Who was Martin Luther?

Based on a sermon by Jack Cabaness preached at the Katonah Presbyterian Church on June 25, 2017. This sermon was the second in our summer sermon series on the Reformation at 500.

For I am not ashamed of the gospel; it is the power of God for salvation to everyone who has faith, to the Jew first and also to the Greek. For in it the righteousness of God is revealed through faith for faith; as it it written, “The one who is righteous will live by faith.” –Romans 1:16-17

Today we look at the person who is most associated with the beginning of the Protestant Reformation: The German monk Martin Luther. Martin Luther did not set out to be a reformer, but all that changed thanks to an extremely violent thunderstorm.

On June 5, 1505, a 21-year-old Martin Luther was traveling home from university. His father Hans Luther had become modestly prosperous because of a silver boom in Saxony, and Hans had made enough money to send his son Martin to the University of Erfurt to study law. Martin was on his way home to visit his parents when he was caught off-guard by the extremely violent storm. In fact, a bolt of lightning struck close enough to Martin that he was thrown off his horse. Convinced he was going to die, he cried out, “Help me, Saint Anne!” Anne was the patron saint of miners, so perhaps in a way, Martin was appealing to the family saint. But Martin actually said more than that. He said, “Help me, St. Anne, I will become a monk.” Becoming a monk was the height of spirituality in the medieval world, so, in effect, Luther was trying to bargain with God via St. Anne to dedicate his life to God’s service if he survived the storm.

Martin did survive the storm, and when he arrived home, he told his father that he had made a vow to become a monk, so he would not be able to continue his study of the law. His father Hans was furious, but what could he do? His son Martin had made a vow. So the next month, on July 17, Martin entered the Augustinian monastery in Erfurt. Two years later, he was ordained to the Roman Catholic priesthood.

In his own estimation, Martin Luther excelled at being a monk, but at the same time, he was engaged in a great spiritual struggle.

Martin wrote: “I made a martyr of myself through prayer, fasting, vigils, cold. What was I looking for in all that if not God? He knows how well I observed my rules and what a severe life I led.”

But no matter how much Luther did, it seemed he had to do more. Luther became obsessed with confessing every single sin and bad thought to his spiritual director—so much so, that in exasperation, his confessor told Luther to go away and only come back when he had something real to confess. Still, Luther found no relief. He engaged in more and more extreme penitential practices to punish himself for his sins, but he still felt unforgiven. This made him hate God, as he confessed, “I no longer believed in Christ, rather I took him for a severe and terrible judge.” In the midst of this spiritual crisis, Martin celebrated his first mass as a priest. At the moment he lifted the bread and wine toward God, Martin was so overcome by fear that he almost passed out.

Luther’s mentor, Johannes Staupitz, sent his difficult charge back to the study by securing him a teaching post. Luther ended up studying the Greek New Testament and lecturing on Paul’s letter to the Romans. While in a tower room in the monastery meditating on the Letter to the Romans, Martin was struck by a new understanding of the phrase, “the righteousness of God.”

Now, the traditional medieval interpretation of the “righteousness of God” was that it referred to God’s absolute standards of righteousness that God expected humans to live up to. This simply reminded Martin of the harsh and severe judge he could never please, and Martin could not understand how Paul could have equated this righteousness of God with good news. But then Martin had an epiphany. What if the righteousness of God refers not to some absolute standard of righteousness that we can never live up to, but to the gift of God’s righteousness that comes from God to us by faith. Forgiveness of sins and salvation are thus freely available regardless of personal merit.

This doctrine, known as justification by faith, became one of the hallmarks of the Protestant Reformation. Martin soon began to read the Bible through an entirely new set of lenses. His view of God transformed from that of a dreadful judge to one of unconditional love.

Luther didn’t break with Roman Catholicism right away. He believed at the time that his new understanding was still compatible with church teaching. But as we discussed last week, the selling of indulgences really incensed him. If it is God who makes us righteous, then what right did Pope Leo have to sell an indulgence promising the forgiveness of sins?

In 1517, Luther summarized his complaints in the famous 95 Theses, or propositions for debate, which was a public invitation to his academic colleagues to debate the doctrine of indulgences. A local printer made copies of Luther’s theses and circulated them, thus provoking a pamphlet war across Germany. Many of Luther’s fellow Augustinian monks sided with Martin, while the Dominicans sided with their fellow Dominican Johan Tetzel, the famous preacher of indulgences who had coined the phrase, “As soon as the coin in the coffer rings, the soul from Purgatory springs!”

Martin Luther probably would have been burned at the stake as a heretic if it weren’t for the protection of Prince Frederick the Wise, who was an Elector, in other words, one of the electors who elected the Emperor of the Holy Roman Empire. Martin Luther did not have the backing of the Emperor, Charles V, but Charles promised Luther safe passage to a meeting at which Martin would be called upon to account for his heretical teachings. This was the famous Diet of Worms, which doesn’t sound very appetizing.

The Diet was the name of the Imperial Parliament, which would meet in different cities across the Empire. The next meeting was scheduled to be in Worms, so the Emperor Charles V promised Luther safe passage to the Diet so that Luther could be questioned. Here, Martin Luther refused to recant, and he made his famous speech, Here I stand, I can do no other.

Martin Luther at the Diet of Worms (1521)

The moment that Luther left Worms, the Emperor withdrew his promise of safe passage and declared Luther an outlaw, making it open season on him.

But agents of Luther’s new friend, Frederick the Wise, the Elector, arranged to kidnap Martin, and they hid him away at Wartburg Castle, where Luther directed the Reformation from a distance, writing, and translating the Bible into German. It’s fair to say that Luther’s German translation of the Bible was every bit as influential, if not more, on the development of German Language and Literature, as the King James Version of the Bible was influential on the development of English Language and Literature.

In 1525, Luther married Katherine von Bora. Katherine had been a former nun whom Luther arranged to be kidnapped from the convent along with several other sisters in the back of a fishmonger’s wagon among barrels of herring. The two made quite a pair, as Luther himself admitted. Together, they raised ten children—six of their own and four orphans. Luther clearly adored Katherine, joking referring to her as “my Lord Katie.” (as told by Diana Butler Bass in A People's History of Christianity).

In one of his writings, Luther wrote eloquently about washing cloth diapers, a chore that he believed husbands should share equally with their wives, and he wrote that the chore of washing cloth diapers was no less glorifying to God than preaching the gospel.

Martin and Katie

I would now like to turn to a central theme in Luther’s theology, and a central theme that our Lutheran friends continue to espouse, and that’s the theme of Law and Gospel.

Church historian Justo Gonzáles makes this important clarification about Law and Gospel: This dichotomy does not mean simply that the law is first, and then comes gospel. Nor does it mean that the Old Testament is the law, and the New Testament is the gospel. Its meaning is much deeper. For Martin Luther, the contrast between law and gospel shows that God’s revelation is both a word of judgment and a word of grace. The two always go together.

According to Martin Luther, the law tells us that God is not indifferent to sin. When we are confronted by the law, we are overwhelmed by the contrast between such holiness and our own sin. This is what Martin Luther means by the Word of God as law.

But God also speaks a word of forgiveness. That forgiveness is the gospel, made all the more joyful and overpowering because the judgment of the law is so crushing. This gospel does not contradict or obliterate the law. God’s forgiveness does not deny the gravity of our sin. It is precisely that gravity that makes the gospel such surprising good news.

For Martin Luther, this understanding of Law and Gospel was paramount, and it’s how most Lutheran theologians would describe Law and Gospel today.

I was in a doctor of ministry for preaching program in Chicago. My colleagues included pastors who were Presbyterian, Lutheran, Anglican, and UCC. What I grew to appreciate so much about my Lutheran colleagues was their insistence that every sermon had to include the gospel, or else it wasn’t really a sermon. Every sermon had to have good news. Sometimes we Presbyterians were content to preach a challenging sermon on a challenging text and simply let that challenge hover over the congregation for a while, but not so our Lutheran colleagues. Every sermon had to include Gospel. Every sermon had to have good news!

One of my favorite Lutheran contemporary preachers is Nadia Bolz-Weber, who is the pastor of A House for All Sinners and Saints in Denver, Colorado. Nadia is about 6 feet one inches tall, has sleeve tattoes, and curses like a truck driver. She says that these facts about her were interesting for about five minutes, and those five minutes ended five years ago. (Yet, she still includes those details on her own website, so she must feel that they continue to give her some street cred.)

As a pastor, Nadia has always wanted to reach out to those who often feel alienated from church---drug addicts, homeless, drag queens, freaks of any sort, and when young, graduate students and white, suburban types started showing up at her church as well, she realized that God was teaching her a lesson about inclusiveness.

Nadia describes the contrast between Law and Gospel in this way. She writes:

You can tell the Law because it is almost always an if-then proposition –  If you follow all the rules in the Bible God then will love you and you will be happy.  If you lose 20 pounds then you will be worthy to be loved.  If you live a perfectly righteous Green eco lifestyle then you will be worthy of taking up space in the planet.  If you never have a racist or sexist or homophobic thought then you will be worthy of calling other people out on their racism and sexism and homophobia.  The Law is always conditional and it is never anything anyone can do perfectly. When we treat Law as Gospel there can never be life and happiness and worthiness.  Under the Law there are only 2 options: pride and despair.  When fulfilling the “shoulds” is the only thing that determines our worthiness we are either prideful about our ability to follow the rules compared to others or we despair at our inability to perfectly do anything.  Either way, it’s still bondage.

And that’s why the Gospel is different.  The Gospel is not an if-then proposition.  It’s more Wizard of Oz than that.  The Gospel is a because because because because proposition.  Because God is our creator and because we rebel against the idea of being created beings and insist on trying to be God for ourselves and because God will not play by our rules and because in the fullness of time when God had had quite enough of all of that God became human in Jesus Christ to show us who God really is and because when God came to God’s own and we received him not, and because God would not be deterred God went so far as to hang from the cross we built and did not even lift a finger to condemn but said forgive them they know not what they are doing and because Jesus Christ defeated even death and the grave and rose on the 3^rd day and because we all sin and fall short and are forever turned in on ourselves and forget that we belong to God and that none of our success guarantee this and none of our failures exclude this and because God loves God’s creation God refuses for our sin and brokenness and inability to always do the right things to be the last word because God came to save and not to judge and therefore…therefore you are saved by grace as a gift and not by the works of the law and this truth will set you free like no self-help plan or healthy living or social justice work “shoulds” can ever do.

What is the Gospel message to YOU this day? You who are prideful because of the laws you have kept, and you are despairing because you feel like you can never measure up.

The good news is that even when hard truths about ourselves and our situations are spoken, that even in the midst of such hard and honest truths, there is also a word of forgiveness, a word that re-forms us after we have been crushed, a word that promises new life.

And in the words of Martin Luther, this is most certainly true!

All glory and praise be to our God. Amen.

This manuscript was written in preparation for the sermon and may differ from the sermon as actually preached.

Bibliography:

Bass, Diana Butler. A People’s History of Christianity: The Other Side of the Story. New York: HarperCollins, 2009.

Bolz-Weber, Nadia. “Why the Gospel is more Wizard of Oz-y than the Law” http://www.patheos.com/blogs/nadiabolzweber/2012/10/sermon-on-why-the-gospel-is-more-wizard-of-oz-y-than-the-law/  Retrieved June 22, 2017.

González, Justo L. The Story of Christianity, Volume 2, The Reformation to the Present Day. HarperSanFrancisco, 1985.

Hillerbrand, Hans J., editor. The Protestant Reformation. Revised Edition. New York: Harper Perennial, 1968, 2009.

Sunshine, Glenn S. The Reformation for Armchair Theologians. Louisville, Kentucky: Westminster/John Knox Press, 2005.

The Roots of Reformation

Based on a sermon preached by Jack Cabaness at the Katonah Presbyterian Church on June 18, 2017. This sermon is the first in a series on the 500th anniversary of the Protestant Reformation.

Martin Luther nailing the 95 Theses to the door of the castle church in Wittenburg, Germany on October 31, 2017. The church door was actually the equivalent of a university bulletin board.

Today we begin our summer sermon series on the 500^th anniversary of the Protestant Reformation. I’m interested in this series not only because I’m captivated by church history but also because I know that many of us in this congregation have Roman Catholic backgrounds; more than a few of us are still technically Roman Catholic even after worshipping at KPC for years. More than once someone at KPC has come up to me and said, “I’m sorry, Father, I won’t be able to make it to mass this Sunday!” I mention this not to put anyone on the spot, but simply to note in a light-hearted way how deeply ingrained our religious habits can be.

When I’m a guest in a Roman Catholic service, and it’s time to say the Lord’s Prayer, I do remember to say “trespasses” instead of “debts.” But the thing that I always forget is that the Roman Catholic version of the Lord’s Prayer is shorter than the Protestant versions, and when the entire congregation has finished saying “deliver us from evil,” mine is the only voice adding: “For thine is …”

Over the course of this summer, we will have fun observing the light-hearted differences and commonalities between us, and we’ll examine deeper issues as well. As we mark the anniversary, do we celebrate it or do we commemorate it? On the one hand, there are many things to celebrate. The Presbyterian Church (USA) wouldn’t exist without the Protestant Reformation, at least not as we know it. There are many things in our heritage about which we should be grateful. Yet we are also acutely aware that the reformations of the sixteenth century led to persecution, executions, long-lasting wars, and continual divisions in the body of Christ, and for this reason many voices suggest that commemoration is the better approach.

For many of us these divisions are not just sad but interesting chapters in a history text book, they are sad and tragic chapters that have played themselves out in our own families. Perhaps your parents or grandparents were ostracized because they married “outside the faith.” Perhaps you’ve been ostracized because you no longer worship in the church of your childhood. I have childhood memories of fundamentalist Protestant preachers and my own grandmother telling me that my Roman Catholic friends, with whom I grew up in El Paso, Texas, would be going to hell; and many of you who grew up Roman Catholic in the years before Vatican II likewise have memories of priests and nuns telling you that your Protestant friends would be going to hell. Sadly, we got to be very good at condemning each other.

This is why I’m grateful for the voice of Martin Luther reverberating across history calling the entire church to repent--not just Catholics, not just Protestants, but all of us. The church in 1517 needed to repent. And the church in 2017 needs to repent. In the first of his 95 theses, or propositions for debate, that Martin Luther nailed to the church door in Wittenburg, Germany, he wrote, “When our Lord and Master Jesus Christ said, ‘Repent,’ he willed the entire life of believers to be one of repentance.” At the time he had no idea that he would one day be regarded as the founder of a separate church or movement; in his mind he was simply calling the entire church as he knew it to repentance.

Some scholars wonder whether Martin Luther literally nailed the theses to the church door. They wonder whether that is more legend that fact. At any rate, the act of nailing a list of theses to the church door may or may not have been as radical as it sounds because the church door really functioned as a kind of university bulletin board, much like the Katonah Village Improvement Society bulletin board near the train station. It wasn’t the act of nailing the theses to the church door that was so radical; it was what Luther was saying in those theses! Originally, Luther only intended to debate his university colleagues in Wittenburg, but thanks to the relatively recent invention of the printing press, Luther’s ideas spread like wildfire and the German Reformation was under way.

There were three specific issues facing the church in Luther’s time that prompted his call for repentance. The first issue was the lack of education among the parish priests. Many of them did not understand the Latin of the Mass that they recited every day. Many of the parishioners tended to view what the priest said in largely magical terms anyway—for instance, the phrase “hocus pocus” comes from that point in the Mass when the priest would say hoc est corpus meum (“this is my body.”)

But the lack of education among the clergy also meant that basic Christian doctrine was not being communicated either. After the invention of the printing press, many of the laity began reading for themselves. For example, in Geneva in 1536, just prior to the city turning Protestant, members of the congregation were known to interrupt preachers, challenging what was said on the basis the of the parishioner’s own readings in the Bible and shouting the preachers down when they could not respond to the parishioner’s satisfaction.

A second issue facing the church at this time was widespread concubinage. The local priests were required to be celibate, but many of them lived openly with women and simply paid an annual fine to the bishop, which the bishop was only too happy to receive. Rodrigo Borgia, after he had become Pope Alexander VI, made his illegitimate son a cardinal and put him in charge of the papal armies. How many things are wrong in that one sentence?! If you watched the Borgias miniseries on Showtime, you might be familiar with much of that story. Reform-minded people across the church grew increasingly dismayed at a church that taught one set of practices as official doctrine but lived out a very different set of practices in reality.

A third issue, and one that particularly incensed Martin Luther, was the selling of indulgences. An indulgence was a way of reducing the amount of time that a deceased person had to spend in Purgatory in exchange for a fee. The selling of indulgences had helped to fund some of the Crusades a few centuries earlier, and they helped to fund the building of St. Peter’s Basilica in Rome. Indulgence preachers like Johan Tetzel would go around and try to convince people to buy indulgences. Tetzel is said to have come up with the jingle,

as soon as the coin in the coffer rings,                                                                                                     the soul from Purgatory springs

It rhymes in German, too. And Tetzel was not above using emotional manipulation. He would lay on the guilt, saying such things as “for only a few coins, you can alleviate the suffering of your loved one in Purgatory. Are you really going to pass up such an opportunity?”

The Selling of Indulgences

In addition to the growing, widespread church-wide concern about all three of these issues, the Humanist movement was growing and helping to sow the seeds of reform. A humanist was a student of the humanities, a group of subjects that included rhetoric, moral philosophy or ethics, history, and poetry. They looked to the past for sources of truth and goodness. They read the classics in Greek and Latin, and they wanted to read the Scriptures in the original Hebrew and Greek. One of their rallying cries was “ad fontes”--back to the sources. One of the humanists was Desiderius Erasmus. Some of said that Erasmus laid the egg that Luther hatched. Erasmus and others began to question many of the traditional teachings of the church based upon their new reading of the Scriptures in Hebrew and Greek.

Desiderius Erasmus (1466-1536)
Erasmus was a leading Humanist reformer who remained within the Roman Catholic Church, and who would later debate Martin Luther on such topics as the Freedom of the Will.

For example, in today’s gospel passage from Matthew, where Jesus says, “Repent, for the kingdom of heaven has come near,” Jerome’s Latin Vulgate had said “Do Penance.” Erasmus and others realized that a better translation of the Greek word metanoite was repent. Instead of undergirding an elaborate church system of penance and indulgences, Jesus in the Gospels was simply calling us to repent, to stop taking our lives down one direction, to turn around, and begin taking our lives in a new direction. That was why Martin Luther began his 95 Theses with a call for repentance. Repentance is something that a believer is always called to do during his or her lifetime. It is not dependent upon whether or not your survivors buy an indulgence after you die. In the rest of the 95 Theses, Luther goes on to question the power of the pope to extend indulgences to souls in purgatory, especially when salvation is really a gift given by a righteous God.

In a nutshell, these were many of the factors leading up to the Reformation.

What are the roots of reformation in our own time? Just as the printing press helped Reformation ideals spread like wildfire 500 years ago, the internet has utterly transformed our communications and the ways that we connect or fail to connect with one another.

In our gospel reading this morning Jesus said, “Repent, for the kingdom of heaven is drawing near.” Repent, and change the direction of your life, Jesus said, because God is doing a new thing.

I believe, and so many others believe, that God is doing a new thing in our lifetimes. It’s difficult to describe with precision because we are alive while it’s happening. We don’t have the benefit of the hindsight of history yet.

The late religion journalist and author Phyllis Tickle once said that every 500 years or so the church conducts a giant rummage sale. Of course, this congregation puts on a giant rummage sale every year! But in Tickle’s analogy every 500 years or so the worldwide church decides which of its essential beliefs and practices it will hold onto and which ones it will discard and put up for sale. If the last great Rummage Sale was the Protestant Reformation, then we are due for another one.

Tickle says we are entering a new era of "The Emergent Church," a religious movement that crosses denominational boundaries and traditions, seeks common ground, engages diverse cultures, embraces social causes, seeks to live out Christ's call to serve others, and takes place mostly outside church buildings. Is this an apt description of the church of the future?

We will ponder that and many other questions throughout the summer. Behind me are some of the church's most treasured possessions that I believe we will always cling to. The Bible on the lectern reminds the church that God is still speaking. The baptismal font reminds us that even in the midst of dizzying changes that God claims us in the waters of baptism and reminds us that we belong to God. The communion table reminds us that God feeds us and gives us the spiritual nourishment we require. These are some of the many things we will hold onto.

We might accidentally sale a communion tablecloth during Rummage, but we're not getting rid of the table! There will always be a reminder of how God cares for and nourishes each one of us.

As we decide what we keep or what we discard during this giant church-wide Rummage sale, the most important question for us is to keep asking ourselves what our mission is. Many bloggers and preachers have said that the church is currently facing its "Kodak Moment." The Kodak company ran into trouble because they believed that their mission was to make film. And nowadays few people buy film. But making film wasn't really their true mission. Their true mission was to preserve images and make memories, whether that was through film or the digital camera technology (that they actually invented!) but were too slow to embrace.

The most essential message of Christianity will always be resurrection and renewal. Jesus said, "Repent, for the kingdom of heaven is drawing near." Let's go, boldly and faithfully, where God leads us.

All glory and praise be to our God. Amen.

Bibliography:

Bass, Diana Butler. A People’s History of Christianity: The Other Side of the Story. New York: HarperCollins, 2009.

Hillerbrand, Hans J., editor. The Protestant Reformation. Revised Edition. New York: Harper Perennial, 1968, 2009.

Sunshine, Glenn S. The Reformation for Armchair Theologians. Louisville, Kentucky: Westminster/John Knox Press, 2005.

Tickle, Phyllis. The Great Emergence: How Christianity Is Changing and Why. Grand Rapids, Michigan: Baker Books, 2008, 2012.