As Through Fire

Propers: The Fifth Sunday in Lent, A.D. 2018 B

Homily:

Grace, mercy, and peace to you from God our Father and from our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ. Amen.

If we as Lutherans make a mistake when it comes to salvation, it’s that we speak of it too legalistically. And I know that may sound counterintuitive, because Lutheranism was in many ways a reaction against legalism in the Church.

Salvation, in Luther’s day, had become a transaction. If you wanted to be saved, there was a ladder to climb, a checklist to follow. You had to do A, B, and C. You had to earn forgiveness, earn your place in Heaven. And this proved very profitable for the middlemen along the way. The papacy of Luther’s time has been described, somewhat uncharitably, as a Pez dispenser, spitting out indulgences for the right price. Rich Italians built grand basilicas on the backs of the German poor.

And Luther was among those voices who said that this was blasphemy. This was a perversion of the Gospel. We don’t earn salvation. Heaven isn’t for sale. We are sinners, plain and simple. We cannot hope to make ourselves worthy of God’s grace. But that’s the thing with grace: it is unmerited. It is pure mercy, pure gift. Jesus loves you and forgives you and asks only that we then pass on this same love, this same forgiveness, to others, like a cup overflowing with richest wine.

The Lutheran concern was for poor souls stricken by the knowledge of their own sins and thus terrified by God’s wrath, forever striving in futility to earn the approval of the world’s sternest father figure. Luther knew what that was like. His own father was no peach, and so the notion of God as Father gave him no peace. It wasn’t until Luther himself had children that he realized the fathomless depths of a father’s love.

And Luther’s message to poor sinners was not that our sins aren’t so bad—indeed our sins are terrible, and have terrible consequences for all those around us—but rather that for as wicked as we are, God’s love for us is infinitely greater, infinitely stronger: stronger than the devil, the world, and the flesh; stronger even than the grave and the deepest pits of hell!

It was meant to be Good News. It was meant to be the joy of everlasting salvation tasted here on earth. And many took it as such, thanks be to God.

But there were others who still thought of this purely in legal terms, and so took Luther’s message of salvation by grace as license for ever worsening sin. As far as they were concerned, Christ had given them a get-out-of-jail-free card. All things were now pure for the pure! So go ahead and lie, cheat, steal, break up your neighbor’s family, murder someone in a back alley; it’s okay! We are all saved by grace through faith, right? Any sin can be forgiven.

But salvation isn’t just about freedom from consequence. It’s more visceral than that, more real. Salvation is about death and resurrection. God doesn’t accept us warts and all. That’s not mercy. That’s not love. Rather, God sees us as He intends for us to be: perfect, sinless, and holy.

In short, God looks at us and sees Jesus, His own Son, who is at once both truly God and truly Man—humanity perfected! And the mercy of God, the grace of God, is to draw us into ever deeper union with Jesus, making us one in Him, conforming us to the Son of God so that we might become sons of God ourselves, reclaiming the inheritance of who and whose we truly are. God’s mercy is that He purifies us, as a smith refines silver in the furnace, when we could not and cannot purify ourselves.

Let me put it another way. You don’t want a doctor who says that you’re okay no matter what, who encourages you to drink and smoke and indulge to excess because he’s going to write you a clean bill of health no matter how messed up you really are. Rather, you want a skilled, honest, compassionate physician who will properly diagnose your disease and work as hard as he can to restore you to wholeness and health. The quack makes life easy, but true health is hard work.

When Jesus first begins His ministry, He goes around forgiving people willy-nilly. Your sins are forgiven, your sins are forgiven, everybody’s sins are forgiven. And this gets Him in trouble, because only God can forgive sins against God. Yet if salvation were limited to legalism, to getting your paperwork in order and the proper stamp on your passport, then His work would already be done, right? He declares our sins forgiven and goes on home to see what Mary’s made for dinner.

But salvation is more than a checkmark. Sin runs too deep for that. It must be rooted out from the depths of every human heart, from the very heart of the world. And that will take a love that runs even deeper than our sin, a love so overwhelming and self-sacrificial that it will entail unimaginable suffering—because the two are inextricable. Real love always requires suffering, because real love is the willful choice to give of yourself for another. And that hurts. God, it hurts. Just ask a parent, or anyone with a broken heart.

This is why the New Covenant prophesied by Jeremiah in our readings this morning will not be like the Old Covenant, which was spoken, and external. The New Covenant will be within us, written on our hearts, because God is going to pour Himself out into us, pour out His Life and His Breath and His Blood into us, into our wounds, into our hearts and our minds and our souls.

And there will be no escaping His mercy, His suffering, His love—because it won’t just be a word on a page or a voice in a pulpit. It will be God Himself hung on a tree, pouring out His own Life into the life of the world. “Now is the judgment of this world,” Christ proclaims! Not off in some distant future, not hidden in the pages of Revelation. The Judgment of the world is Christ on the Cross. There we see the true horror and depth of our sin. And there we see the unspeakable ocean of God’s mercy and grace and love drowning us in our brokenness, purging us of our evil, and raising us to new life in Christ. The New Covenant doesn’t proclaim us forgiven; it remakes us forgiven.

God is not content to welcome us into Heaven twisted and crippled by our sin. Such would not be mercy. Such would not be Heaven! If we were wicked forever, surrounded by others who would be wicked forever, that would be hell, and the presence of God would only highlight the agony of our sins. Out must Satan go, every hair and feather! Only then will we be fit for Heaven. Only then we will know the salvation of our God. And this is not something we can earn. This is not something we can do. Rather, this is what Christ does in us, in our flesh and in our bone, drowning us each day to sin and raising us to life in Him.

It is a process. It is a struggle. Just as the blacksmith must return the iron to the fire again and again, so must God purge us of all impurities, shaping us to fit the task, breaking down what doesn’t work to make us stronger than we were—until at last one day we are as one with the fire, bright and hot and pure. And the fire is no longer pain to us. It is no longer our purgation. Rather it is our life and our beauty and our everlasting joy. That is salvation. That is the mercy of God.

And so I say to you, dear Christians, that we have been saved, that we are being saved, and that we hope one day to be saved. We are on the earliest steps of a hero’s journey. We have been granted a destiny in Christ more wondrous than any we could imagine here below. And this life, this whole life, is our pilgrimage to our true and only home.

The day will come when each of us will blaze forth in the reflected glory of God, shining out for all the universe to see, forged at last into what we were each meant to be from before the beginning of the world. And I for one cannot wait to see what on earth we will look like when our salvation is at last complete.

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