a man is, the more evil and suffering he must endure. Just look at Christ Himself, or any of His saints. Jesus, the Son of God, is totally free. And as a perfect Man, He is still perfectly free. But out of His freedom, He became a servant to all. He did not come to be served, but to serve and give His life as a ransom for many. Christians are given the freedom of the Son. And in that freedom, Christians imitate the Son in His service. Like Jesus, we die to self and serve others. He was crucified for us, we crucify our sinful desires. He lives for us, we live for others.

But whenever Christian freedom is taught, the question always comes up: If we’re free, why do we still bother with trying to keep the Law? Two reasons: We still have the sinful flesh, the Old Adam hanging on us. And we still have suffering and death in this world so our neighbors need our help. So there are two kinds of good works for us to do. There are works to keep ourselves under control, to kill our sinful desires. The free man is able to govern himself. Giving into every craving you have is slavery—being unable to resist your flesh is slavery. The free man can say No. He has self-discipline, and he subjects his flesh to the Spirit, so that it obeys Christ and does not hinder him on the way of faith. Then there are also works we must do for others. The free man is able to work for the good of others, because he’s not worried about himself. His relationship with God is right, so he doesn’t need his good works to be for God. He’s free to give his good works to his neighbor.

You were saved freely, so you live freely. You are able to give yourself as a little Christ to your neighbor, just as Christ offered Himself to you. This is why we are named after Him: Christians. He dwells in us and we in Him. So, Luther writes: A Christian lives not in himself, but in Christ and in his neighbor. Otherwise he is not a Christian. He lives in Christ through faith, in his neighbor through love. By faith he is caught up beyond himself into God. By love he descends beneath himself into his neighbor.

In order for those beautiful words to become real, we’ve got to get the order right. First faith, then works. First, we are set free by Christ, and then we are able to work freely for others. This order was one of the main points for the Reformation. Only a free man does free works. Only a good man does good works. It’s not the other way around. A good tree produces good fruit. A good builder makes a good house. Only when the Christian is free from relying on his works for salvation, can he start doing truly good works. Slaves cannot free themselves. The free Son has to set you free by His Word, give you faith and new life, and so set you free to doing good.

Jesus said, Abide in My Word. Use the Means of Grace—the Word, Baptism, the Absolution, the Holy Supper. Making use of those gifts is how you abide and live in His Word. And you will know the Truth. You will know Christ who is the Truth. And you will know Him to be truthful, worthy of your trust. That is faith in Christ. And the Truth will set you free. With faith in Christ, you are free like Christ. And the free man lives like Christ, for God and for others.

In the Holy + Name of Jesus. Amen.

Based on Martin Luther, The Freedom of a Christian (Luther's Works 31)

The Festival of the Reformation

Romans 3:19–28

St. John 8:31–36

In the Name of the Father and of the + Son and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.

Scripture Alone! Faith Alone! Grace Alone! You’ve probably heard those Reformation mottos before, but what do they mean? Whenever something big like the Reformation comes along, we can’t help but making a motto, a cliché—something short and easy that we can wrap our minds around. We want something simple so we can easily remember the big message. But there’s always a danger for clichés to go bad. If we just repeat them without thinking, they can be emptied of their meaning. And then you’ve lost what you were trying to hold onto. As another example, last year, for the 500^th Anniversary of the Reformation, our Synod rolled out a new motto or theme: “Reformation 500—It’s still all about Jesus.” That’s not a bad slogan, but it could raise questions like: What about Jesus? Who is He? What did He do? Slogans, mottos, themes, battle cries—they’re not bad, but we can’t forget what they really mean.

Here’s another phrase you’ve probably heard a lot in Lutheran churches: Law and Gospel. You’ve probably heard these words a lot from me, and hopefully I’ve given them the meaning they deserve. But in many cases, Law and Gospel can be boiled down to an oversimplification that ends up missing the entire point. The simple Sunday School meaning for Law and Gospel is usually abbreviated with three letters: S.O.S. The Law Shows Our Sin. The Gospel Shows Our Savior. Now, that’s NOT a bad understanding to have, but what IS bad is if we try to boil it down even more, like this: “The Law shows our sin, and sin is bad, and having my sin pointed out makes me feel bad, so the Law is bad. And the Gospel shows our Savior, and the Savior is good, and hearing about the Savior makes me feel good, so the Gospel is good. Law—bad. Gospel—good.” No. This twists the cliché to mean something it was not supposed to mean.             

This kind of thinking can even twist the meaning of our Lord’s words in our Reformation Gospel Reading: The truth will set you free. If you just think that the Law is bad and the Gospel is good, then you can take Jesus’ words to mean that the Gospel will set you free from the Law completely. So, you’re free from doing good works at all, even free to sin! This bad understanding of Law and Gospel can lead you to suppose: “God loves to forgive, and I love to sin! What a perfect arrangement!” But this thinking destroys both the real Law and the real Gospel. And we’ll come back to those in a little bit.

But how about another cliché or saying, one that you hear from all kinds of people: “God is love.” In fact, it’s a direct quote from the Bible (just don’t look too closely at what else the Bible says right around those three little words). God is love. Sounds so nice. And that’s exactly what many people want it to mean. They don’t really want to say “God is love.” They want to say, “God is nice. He is nice, so you should be nice too.” This is the idea you get when people say, “Can’t we all just get along?” Well, sure, except they don’t really want to get along. They really mean, “Can’t we all just get along without each other and be left alone, so I can do what I want?” Real nice, huh. With this “God is nice” thinking, the Gospel is no longer the power of God for salvation (Romans 1:16), but just a nice example for us to follow. It ends up giving you a God with no Law, no anger over sin, no sin at all, and so also no forgiveness, and no Savior.

God is not nice. He will not leave us alone to go our merry way to hell. He comes after sinners, and He rebukes, He punishes, He gets angry. Because He loves you. Rather than nicely letting us be, God paid us the intolerable compliment of actually loving us. He dealt with our sins, condemning them, punishing them in Christ. Listen to what else comes right after those three little words: God is love. God’s love was revealed among us in this way: God sent His one and only Son into the world so that we might live through Him. Love consists in this: not that we loved God, but that He loved us and sent His Son to be the atoning sacrifice for our sins (1 John 4:8–10, CSB). This is the cross of Jesus kind of love. Real, self–sacrificial, heart–wrenching, bleeding, dying Love. You can say “God is love” as much as you want, but if you never mention the cross on Mount Calvary, a dead Jesus and a Jesus risen from the dead, then you’ve got no true love, and you’ve got no true God either.

This is what we’ve got to learn when it comes to Law and Gospel also. Keep the S.O.S. idea: the Law Shows Our Sin and the Gospel Shows Our Savior. But get rid of that “Law—bad. Gospel—good” idea. The Law should make you feel bad, or I should say, God’s Law should make you feel convicted, guilty, you should feel judged—that’s its job. But the Law is not bad—it is holy and perfect because it comes from God. You are bad—you are a sinner and through the law comes knowledge of sin. So, where do we go for help? Not “Where do we go to get a good feeling?” but where do we go for rescue? To the Gospel, which shows and delivers to us the Savior. For all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God, and are justified by His grace as a gift, through the redemption that is in Christ Jesus, whom God put forward as a propitiation by His blood, to be received by faith. 

Once again, we’ve got to get deeper than the clichés, behind the words “Law and Gospel.” We’ve got to get to the cross of Jesus, where the Son of God Himself bled and died in our place. Jesus was the propitiation, the atoning sacrifice that took all of God’s anger so that we would be spared. Jesus suffering on the cross—that’s the Law, that’s what should happen to you. Jesus crucified for you and you go free—that’s the Gospel.

And the same goes with those other slogans. Grace Alone. Grace because of what? Is salvation God’s free gift to us just because He happens to feel generous sometimes? No. Is there any cost for salvation at all? Yes, but God Himself paid the price and so it is free for us. And Faith Alone. Faith in what? Will faith in anything work? Faith in any god? Faith in yourself? No, only faith in the God who became a man, was crucified, and rose again. We are saved by Grace Alone through Faith Alone because of what Jesus did in His death and resurrection. When we talk, when we sing, we need to keep Jesus and His cross front and center. Notice how our hymns also keep driving this point home:

            Since Christ has full atonement made

            And brought to us salvation,

            Each Christian therefore may be glad

            And build on this foundation.

            Your grace alone, dear Lord, I plead,

            Your death is now my life indeed,

            For You have paid my ransom (LSB 555:6)

And last but not least, there’s that other Reformation slogan, Scripture Alone. The Holy Bible gives us Christ crucified. Those Spirit–inspired words give us knowledge of the salvation that He won for us on Calvary. But does this mean you can get along fine just you and your Bible? No, it’s never “just” with Jesus. The Scripture also gives you the Words of Baptism, so that you are joined to the death and resurrection of Christ; the Words of the Lord’s Supper, so you are fed with His real crucified and risen body and blood; the Words that are preached to you and spoken in the Absolution, so that you hear His declaration from the cross and the empty tomb, “It is finished. Peace be with you. Your sins are forgiven.”

More than any one cliché can explain, the Reformation is focused on the atonement Jesus made for sin. The Reformation still calls us to set our eyes on Christ the Crucified. For that reason, we set the cross before our eyes—a reminder of God’s bleeding, dying love—a reminder of what our faith is all about. 

Today, you followed the processional cross with your eyes. This lovely simple cross was made many years ago by Curtis Heil and it will continue to have a special place in our church. Our congregation has also been gifted with a new processional cross which we will dedicate next Sunday in memory of Carole Eberhart. This cross will include an image of our Savior and the work He suffered for us—simply a more detailed reminder of God’s love. While our crosses may all look slightly different, they all mark this place where the Reformation message is still heard—where the Word of the cross is made known and the Sacraments are given—always leading us on in our faith until, in Jesus’ eternal Kingdom, we bow before that Lamb who was slain and now sits upon the throne of God.

In the Holy + Name of Jesus. Amen.

Festival of the Reformation

Romans 3:19-28

St. John 8:31–36

In the name of the Father and of the + Son and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.

Between now and Reformation Day 2017 we will be celebrating the 500 years since Martin Luther started the Reformation of the Church. We’ll have special services and hear special news from the Synod. We’ll take some time to appreciate the heritage we have in the Lutheran Church. In fact, over the next year, even other Christian churches will have to tip their hats a bit to Martin Luther and the Lutheran Church. Whether they liked it or not, every Christian Church in existence today was effected in some way by the Reformation.

And that’s all a good thing. The Reformation was an important event. You can hardly teach a history class without dealing with it in some way. And the Lutheran Reformation was certainly a godly event. It restored the preaching of the pure Gospel to the Christian Church. Thanks to Luther and many other church leaders we have now enjoyed almost 500 years of pure teaching from the Scriptures Alone, that we are saved by Grace Alone through Faith Alone in Christ Alone. So it’s a good thing for us to pull out all the stops and really celebrate.

But there can also be a problem with anniversary celebrations like these. And the problem is the temptation to start celebrating ourselves. It could be far too easy for us to pat ourselves on the back, shout Rah! Rah! Rah! for Luther, and turn it into a big rally for how great we are. It could be far too easy for us to let the triumphalism get out of hand, to go blind to our own failures, and to look down in pride upon those around us.

And so as we begin this anniversary year, we might do well to consider how the Reformation got started almost 500 years ago. It didn’t start with a parade, a pep rally, stump speeches or fanfare. It didn’t start with an army of revolutionaries or a grand assembly of likeminded founding fathers. It started with a monk posting the outline for a theological debate on a church door. And even this was not as remarkable as it may seem. The monk was a university professor. He was concerned about the church’s teaching on indulgences and so as a professor he wanted to have a debate, a discussion. And the hammer blows that pinned his 95 Theses up on the door were not the loud resounding booms that would shake the church of Rome, nothing quite so dramatic. They were just announcing a theological debate. They were announcing what any pastor and teacher of the church should do: study God’s Word and proclaim it. Obviously the Reformation did grow into a much greater event, involving princes and bishops, emperors and popes. But its beginning was simple. And the very first thesis of those 95 posted by Dr. Luther was perhaps the simplest one of all, and one that we should still keep in mind for ourselves. Thesis 1: “When our Lord Jesus Christ said, ‘Repent,’ He willed that the whole life of believers should be repentance.”

This was Luther’s fundamental point: the whole life of a believer should be about repentance. Repentance is not a momentary, once in a while thing. It’s not just what you do when you do something really bad. Repentance is not buying an indulgence, or trying to make up for a sin by doing a good deed, or just giving lip-service to God’s Law. Repentance is the whole Christian outlook. It is the way we stand before God, confessing all our sins, all our failures, to Him, and relying solely on His grace in Jesus Christ. Repentance is the whole deal: contrition and faith, sorrow over sin and trust in the Savior, fear of God’s wrath and love of God’s mercy. Or as Jesus put it in our Gospel reading, repentance is abiding in Jesus’ Word. Not just checking-in once in a while. Not just keeping it in the back of our minds. Abiding in the Word of Jesus means having it at the very center of our lives. Returning to His Truth again and again. Living the life of repentance, the life of a baptized child of God, the life of listening to His Word, learning the Truth, and being set free by the Truth.

And so just as the Reformation was begun with a call to repentance, a call to renew this life of confessing our sins and abiding in Jesus’ Word, so also it would be good and right for us to begin this anniversary year with a similar call to repentance and renewal. It is not a new call, it’s the same call to repent that has been echoed down throughout the ages, but it is always new for us – we always need to hear it again. Because we have sinned and need to repent. We have lived as if God did not matter and as if we mattered most. We have let our desires and convenience control our actions rather than God’s commands and promises. In certain ways we have not been faithful Lutherans or faithful Lutheran churches. We have been embarrassed by God’s Word and tried to water down His Truth or soften it so as not to offend people, because we fear men more than we fear God. And we have also thought we’re better than others, more holy, more pure, more right, and so we have despised those most in need of our witness, our support, and our love. Repent.

Repent and abide in Jesus’ Word. Turn away from your sin and live in Jesus’ grace and truth. “When our Lord Jesus Christ said, ‘Repent,’ He willed that the whole life of believers should be repentance.” This is the life that finds its source and its center in Jesus our Savior. For it is in Him, in His Word and sacraments, that we receive the Gospel, the Good News of our salvation. It is not in the Law, our achievements or efforts. This life is found for free in the Gospel: The righteousness of God has been manifested apart from the law. This is the righteousness that God gives to the sinner on account of His Son. It’s the righteousness of God through faith in Jesus Christ for all who believe. And this is a gift from God for all people. For there is no distinction: for all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God, and are justified by his grace as a gift, through the redemption that is in Christ Jesus, whom God put forward as a propitiation by his blood, to be received by faith.

Jesus died for you. His holy blood was more than enough for God – an all-sufficient payment for your sins and for the sins of the world. So that now, whoever believes in Him, whoever abides in His Word, whoever repents and trusts in His saving name, would be declared righteous in God’s sight. You are free from sin and free from the demand of the Law to earn your salvation. You are righteous in Christ, through faith in Him, by the grace of God.

This is the great and holy treasure that Luther helped to rediscover by abiding in Jesus’ Word, hearing it, studying it, living it in repentance and faith. And this is the great and holy treasure we still cherish and proclaim today. That’s the real reason to celebrate the Reformation. We’re not celebrating ourselves or even celebrating Luther. We’re celebrating that the Gospel is proclaimed so clearly and truly for all. The salvation achieved on Christ’s cross and delivered in His Word is here for us and for the world. That’s the reason to celebrate the Reformation. The Reformation is STILL all about Jesus.

In the Holy + Name of Jesus. Amen.