Reformation Sunday
October 28, 2012
John 8:31-36
On October 31, 1517…a mere
495 years ago, a relatively unknown monk living in a small city in Germany
performed an act that would, unbeknownst to him at the time, turn the church
upside down. When he tacked his writings
on the door of the Castle Church in Wittenburg, Luther may have had some
inclination of what awaited him at the hand of the King Charles, the Holy Roman
Emperor and Pope Leo X…but he had even more of an inclination that the power of
the word of God had set him free to challenge the abuses he saw in the church,
namely, the selling of indulgences as a fundraiser to build St Peters in Rome.
Had Martin Luther been around
50 or 100 years earlier, this never would have happened…but the advent of the
printing press made it possible for his Ninety-Five Theses on the Power
and Efficacy of Indulgences to be read by anyone who was literate. Before the creation of the printing press,
folks like Luther who challenged Rome
would be silently “removed” from the situation, most commonly by being burned
at the stake. And to be honest, had it
not been for the intervention of Saxony’s
Prince Fredrick the Wise, Luther would have wound up burnt on a stake and the
Reformation may not have happened. But
there he stood, at the door of the castle church with a hammer, a nail, and 95
theses in his hands, having found the freedom to Sin Boldly, freedom which he
found in the word of God.
Luther hadn’t always had that freedom to challenge
the status quo in the church. In his
earlier years as a monk, Luther was enslaved by his own sin and the feelings of
guilt surrounding those sins. He had
become enslaved by an image of God as an angry, judgmental God, ready to swat
down a sinner like someone chasing a fly with a fly swatter. He was enslaved by the idea that there was
absolutely nothing that he could do to earn the love of this image of God’s and
that he was doomed to suffer in the bowels of purgatory or hell. So Luther, almost literally, enslaved himself
to the practices of penance - fasting, long hours of prayer, he would whip
himself, and he spent many, many hours in the confessional, all in attempts to
make peace with his image of an angry God.
And the more he tried to find peace with God, the more and more he
became enslaved by the thought that this would never happen for a sinner such
as he thought he was.
So where did Luther find this freedom to sin boldly
and call the church out for its abuses?
Luther’s superior, Johann Van Staupitz, in seeing
the depth of Luther’s struggle, sent him to Wittenburg to study and to teach.
It was in these academic studies that Luther became so deeply exposed to the
bible, and particularly the New Testament…it was in these academic studies that
Luther finally grasped the words “if the Son makes you free, you will be free
indeed,” and “We hold that a person is justified by faith, apart from works, as
prescribed by the law.” Luther realized
in his reading of the New Testament, particularly the Gospels and Romans, that
salvation isn’t about what you do, it’s about who you are as a beloved child of
God. Luther found the peace and the
freedom that he was looking for in the word of God…and I’m not just talking
about the words written in the bible…I’m talking about the Word made
Flesh.
When Luther found the grace that comes to us
through Christ, as revealed in the scriptures, it opened up a whole new world
for him. One in which an angry,
vengeful, God was replaced by a God who loves and who seeks the lost and the
broken and brings them peace.
This is the freedom that Luther needed to allow him
to preach and teach to the people of Wittenburg, it is this freedom that gave
Luther the courage to call the Pope, and the church in Rome, out on its abuses
perpetrated in the selling of indulgences, taking advantage of an illiterate
public that had never had the opportunity to read the bible for themselves and
selling them a vision of fire and brimstone that could only be escaped by
purchasing get out of purgatory free cards, so that the capital campaign to
build St. Peter’s Basilica in Rome could be funded. It is this freedom that caused Luther to
stand firm in his challenges to Rome at his trials, for he could do no
other…and it is this freedom that inspired Luther to take another step towards
treason against the church when he translated the New Testament, and eventually
the whole bible into German so that the Word of God could be placed into the
hands of the people who before had to rely on the testimony of the priests to
learn about faith.
As we gather here, 495 years after Luther tacked
the 95 theses to the door of the castle church in Wittenburg, it is very
tempting for us as people who live with the freedom to worship however and
wherever we wish, to echo the words of the Jews who believed in Jesus “we are
children of Abraham, and have never been slaves to anyone.” But when we do this, we ignore two realities,
the reality of our history of slavery, and the reality that we share with our
dear brother Martin. Like him, we too
have enslaved ourselves to things that keep us from being able to live fully,
love fully, and serve fully. We have
become enslaved to fear, enslaved to wealth, enslaved to possessions, enslaved
to own self-consciousness, our own sin and our own guilt. And these things that enslave us keep us from
being able to stand up and sin boldly for the sake of the Gospel.
But just as Luther found freedom in the Word of
God, so can we. There is freedom waiting
for us in the Word made Flesh in the person of Jesus Christ whose death and
resurrection, the acts that freed us from our sin and granted us life, are
revealed to us in the words of scripture.
There is freedom waiting for us in the grace that God provides for us as
beloved children of God who are saved and set free from our sin not because of
anything we do or do not do, but rather because of the love, hope, and peace
that God grants us in this gift.
We are children of a God of love, one who looks
into our hearts and consistently finds the best that is within us and tries to
draw that out of us. We are children of
a God who freed us, through Christ, to live fully, to love fully, to serve
fully, with total confidence in God’s love and grace, without fear of making
mistakes, without the guilt that can overcome us when we mess up, without the
chains that our sin has tried to shackle us with. We are free to live as people of God…to sin
boldly as sinners who have been set free to be saints of God…to continue to
walk in the steps of Martin Luther, working for justice and peace in the church
and out in the world.
