Ephesians 2:1-10 (NRSV) 1 You were dead through the trespasses and sins 2 in which you once lived, following the course of this world, following the ruler of the power of the air, the spirit that is now at work among those who are disobedient. 3 All of us once lived among them in the passions of our flesh, following the desires of flesh and senses, and we were by nature children of wrath, like everyone else. 4 But God, who is rich in mercy, out of the great love with which he loved us 5 even when we were dead through our trespasses, made us alive together with Christ [a] by grace you have been saved 6 and raised us up with him and seated us with him in the heavenly places in Christ Jesus, 7 so that in the ages to come he might show the immeasurable riches of his grace in kindness toward us in Christ Jesus. 8 For by grace you have been saved through faith, and this is not your own doing; it is the gift of God 9 not the result of works, so that no one may boast. 10 For we are what he has made us, created in Christ Jesus for good works, which God prepared beforehand to be our way of life.
A Monk with a Mallet A sermon preached by the Rev. Dr. Virginia McDaniel October 8, 2017 On October 31, 1517, a monk walked up to the church in Wittenberg and pounded a notice on the door with a mallet. Up until that day, nearly 500 years ago, pretty much everyone in Europe was a Roman Catholic Christian. Yes, there were other flavors of Christians in Eastern Europe and Asia and Africa, but Roman Catholicism was the dominant form of Christianity and had been since the fourth century. With that monk s posting of 95 theses for discussion and debate, the Protestant Reformation divided western Christianity into two and then three and then many groups until there were many denominations not just Catholics and Lutherans but Calvinists and Hutterites, Anabaptists and Zwinglians. This was hugely important! That one could protest the religious authorities revolutionized peoples way of seeing themselves and at the world. It led to wider European literacy, and eventually it forced governments to grant religious freedom, while also setting off a political revolution that overshadowed the religious one. But I m getting ahead of our story Let s set the scene. 1 During the Middle Ages, the Catholic Church completely dominated European civilization. It s almost impossible to imagine the scope of its power in the Middle Ages, but let s try. First off, Mother Church was the caretaker of the most important thing that Christians had their souls which, unlike our temporal bodies, were eternal. With living conditions so tough in those days, it s not surprising that people cared passionately about what would happen to them after death. (The Black Plague had wiped out 50 million people in the 14 th century and, by Luther s time, life expectancy was still only 35 years. ) So if the church guarantee eternal salvation, that was a pretty sweet deal. When the Church talked, people listened. The Church also provided all of the social services of the time it distributed alms to the poor, it ran orphanages, it provided what education was available. AND, the Church owned over one third of all the land in Europe, which helped make it not just the most powerful religious force on the continent, but also the most powerful economic and political force. The pope claimed authority over all the kings of Europe as the successor to the Roman Emperor. 1 Crash Course in the Protestant Reformation https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1o8oielbnxe
So here s this incredibly powerful institution, and in 1517 its power was undone by a monk with a mallet. The Reformation that gave us our name Protestants really was set in motion by one man Martin Luther. Martin s father was a mine-owner, which made the family sort of middle class. Father sent son off to study law, believing that it would improve the family s fortunes. Like most law students, Martin hated it. One day when Martin was out walking (so the story goes) a sudden storm blew up, lightning struck him to the ground and, in a panic, he cried Help me, Saint Anne, and I ll become a monk! He survived, and within two weeks Martin withdrew from the university, entered an Augustinian monastery 2, shaved off his hair, took his vows, and sent off a message to inform his family of his change of plan. They were delighted (I am sure) to have spent all that money on his education because monking is so lucrative. You might think that once he had found his true vocation this impetuous and headstrong young man might have settled down. Not so much. In 1511 the abbot sent Father Martin (he d been ordained as a priest by then) and another monk to Rome on an errand for their order. The two traveled on foot and made the 1000 mile journey in about two months. Luther had high expectations for Rome. But the more he saw of the city, the more his reverence turned to loathing. He was shocked by the lack of morality of the local clergy and by the luxurious lifestyle of the Pope Leo X, a member of the Medici family. Back in Erfurt, meanwhile, Luther was obsessed with his own sinfulness. After he returned to the monastery he would sometimes keep a priest busy listening to his confession for hours at a time. Finally, his superiors sent him to the University of Wittenberg because they were a little annoyed with him and they thought maybe he d be good at teaching scripture. (These days, incessant confessors become stars on reality TV, but back then, apparently, you sent them to the University to be professors.) Luther finally found solace in the writings of the apostle Paul, specifically in one line that said, The just shall live by faith. That phrase crystallized what had so troubled his soul: salvation comes through FAITH, not good works not through prayer, not through fasting, or vigils or pilgrimages or relics not through giving to the poor, or the sacraments, or any thing that a person can DO. We can t ever be good enough 2 1505
through our own actions to merit God s love. We can only have faith in Latin, sola fide. Luther s new understanding of the grace of God grew into an open conflict with the Church when a friar named Johann Tetzel showed up in Wittenberg selling indulgences. So what was that about? Pope Leo needed funds to pay a certain painter and sculptor, one Michelangelo, whom he d commissioned to finish the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel. An indulgence was a donation to the church that came with a promise from the pope to reduce a sinner s time in purgatory, and Tetzel was apparently quite a salesman! But Father Martin felt that that wasn t the sort of thing that should be for sale. The price of an indulgence a certificate for Whole Life Complete Forgiveness of Any Horrible Sin was 3 marks, about half a year s wages for a laborer. Father Martin didn t like seeing his parishioners handing over money that they didn t have for a scrap of paper that he believed to be meaningless. So in response he wrote 95 Theses for Debate (principally against the sale of indulgences) and then dramatically nailed them to the door of the church for all to see, on October 31, 1517 (Or else he mailed them to the archbishop, or possibly both. We don t actually know.) The church door was the Yankee Flyer or the Granby Living Facebook page of his day. It was where you put important notices that you wanted to share. Luther got the debate he was asking for, alright, but over time his positions became increasingly radical. Starting from the assertion that Christians were saved only by faith and the grace of God, Luther kept upping the ante, saying first that the church s rituals didn t have the power to save souls, and THEN arguing that, far from being infallible, the Church and the Pope made errors all the time. These were all bold things for Luther to assert! Almost overnight this had gone from a debate over the sale of indulgences to a revolution. But why then? Why Luther? There had been plenty of radical scholars and clerics who had criticized the Church s abuses over the years. John Wycliffe had translated the Bible into English 150 years earlier, and another reformer, Jan Hus, was burned at the stake for his ideas in 1415. Why would Luther prove to be so influential? The biggest reason was the invention of the printing press. Wittenberg had just gotten their own Gutenberg Press and, soon after he posted them, Luther s 95 Theses went viral. Over the next ten years more than 2000 editions of Luther s writings appeared. His ideas were also distributed as posters and cartoons that were seen and read by hundreds of thousands of people.
But maybe the most revolutionary of Luther s publications was his new translation of the Bible into German. For the first time EVER anyone who could read could read the Bible for themselves, because Luther used the German that people actually spoke. Suddenly it wasn t just the learned clergy who had access to the Bible, but anyone. Hundreds of thousands of copies of Luther s Bible were printed, people carried it around in their pocket and memorized it now everyone could quote scripture and discuss its meaning. Luther s radical belief was that if everyone could return directly to the scriptures, they would see the one single truth and the Church would be restored to its original simplicity. That s the meaning of the radical, by the way. The Latin word radix, from which it comes, means root. Luther and the other reformers thought that if they could just get back to the roots of Christianity, all would be restored. Alas, there is no such thing as original simplicity! It s all interpretation. And once you start making scripture accessible to everyone and tell them that their interpretation is just as good as the interpretation of the clergy, what happens is that people start, you know, start having different interpretations about religious truth. So Luther s protest started creating spinoffs the Zwinglians, the Calvinists, the Anabaptists and then the spinoffs had their own spinoffs. Each of these new Protestant churches thought that IT knew the one true way to worship God, and that everyone else was going to hell. This led to some fighting. And also some disemboweling. So for instance, you don t believe in infant baptism. You believe that people should come of age so that they can make their own decision about belief and salvation. And other people Catholics, many Protestants believe that it s okay to baptize infants, or even that it s good. Maybe you don t think this disagreement should lead to disembowelment, and yet it did. With all these different denominations, there were years of religious mayhem. What started as a doctrinal dispute turned into a social revolt, because Luther let the personal conscience cat out of the bag. In 1525 German peasants took up Luther s ideas to give voice to longstanding grievances against landlords and clergy. In their most famous revolutionary proclamation, The Twelve Articles, the peasants echoed Luther s language proclaiming that serfdom was invented by men with no basis in scripture. Peasants rebelled, refused to pay taxes, pillaged church lands, and raised an army estimated at 300,000 people. Seeing what his ideas had loosed, Luther feared for civil order and sided with the ruling elite. And that turned out to be the winning side for a few hundred years, at least.
Luther seems to have taken back much of his earlier ideas, now claiming that Christian liberty was a spiritual concept only, and not meant to promote equality or freedom in the physical world. He urged the faithful to smite, slay, and stab rebels and kill them like mad dogs. The peasants revolt, the biggest uprising in Europe before the French Revolution, was suppressed with crushing brutality. An estimated 100,000 people were killed. That said, we shouldn t minimize the extent to which the Reformation really was about belief. Catholics truly believed that Protestants were heretics, and Protestants truly believed that the Pope and his hierarchy were imposters. If it were only about land and influence, how could we explain the case of Saxon Elector John Frederick, for instance? When defeated and imprisoned by his Catholic emperor, Frederick was given the choice between his lands and his faith. He chose his faith. And then there were Catholics, like Sir Thomas more, who would not sanction King Henry VIII s break with the Pope and chose execution over sacrilege. In the end, the Protestant Reformation was both a religious movement and a political one. Now many would argue that the Reformation led to more religious tolerance in Western Europe, because people just had to learn to live with each other, once they had a lot of bloody wars and figured out that they were going to be both Catholics and Protestants going forward. But maybe the most crucial aspect of the Protestant Reformation is contained inside the words: PROTEST and REFORM. These have become two of the central political ideas of recent centuries. And while religion has justifiably been blamed for much violence and intolerance, we should also remember that many of the leaders of the American Civil Rights movement were Protestant clergy. And they saw a history of protest that could fuel real and lasting reform, which included people like Gandhi and Thoreau but also people like MARTIN LUTHER.