Here We Stand
Propers: Reformation Sunday, AD 2024 B
Homily:
Lord, we pray for the preacher, for You know his sins are great.
Grace mercy and peace to you from God our Father and from our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ. Amen.
500 years ago, a monk in Germany feared that he would never be good enough for God.
He hadn’t meant to be a monk. Initially, his parents had great hopes he’d be a lawyer. They’d made their fortune in copper—boring deep into the earth, where the imps and kobolds dwell—affording their son a first-rate education. Yet one day, when caught in a storm while riding back to the university, Martin Luther found himself taking shelter beneath a tree suddenly struck by lightning. “Help me, St Anne!” he cried, petitioning the patron saint of miners. “I shall become a monk!”
Luther feared God. He was afraid that his heavenly Father would prove as stern and unforgiving as his earthly parents were. Thankfully his superior in the Augustinian Order pointed him to the writings of St Paul, to the promise of salvation by grace through faith. God’s love could not be earned, Luther saw. It could only be given freely through the love and grace of Christ, He who forgave us our sins even as we murdered Him. This became the heart of Luther’s ministry: the perfect love of God, which drives out fear.
Fr Martin was a friar, a priest, and a professor. He found within the Scriptures the liberation for which he longed. The love of God, the grace of God, promised in Christ had freed him. And now he wanted all to know the Gospel, the Good News of the forgiveness of our sins, because more than anything else, he was a pastor. People speak of Luther as a theologian, as a reformer, as a writer, but one can only understand him as a parish pastor.
One day a man named Tetzel came to town. And Tetzel was a seller of indulgences. The mother church of holy Rome was building new cathedrals. And to raise money for such grand edifices, she generously opened up the treasury of the saints. Now, the idea behind this was that Jesus Christ, along with His canonized Saints, had built up such a spiritual treasure of merit from their good works, that the Church possessed, in effect, a vast line of credit, which she could offer to the faithful.
Let’s say that you’re a sinner. You’ve done bad things in life. You confessed your sins in Church and are forgiven. But are you really, though? I mean, sure, you probably won’t be going to hell, but are you truly ready for heaven with all those sins upon your soul? Purgatory was proposed as a place for the punishment and purification of those souls neither heinous enough for hell nor yet worthy of heavenly bliss. You’ve got to pay your debts. So isn’t it lovely, then, that the Church has such a surplus of good works done on credit?
You can have some, if you like; shave a couple years off your purgation. All you’ve got to do is give some alms. Pay the good Fr Tetzel a paltry discounted sum—a steal, really—“and when a coin in the coffer rings, a soul from purgatory springs.” Heck, if not for yourself, then do it for your grandma. You love your grandma, right? You don’t want her burning for years in purgation when you could set her spirit free. Thus were poor Germans convinced to finance building projects for rich Italian bishops.
Meanwhile, Luther felt like he was taking crazy pills. Whence all this talk of purgation? Was Jesus Christ not good enough, His promise not sure and clear? Why was the hierarchy fleecing his congregation with spiritual blackmail and hoarded saintly merit? Luther’s concern here was pastoral: don’t tell his people that they have to earn the grace of Jesus Christ. Don’t make them pay for forgiveness freely given from the Cross on Calvary. Grace that is earned isn’t grace; it’s just wages. And that is not the Gospel. That is not Good News.
Luther based his arguments on Scripture, on the clear promise found within the text. He knew Hebrew; he knew Latin; he knew Greek. He knew what Jesus said, as reported by Apostles. Where was Rome coming up with all these strange new teachings? Luther wasn’t trying to reform. He was trying to preach the Gospel as it had been taught to him. Romans were the ones coming up with something new. Rome had to justify these claims. So he posted his theses for academic disputation. Luther wanted reasonable debate.
But Rome was dealing with too many challenges, too many other problems, to waste energy on some uppity Augustinian friar in the backwaters of Deutschland. So they sent Cardinal Cajetan to shut him up. Recant, Cajetan said; submit to proper authority. Gladly, Luther replied. Just show me where I’m wrong. Because my arguments stem from Scripture and plain reason, and if you can use Scripture and plain reason to point out my error, then I’ll go back to my classroom and congregation duly chastened. But if you can’t, then God help me, for I won’t deny the Gospel.
That is the root of the Protestant Reformation. It wasn’t about doing new things. It wasn’t about the Western Church needing to transform. It was at heart the hard-headed resolve to say, “Thus far and no farther.” The whole argument of the Lutheran movement, as laid out for the Emperor in the Augsburg Confession, is that we are doing nothing new. Rome is. All we want is Jesus, Luther said. And the poor do not need to pay the powerful in order to hear the promise of grace that Christ has poured out for this world. Here I stand.
Now, a whole lot hence has happened, due to this one stubborn monk. His clinging to the Gospel, as he understood it, in the face of the Pope and the Emperor and half the kings of Europe, sowed the seeds of modernity: of conscience, of religious freedom, of individuality and eventually democracy. It has been a long and messy road. Christian has killed Christian, to our everlasting shame. And Luther was no saint. Especially as he aged, he wrote some pretty awful things, with awful consequences down the line. For better and for worse, he split the Western Church in two.
But Wisdom is justified by Her children. The Protestant Reformation is over. The questions at its core have been resolved. Lutherans and Catholics agree that we are saved by grace through faith, that justification before God cannot be bought but only given. Multiple Popes in recent years have defended Martin Luther, to the consternation of hardliners on both sides. Moreover, critical biblical scholarship, worship in the vernacular, widespread access to the Scriptures, the dignity of conscience, the priesthood of all, and engagement with modernity—Rome did all of that, because Reformers forced her hand.
That was the Lutherans’ job: to hold the Church accountable to the promise of the Gospel.
Reformation Sunday ought not to be triumphal, in the sense of our team versus theirs. In truth, people who were raised neither Lutheran nor Catholic have a hard time telling us apart. We are brothers and sisters in Christ, sharing one Baptism, one faith, in our one Lord. We can be proud of the contributions of our tradition to the greater Christian Church, while also mourning the divisions which persist. We must outdo ourselves in honoring one another.
The truth is that the Church is always in crisis, forever encountering hostility without and fratricide within. Visible unity has never been achieved, and won’t be on this side of the grave. Ecclesia semper reformanda est: the Church is always reforming; always failing, falling, repenting of her sins, returning to the promise of our Baptism, and rising up from the tomb again with the life of Christ within us. It is death and resurrection in every generation. Yet the Good News is proclaimed, in Word and in Sacrament, as shocking today as ever it was.
It ain’t about being worthy. It ain’t about earning God’s grace. Deserve’s got nothing to do with it. You are loved by God in Jesus Christ. And nothing in this world—not bishops, not princes, not the Emperor on his throne—nothing can ever take that promise from you. Let hell rage! Let every power and principality vent their wrath upon our souls. We were bought by Jesus’ Blood, that even death can have no claim! Go ahead, kill a Christian, see what happens next. Ain’t no grave dug deep enough to keep my body down.
Here we stand. And we have nothing left to fear.
In the Name of the Father, and of the +Son, and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.
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