A Sermon For Reformation Sunday

So if the Son makes you free, you will be free indeed. - John 8:36

I’ll begin this morning with what you likely know about Martin Luther and the Reformation of the Church.  I offer this repetition because I want to lay a foundation to build on what you may not know about Luther’s reforms.  Luther lived in an age in which poverty and suffering were rampant.  The faithful feared God as a tyrant and taskmaster.  Therefore, they dreaded judgment, doom, and hell as life’s outcome.  This was overwhelmingly true of Luther.  He suffered from “anfechtung,” the German word to describe deep spiritual despair and anxiety.  This likely contributed to his decision to join the Augustinian monastery because it was the most ascetic and strict of its time.  Among those monks, Luther said the most prayers, read the most Scripture, crawled up the most stairs in repentance, and offered the most confessions to placate a God whom he simply could not satisfy.  He confessed his anxiety to his spiritual director, Johann Von Staupitz.  Von Staupitz chided him, “Martin, just love God!”  Luther replied, “Love God?  I hate God!”

It was only through Luther’s study of Scripture that his faith progressed and deepened so that he was able to pierce the cultural and religious veil of an angry God to find the oasis of grace.  We read the classic texts of grace on Reformation Sunday.  From Romans, we are justified by grace through faith, not by our own works to satisfy God.  From John, we are freed from sin and reconciled to God by Christ.  You have heard it ad nauseum in the Lutheran church, we don’t earn our salvation.  We don’t get right with God by our works.  Salvation is a free gift – grace – from God.

Luther’s theological epiphany and his courageous proclamation against the oppressive theology of the powerful Roman Catholic Church of the Middle Ages led to the reformation of the Church.  You know that story…we Lutherans are inheritors of that reform.  Grace is the foundation of Protestantism….and, since the signing of the Joint Declaration on the Doctrine of Justification  in 1999, it is also the profession of the Roman Catholic Church. 

Let me offer a simple diagram of Luther’s theology of grace.  The vertical axis is our relationship with God.  In Christ, we are freed to love God through faith.  How are we free?  We don’t have to spend our lives “crawling up steps” or performing any other works to please God or earn our salvation.  Just think of all the time that this saves you for other things!  It is like your schoolteacher saying, “No more homework.  Ever!”  Think of what fun you would have playing with your friends after school and playing on your smart phone all evening if you had no homework!  Freedom!

That is the first part of Luther and the Reformation, the part we all know.  Luther reformed the Church.  In 2016, the ELCA identified the second part of Luther’s reform in this book, The Forgotten Luther.  I would have given the book a different name.  I would have named it The Luther We Did Not Know But Should Have Known If We Were Paying Attention To The Implications Of Reforming The Church.  Yes, that is probably too long for the title of a book!

Luther’s reform of the Church led to the reform of the State in a way that continues in European countries today.  The outgrowth, the logical conclusion of justification, is that we are free to love our neighbor.  “No more homework” provides you with ample time for your neighbor and developing the neighborhood!  Diagrammatically, we love God in faith (vertical) and we serve our neighbor in love (horizontal).  This is the cruciform shape of the Christian life.  It is faith active in love.  In his tract, The Freedom of a Christian, Luther said that “A Christian is perfectly free lord of all, subject to none.  A Christian is perfectly dutiful servant to all, subject to all.” 

I have placed some quotes from The Forgotten Luther (below) in your worship folder that roll out this wisdom of Luther.  He had a keen interest and passion for the plight of the poor.  He advocated for a common good theology through which the needs of all were met and the wellbeing of the community was valued about self-interest.  Most importantly, he advocated for the State to do likewise!  Luther worked for social welfare and education.  For example, he helped to establish the Community Chest, State-sponsored social welfare that provided relief for the poor.

Another way of saying this, of understanding the cruciform life, is that religion and politics are inseparable (intersection of the axes).  Luther’s reforms led to the Christian Democratic Poverty State as we know it today in Europe….  I know that the words “poverty state” carry political baggage in the United States.  Understand that Luther’s reform of the State was not the Church choosing a political party or an economic system.  It was the Church advocating for a common good response to unjust social structures that bound people in poverty.

We can think of this positively.  My youngest daughter married a man from Belgium.  On his first visit to the United States, he was surprised by the prevalence of homelessness.  Generally, in Europe, there is far less homelessness because there are government systems for the common good.  The roots of this are in Luther and the Reformation.  That is The Forgotten Luther!

The cruciform life says that we are free to love God and then free to serve our neighbor.  Unpacking this leads us to social justice.  When I say that religion and politics are inseparable, I am sensitive that all sorts of alarm bells go off for some of you.  So often in ministry I have heard the highly concerned, critical voice, “Pastor, your being political.  I don’t want to hear that in church!” 

This is what I mean when I suggest that Christian faith is “political.”  The Brazilian Archbishop, Dom Helder Camera, famously said, “When I give food to the poor, they call me a saint.  When I ask why the poor have no food, they call me a communist.”…  My son-in-law asks why there are so many homeless people in our wealthy country.  That is a justice - serving our neighbor - question.  I am confident that the OT prophets, Jesus, and Martin Luther would ask the same “political” question of us today…just as they did in their own day!

My upbringing was sheltered.  I had little awareness or interaction with marginalized groups of people.  My life experience is not unique in that way.  We tend to live in homogenous silos.  It took a long time for that sheltering veil to be pierced.  Very early in my ministry in Cincinnati, I took our Catechism class to the Over-the-Rhine section of the inner city to serve dinner at a Lutheran church.  It had a reputation for being very poor, very African American, and very unsafe.  During the meal, a young African American girl, maybe about nine or ten years old, came running up to me with a huge smile on her face and laughing merrily.  She said, “Hey mister, that girl that came with you has metal on her teeth!”…  I was stunned!...  The fact of the matter was that almost every one of my Catechism students had metal on their teeth, and this girl who lived no more than fifteen miles from our community had no idea of what braces were!...  I truly felt as if that little girl was an angel of God or the Holy Spirit who picked me up by the scruff of the neck and said, “Henry, that is an injustice!  You have been down a very sheltered path in life.  I’m going to show you another way.”

Two years later, at the ELCA National Youth Gathering, I remember being in the TWA Dome in St. Louis with 40,000 Lutheran teenagers.  A very old, diminutive South African man shuffled up to the podium for the keynote speech.  He started speaking in a heavy accent and I thought to myself, “Oh, what a train wreck!  How is this guy going to connect with these teens?”  He started talking about a South African belief called “ubuntu.”  He explained that ubuntu meant that we are all connected in a web of care.  Whenever one human being anywhere is hurting, we all hurt together.  As he spoke, it felt like the Holy Spirit had descended upon that dome.  The speaker’s name was Archbishop Desmond Tutu.  Ubuntu became one of my guiding principles in life.  It is a political concept!

We are in the midst of our sock collection and inviting financial contributions to assist with heating bills for the Native Americans on the Pine Ridge reservation in South Dakota.  It makes my heart sing to see all those socks accumulating in the Narthex.  Charity is good.  But I wonder, have we considered the justice question?  Why are Native Americans so poor and what might we do to dismantle systems that keep them dependent on our charity?...  That is a political question that grows out of a cruciform life.

When reading the Bible, it doesn’t take long to arrive at the depth of human depravity.  In Genesis 4, we read that Cain murders his brother, Abel.  When God confronts Cain, he defends himself by saying, “Am I my brother’s keeper?”  The clearly inferred answer is, “Yes, you are!”…  The cruciform life is the shape of “brother’s keeper” that brings those who are marginalized into community (show arrows on diagram going into the center).  The spiritual food of the altar leads us into the world to be concerned with “physical food” and “socks” for our neighbor.  Our faith is personal, but it is not private.

There is good news for you on this Reformation Sunday.  We are justified with God by grace through faith, a free gift.  There is also good news for your neighbor.  We are called by the Great Servant to be servant of all.  And that is good news for us when we have need too.  Luther wrote, “By faith the Christian is caught up beyond himself into God (vertical).  By love he descends beneath himself into his neighbor (horizontal).”  Our faith in Christ, more than anything else, informs our life in the world and our love of neighbor.  That is political.  That is cruciform.  That is The Forgotten Luther.  That is “the rest of the story” on Reformation Sunday! 

THE FORGOTTEN LUTHER

It is a question of a fair balance between your present abundance and their need, so that their abundance may be for your need, in order that there may be a fair balance.  As it is written, “The one who had much did not have too much, and the one who had little did not have too little.”

II Corinthians 8:13-15

God is the kind of Lord who does nothing but exalt those of low degree and put down the mighty from their thrones, in short, break what is whole and make whole what is broken.

Martin Luther, Luther’s Works 21:299-300

How does income disparity mesh with the biblical call to share the wealth of God’s creation with equity?  How does the existence of extreme wealth alongside of hunger and poverty – in our country and in our world – mesh with St. Paul’s admonition to the Corinthians to strike a “fair balance between your present abundance and their need”?...

Many Lutherans were shocked to learn that, from his earliest days in Wittenberg when he saw the adverse effects of the new market economy on the common people and was overwhelmed by the sheer numb of beggars on the streets, Martin Luther had committed such a great deal of theological energy and passion to the issue.

The poor are defrauded every day, and new burdens and higher prices are imposed.  They all misuse the market in their own arbitrary, defiant, arrogant way, as if it were their right and privilege to sell their goods as high as they please without criticism. (from The Large Catechism)

There was for Luther – and should be also for us today – no single, biblically-mandated economic model, no direct line from the biblical witness to any specific economic institution or system.  To claim such, as some have done, is to confuse law with gospel.  Rather our discussion is in the realm of Christian freedom.  It asks how we might use our God-given creativity and reason to express what St. Paul calls “faith active in love.”

Introduction to The Forgotten Luther: Reclaiming the Social-Economic Dimension of the Reformation, Copyright © 2016, Lutheran University Press.

            Paul Wee introduced the phrase, “the forgotten Luther,” the Luther who initiated the reform of social welfare that eventually led to the welfare states of Germany and the Nordic countries…. The Luther who throughout his life excoriated an unregulated profit economy and created social welfare programs is forgotten because he just does not fit an ideology that he said, “dresses up greed.”  “How skillfully Sir Greed can dress up to look like a pious man if that seems to be what the occasion requires, while he is actually a double scoundrel and a liar.” …

            Luther’s relevance to our context is his analysis of poverty and his forceful advocacy of government policies to promote the common good.  Luther’s theological turn led him beyond remedial philanthropy to address the social and political roots of poverty.  In this he foreshadowed the famous comment by the late Brazilian Archbishop Dom Helder Camara: “When I give food to the poor, they call me a saint.  When I ask why the poor have no food, they call me a communist.” …

            For Luther, social ethics flows from worship: it is the “liturgy after the liturgy.”…Faith active in love is indeed personal, but not privatistic.  Worship and social welfare are inseparable….

            The establishment of the Reformation through church ordinances which included provisions for social welfare and education was rooted in evangelical preaching and legally structured by jurists.  Luther and his colleagues were fully aware that religion and politics are inseparable…

            In commemorating the 500^th anniversary of the posting of the Ninety-five Theses, we have an ecumenical responsibility to remember and to advocate those aspects of Luther’s word submerged by our culture’s displacement of the common good by unjust social structures.

            As Paul Wee has stated, “The socioeconomic dimension of the Reformation has been conspicuously absent from the curricula of Lutheran seminaries and, consequently, from preaching and teaching in Lutheran congregations.  This lost dimension of Reformation history and theology is urgently needed to inform the mission of the church today.”

Luther and the Common Chest, Carter Lindberg in The Forgotten Luther: Reclaiming the Social-Economic Dimension of the Reformation, Copyright © 2016, Lutheran University Press.