George A. Mason 500-year Anniversary of the Reformation Wilshire Baptist Church 15 October 2017 Third in a series, The Legacy of Luther Dallas, Texas Just Faith Romans 1:16-17, 5:1-3; Ephesians 2:8-9 If you were standing today where I am, you would see what I see every Sunday: carved into the pulpit and painted in gold lettering is a verse of Scripture I chose when we redesigned the sanctuary some years ago. A man in the church gave the money for the pulpit. His only request was that somewhere on it there would be a reference from the Book of Romans, since that was his father s favorite book of the Bible. I chose Romans 1:16 and used the King James Version because that language never goes out of style: I am not ashamed of the gospel of Christ, for it is the power of God unto salvation for all who believe. Every time I mount this pulpit, I am reminded of the proper subject of preaching. My favorite moment with it, though, might have been the Sunday of my 25 th anniversary, when Rabbi David Stern preached for us. He looked at the verse, paused, shook his head with a wry grin and then glanced over at me as if to say, Are you going to make me look at this the whole time I preach? We both knew what was happening, but God had the last word. After he preached and I gave the altar call, two people came forward to join the church one of them on profession of faith! Such a Wilshire moment, don t you know?! The gospel has the power to save, regardless of the preacher. Of course, I would tell you that the God that Rabbi Stern loves and serves is none other than the God we love and serve, so we shouldn t be so surprised when a thing like that happens. But what is the gospel of Christ that is the power of God unto salvation? The rediscovery and reclaiming of that from these two verses in Romans 1 were what set off the Protestant Reformation 500 years ago this month. Martin Luther was an Augustinian monk in Wittenberg, Germany. He was a tortured soul, desperate to find peace with God. In good Catholic tradition, he would confess his sins to his priest and often sit in his cell and flagellate himself
with whips to punish his body for the sins of his soul. His priest confessor, Johann von Staupitz, became increasingly concerned about Luther s mental and emotional condition, as Luther confessed every thought and deed to him repeatedly, revealing a soul in constant crisis. Staupitz counseled Luther with care and kindness, but nothing worked until one glorious day in 1516. As Luther was studying these verses in the tower library of the monastery, he came upon the phrase the righteousness of God. The righteousness of God or you can also say that the justice of God, because the same word translates as justice and righteousness was precisely the stumbling block that kept Luther stuck in a state of perpetual self-condemnation. He later said that he hated the phrase the righteousness of God with a perfect hatred. He saw the righteousness of God as his enemy. He had always thought of it and the Church had often taught it as the high and perfect character of God with which God judges sinners. Against the righteousness of God, Luther knew he couldn t win in this life or the next. But that day as he read, it was as if a light dawned, or maybe it was a lightning strike to his heart. He saw something in those words of Paul that changed everything. He realized that the righteousness of God was not what condemned him; it was what saved him. He realized that this righteousness of God was a gift to him, not a demand of him. If you are from my generation, you may remember the musical group The Righteous Brothers. It had hits like Unchained Melody and You ve Lost That Lovin Feelin. In an interview with band member Bill Medley, he recalled how the group thought of the name: Normally, when we think of the word righteous, he said, we think of impeccable behavior and sterling moral character. But their name was not so much about their morality as it was about the quality of their music. In the 60s righteous was also a kind of exclamation that people used to express their approval and admiration of someone else. You were, righteous, brother! if you were cool. Someone once heard the music of [their group when it was called another name] and exclaimed, That was righteous, brother! [It wasn t] 2
their moral character but the quality of their music. It was good music. It was music they could be proud of and the name stuck. 1 This is like how Luther came to see God from that moment on. God was someone to be celebrated, not feared. God is righteous in the sense that God draws the world into God s goodness and love. It s almost like being drawn into the music of life that you don t make but you can hardly resist. Understood this way, faith isn t something you initiate yourself; it s more like letting yourself go to the music, letting it sing inside you, letting yourself dance to it. God shares God s righteousness with all who put their trust in God. We get to participate in God s righteousness, not because of who we are, but because of who God is. The righteousness of God is a gift to us that replaces our unrighteousness with God s righteousness. This is what God reveals to us in Jesus Christ. The gospel is about what God has done for us, not what we do for God. For by grace are you saved, through faith, Paul says in Ephesians. It s just faith. It s just about living by faith in God s gift to us, not by making our faith a work for God. The just shall live by faith, Paul says. That could also be translated, The one who is righteous will live by faith. And the meaning Luther saw in that is that our righteousness is a participation in God s righteousness. Today many Catholics also understand it as Luther did. But for half a millennium there has been a lot of hard work between Lutherans and Catholics to overcome the differences between them on this notion of justification by faith alone. But the rift is healing. Witness what one Catholic theologian, Richard Rohr, says: We know God by participation in God, not by trying to please God from afar. Please think long and happily about that! Let the one who would boast, boast in God, as Paul says (1 Corinthians 1:31). It is our faults and our weakness that bring us to God, not our perfection and our strength. What a surprise for most people! 1 Stephen E. Albertin, Righteous! https://sermons.com/sermon/righteous/144 3512 3
I believe this is the heart of the Gospel. Nice. The legacy of Luther is alive and well among Catholics now as well as Protestants and Baptists like us. But we have to be reminded of it over and over. And some of us have to hear it for the first time. Many of us live with the same kind of worry Luther had. We re never good enough, no matter what we do. We feel that God looks down on us. We imagine God only staring at us with a disappointed frown if not an angry glare. Maybe it s because we grew up with a demanding father or a mother who was ambitious for us to succeed, and we don t think we can ever be what they wanted. Maybe we grew up listening to preaching that emphasized our sin and hellfire more that God s grace. On top of that, we all of us come to a time in our lives when we feel like failures. We know our own crooked hearts. We blew a marriage, we lost a friend or just didn t measure up to the standards that were set for us or that we set for ourselves. And it just kept us stuck. Maybe it keeps you stuck even now. Here s the good news the gospel: just faith. That s it. Just a faith that God has made you just, made you right. Your hope and mine is not in ourselves; it is in God made known through Jesus Christ. Period. I attended a Lutheran school from kindergarten through the eighth grade. My mother s family was Lutheran. My parents raised us in a Baptist-like Evangelical denomination called the Free Church. Our church put a lot of emphasis on being born again by making a profession of faith in Christ. If you prayed the sinner s prayer and believed in Jesus, you can be saved. One day in school a religion teacher wrote a spiritual equation on the chalkboard: Grace + = Salvation. I raised my hand as if it were an interrogative question. And you know me I like to have all the answers. FAITH! I said. Grace plus faith equals salvation. Turns out it wasn t a question, though. It was a statement. My first big Reformation lesson. The blank wasn t there to be filled in; it was there to signify nothing. Grace plus nothing nada, zero is what brings salvation to us. What about faith, then? Faith itself is possible only because it is given to us. God s grace not only does for us what we can t 4
do for ourselves by our works, but it also enables us to have faith. It makes it possible for us to trust in God by breaking down our defenses and opening us up to divine help. My colleague and friend Jimmy Gentry reports on a beautiful story that happened only last month. Clayton Cook was married on Friday, September 22. Following the wedding, pictures were being taken with his wife, Brittany. The pair was on a bridge over a lake in Victoria Park in Kitchener, Canada. That s when Cook noticed something that would startle anyone. A child had fallen into the lake while playing with his friends and looked to be drowning. The suited-up groom ran off the bridge and jumped into the water. He grabbed the little guy by the forearm and pulled him to safety. That s Clay to me. It doesn t even surprise me that that happened, said Brittany. It s something he would just instinctively do. How different would everyone s day have been if we weren t in the right place at the right time? After the rescue, Clayton didn t change out of his soaking suit. Instead, he went about his special day without complaining once about his wet shoes. How cool is that? Really cool! Or, righteous, we might say. Clayton did for that little boy in peril what that boy could not do for himself. Clayton s own character, his righteousness, was precisely the thing that sent him into the water to rescue the boy. We could have imagined someone like Clay thinking mostly of himself on his wedding day, or of blaming the little boy or his parents for being careless. We might imagine that because we often hear a lot of high-andmighty rhetoric about personal responsibility especially as it applies to other people! But every single one of us eventually comes to the end of our ability to save ourselves. We will all fall, and we will all fail, because that s what humans do. Thank God that s not what God does. The one who is perfectly righteous exercises the greatest mercy. God doesn t point a finger to lay blame or apply shame. God takes all our faults upon God s self in Jesus Christ, enabling us thereby to be truly response- 5
able. We are able to respond when the weight of judgment is removed, not when it is loaded on us. And that s only just. Or righteous, brother. Amen. 6