Reformation Within

Reformation, by Jeska Valk

Lections: Reformation Sunday, AD 2026 A

You may find the accompanying children’s sermon here.

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.

True reform must begin within. It is the reformation of the soul; which is not to deny that our faith is corporate, for indeed together we are the Body of Christ; nor that we are saved by grace through faith, which of course we are. Jesus saves. But this cannot be the end to our labors, nor the end of our joy.

Rather, having been liberated—having been freed from sin and death and Hell—we are then sent out to liberate others, to liberate the world! It’s a package deal. Love of God and love of neighbor must go hand-in-hand. God pours out the superabundance of His love upon us, that we might then pour it out upon everybody else, without distinction, without hesitation, be they friend or stranger or even our enemy. And that part’s not easy. But that’s what salvation is.

Reflexively, we want to hoard the love of God, to keep it to ourselves; for well we know that it is precious, and in our world precious things seem rare. We can’t go willy-nilly pouring out grace and love and generosity upon just anyone every hour of the day. Surely we’ll run out! Surely there’s not enough to go around. And so we keep the love of God bottled up, stored away on a shelf in the cupboard, so it becomes just one more thing to own, a lifestyle choice, an aesthetic.

But the love of God is our lifeblood. When it flows, we flourish. When it stagnates, we die. In order to live, to truly live, with the life of Christ within us, we must let it flow. We must pour it out. We must be reckless, must be foolish, at least in the eyes of the world. We must lend without thought of reward, give without hope of return. We must love our neighbor even when he’s a pain in the rear. We must forgive the unforgivable, believe the unbelievable, and see the face of God in human beings.

The love of God is not gold to be hoarded. The love of God is a living flame, which must spread. And the more it is shared, the more it is given recklessly away, the brighter and hotter and purer it burns. And again, that’s not easy. It takes practice; it takes work. We have to eat a lot of crow. It is hard to give, to forgive, to love, to lend; hard to feed the hungry and clothe the naked and rebuke the sinner and build up the broken. It simply is not in our fallen nature, but in the sinless Spirit of Christ who dwells within us.

We read today from Paul’s Epistle to the Romans, a fine Reformation text indeed. Good old Paul, he understood grace. He understood the radical liberation of the Gospel. When other Christians—Jewish Christians, just like him—tried to tell his Gentile congregations that in order to be a Christian you first have to be like them—have to eat a certain way, dress a certain way, adopt a culture that was alien to them—only then did Paul unleash all of his considerable rhetorical fury.

You moralists, he cried. You hypocrites! You want to dump all these rules and regulations and outward foreign signs upon these poor people, when we ourselves, the children of Abraham, have proven time and again unable to keep our own Law? It’s not the ritual that matters, Paul wrote, nor the outward religious or cultural rites—though he himself maintained them, as an observant Jew. The Gospel isn’t limited to one people, but is for all peoples, all of humankind, all of Creation.

What matters rather is the heart of the Law—love God with all you’ve got and love your neighbor as yourself—and when we can’t even do that, then we must run to the Gospel, run to the Good News, that where we have failed Christ succeeds! We are saved not by works of the Law, not by the strivings of our own hearts and minds, but by the mercy, grace, and love of God, in Christ who died for us.

And that’s fantastic right there. That’s the Gospel truth. That’s what we all need to hear: that we can’t earn grace, can’t be worthy of mercy, but we don’t have to be! For as all have sinned and fallen short of the glory of God, so now all are raised to life in Jesus Christ. It’s not about ego, or earning, or keeping score. It’s not about hierarchy or being holier-than-thou. It’s about Jesus! It’s all about Jesus! And now this Jesus lives in us, mirabile dictu.

God bless it. I wish we could end the homily here. Lord knows many would. But something happened then that Paul perhaps did not anticipate. Having rebuked the moralists, his congregations then went hard the other way. They became libertines. Paul was arrested around AD 58, and soon James, the Brother of the Lord—who was the leader of the early Christian movement, more so even than Sts Peter or Paul—started getting reports that Paul’s congregations had gone off the deep end.

See, they knew that we are saved by grace and not by works. They got that right. But then when Paul was arrested, they just went back to living as they had lived before; which is to say, as pagans. They stopped feeding the hungry. They stopped clothing the naked. They stopped treating one another as brothers and sisters in Christ, and went back to hanging out with their own social classes. Slaves worshipped with slaves; masters worshipped with masters; the haves at the expense of the have-nots. Not that we can relate to any of that.

It’s a classic biblical case of liberated people returning voluntarily to their captivity, because it’s easier, it’s familiar. Give us the fleshpots of Egypt! The very things from which God liberates us in Christ—consumerism, social divisions, meaningless distractions, allowing the market to determine the value of human lives—these are the very things to which Paul’s congregations returned in his absence.

To all of this James responded: Are you nuts? This isn’t what Paul meant when he told you that you are saved by faith and not by works. Faith doesn’t mean holding the right opinion, checking the proper box, and then relegating your religion to the back burner. Faith means living with the life of Christ within you! Faith means loving others as God has first loved us. Show me your faith without your works, James challenges, and I will show you my faith by my works; for faith without works indeed is dead.

Christ did not free us that we might slouch back into slavery. Should we sin that grace might abound the more? To this Paul says, μὴ γένοιτο—roughly translated, “Hell, no!” We aren’t freed simply so that we can live for ourselves. We’re freed for a purpose, freed for a mission: that we might be the hands and feet, the eyes and ears, the lives and the deaths, through which Christ is hard at work saving this and every world.

We are the Body of Christ now; we are the vessels of His Spirit; we are Jesus for a world still very much in need of Him—yet we all live like pagans. We all live like everyone else. And so the world cannot believe that Jesus saves, because the world cannot see Jesus except through you and through me.

And so we must reform. We must return to Jesus, the root of our faith. We must die and rise again, every day: die to ourselves, die to our sins; rise to a new life, rise to a new world. We are the keepers of the Kingdom. We are the saviors of the cosmos—if only we will let the Savior shine His light through us. For truly, we defend the Christ in the same way that we would defend a lion: by getting out of His way.

Christianity isn’t easy. Believe me, I know. It takes time and effort and humility and prayer. It takes silence and meditation and reading the Scriptures until they seep into our bones. It takes Confession before this assembly, and a constant return to the Eucharist, to the Font of all our faith. It is hard work being a Christian, and we are, after all, just sinners.

But we don’t do good works for us. We don’t do this for our own self-improvement or self-salvation. We are saved; we are loved; we are forgiven; we are freed. Alleluia! Rather, we strive to do the work of Christ because it is through such unlikely instruments as us that God has chosen to save the world.

That’s the price of free salvation: it has to be free for all.

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

Full disclosure: this homily is a reworking of one from about a decade back.

Pertinent Links

RDG Stout

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St Peter’s Lutheran

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Nidaros Lutheran

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