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.