Sermon by Pastor Joel
Jeremiah 31:31-34
Psalm 46
Romans 3:19-28
John 8:31-36
It’s Reformation Sunday, and the scene that most seems to capture our imagination is that no-turning-back scene, when Martin Luther marched up to the door of the Castle Church in Wittenberg and hammered the Ninety-Five Theses into the wood. In fact, historians can’t say for sure that even happened. Nobody actually reported seeing Luther hammer the theses up there, and people put notices up at the church all the time. Even more importantly, Luther, to meet him in 1517, was still an obedient monk, committed to the pope’s authority, hoping church leaders would address the issues he’d identified around indulgences and the lay person’s relationship to God. He was not yet a rebel. That came later.
For the beginning of Luther’s Reformation, we need to go back much earlier, to 1505, to the year of a thunderstorm that terrified young Martin so much, he vowed to become a monk if he survived. The storm passed and Luther soon afterwards became a devout resident at the Augustinian monastery. At dawn, each day, the bell would call him to prayer, rousing him from his cell. He would pray, and confess. Fast. And pray and confess again. But he still felt no peace. His superior, Johann von Staupitz, reportedly became exasperated because Luther kept returning to confession with what seemed like microscopic sins. Not because Luther doubted the church. But because he believed in it so completely.
A second scene to imagine: Luther sitting at his desk in Wittenberg in 1517, drafting the Ninety-Five Theses. He does not intend it to be a declaration of independence, but more a proposal for change from an academic. The Pope will listen. The Bishops will hear him out. His older self will wince at his naïveté; but younger Luther is still trying to change a corrupt system from within. He is trying to save the Church.
Two years later, Luther sits each night with the same Bible verse: Romans 1:17.
"For in it the righteousness of God is revealed through faith for faith; as it is written, 'The one who is righteous will live by faith.'" He kept tripping over the word righteousness. “I hated that word,” he recalls later. Finally, Luther says, he saw the word in a new way – righteousness was not God’s demand; it was God’s gift. "I felt that I was altogether born again and had entered Paradise itself through open gates,” Luther says. This is not only a theological breakthrough. This is a human being transformed. An obedient monk becoming a liberated Christian.
Another scene, a year later, in Heidelberg. Luther has arrived to defend his ideas. The rumours have spread: the trouble-making monk for Wittenberg is coming. The young scholars are expecting a fight about indulgences. Instead, they hear about “the theology of the cross.” They hear Luther suggest that humans are constantly mistaking glory for truth and strength for God’s way. Luther is reminding his listeners to question assumption, to challenge the framework they’ve been given, to explore faith in a new way. This is reformation – rethinking what has always been, pondering a better way.
And finally, we skip ahead, to 1545; Luther is an old man. His writings, at the end, have turned hateful and cruel; stripped of the grace he had once so devoutly challenged. His racist message in his last works will be used 400 years later, to underpin the most horrific, planned, and deliberate atrocity the modern world has known. “But even then,” he says, “look back through the story; I did not know everything. I learned as I went. My views developed. I changed as I needed to. In other words, ‘God kept reforming me.’”
The Reformation was not born the moment Luther nailed something to a door. The Reformation was born when Luther let God reform him.
And the Reformation is not over. Not for the church. Not for us. There is no one place that we reach and then stop. Change and reformation have been the very definition of our lives and faith. Just as some part of the Bible may resonate more with us at one point in time than others, the words of Luther speak to us in different ways. We must listen to all of them – the words that bring us joy and hope, the words that reassure us about our own understanding of faith, and, yes, the part that brings us shame. By listening, we find the truth that Luther sought. By listening, we make a path toward change. True discipleship is lifelong transformation rather than a single conversion experience.
It is a popular myth that Luther's first concern was indulgences. Really, he was focused on repentance. People were arriving in Wittenberg carrying indulgence certificates they had purchased and believing that repentance had become unnecessary. Luther feared that an external religious transaction was replacing inner transformation.
In Thesis 1, he writes, “When our Lord and Master Jesus Christ said, 'Repent,' he willed the entire life of believers to be one of ongoing repentance." The entire life of believers, repenting and changing. And reforming. This is Luther’s ongoing argument: we are also being transformed by the gospel. We are always being reformed, especially by acknowledging where we have gone wrong.
Reformation – this act, this choice, this fight to be better - was never sheets of paper hammered on a church door. It was always the people of the church. It was always us. Amen.