Reformation Sunday, October 26, 2008
Grace be unto you and peace, from God our Father and from our Lord, Jesus Christ. Amen.
Let us pray: Dear Heavenly Father, you came among us in the person of your Son, Jesus the Christ, to reveal your will and grace for our lives. Through the power of your Holy Spirit, open our hearts and minds to hear your Word for our lives, that we might acknowledge our sinfulness and need for your redeeming grace, poured out for us through Christ’s death and resurrection. This we ask in Christ’s holy name. Amen.
Before I turn to our text for this morning, I must admit that Pastor Blair was at it again, working to help me become a better preacher. He suggested that I take a second look at one of the articles printed in the last issue of Forum Letter, published by the American Lutheran Publicity Bureau, in preparation for my sermon for this morning. “It is something that needs to be preached, especially on Reformation Sunday,” he said.
A couple of days later, I set out to reread that article, only to find that I couldn’t find that issue of Forum Letter. So I called Ralph and asked if he could bring his copy to church last Sunday for me to copy the article. He suggested that he could drop everything, and bring it out to me that very hour. I said, “No Ralph. I won’t have time to get to it until after Sunday anyway.”
Well, after rereading the article, I can see why it was so important to him that I do so before writing this sermon. Reformation Sunday is a time for us to recall our basic Lutheran doctrine that the Word of God confronts us as both Law and Gospel. This article, entitled, “Retrieving confessional identity – for the public good,” goes to great length to document how the Lutheran Church in North America has drifted away from this, our basic understanding of Scripture. Yet, our unique understanding of the Word of God as being both Law and Gospel, is desperately needed by our present day society.
But I’m not going to go into the article itself. If there are any who would like to read it, I would be happy to make a copy of it for you. Rather, I would like to turn to Paul’s letter to the Romans, and allow the Word of God to speak for itself.
First, let me say that our second lesson for this morning is only a part of the message that Paul is expressing to us. This is one of those times that I wish we did have one of those long lessons that couldn’t be printed in our bulletin inserts. For from the first chapter of his letter, up until our text for this morning, Paul has been proclaiming the law, making his case for the guilt of all humankind.
Let me share with you some excerpts that precede our text. “For the wrath of God is revealed from heaven against all ungodliness and wickedness of those who by their wickedness suppress the truth… Their women exchanged natural intercourse for unnatural, and in the same way
also the men, giving up natural intercourse with women, were consumed with passion for one another…
They were filled with every kind of wickedness, evil, covetousness, and malice. Full of envy, murder, strife, deceit, craftiness, they are gossips, slanderers, God-haters, insolent, haughty, boastful, inventors of evil, rebellious toward parents, foolish, faithless, heartless, ruthless. They know God’s decree, that those who practice such things deserve to die – yet they not only do them but even applaud others who practice them.”
“Therefore you have no excuse, whoever you are, when you judge others; for in passing judgement on another you condemn yourself, because you, the judge are doing the very same things.” End quote.
In other words, from halfway through the first chapter until we come to our text for this morning, Paul is trying to convince his readers of the universality of sin, and its consequences. As Robert Kysar points out in his commentary on our text, “Paul’s whole point is to bring us to a sense of our responsibility for our sins and the realization that we cannot rescue ourselves.” End quote. [New Proclamation, Fortress Press, 2005]
For Luther, and many in his day, awareness of his sinfulness was not the problem. He was constantly seeking relief for his conscience, striving to please God, but always coming up feeling inadequate. That was because the law of God was strongly proclaimed. But in today’s society, we don’t here much about the law of God. In fact, Pastor Blair included a note tucked into his copy of the Forum Letter asking me when the last time it was that I actually preached about sin.
The truth is, we are all sinners. And perhaps the greatest sin that each and every one of us share, is that we don’t truly worship God. Now, I’m not talking about being here this morning, singing hymns and saying our prayers, even if we do so on a daily basis. I’m talking about waking in the morning, every day of our life, and acknowledging God to be sovereign, the one who created the universe, who gives and sustains our life, and who has the sole right to command our allegiance to his will.
In today’s society, I am led to wander how many persons stand in awe of God, or fear him with a holy fear. As I mentioned before, what a shock it was for all of the leaders of our confirmation camp this past year, to hear a few students express that they didn’t care what the Scriptures said, and if God really felt that certain actions were sins, God must be wrong.
We seem to be in the process today of redefining the mission of the church, not with respect for God and the Scriptures, but according to our own social and political agendas. We see the church as the means of upholding family values, caring for the poor and disenfranchised, giving us the means of achieving psychological wholeness of health, etc. But the truth is, according to Scripture, because of human sin, we are not able to truly resolve the political and social problems that confront us.
But after taking nearly three chapters to point out our human sinfulness and our inability to redeem ourselves, Paul proclaims the solution. Again, as Kysar points out in his commentary, “The whole point [that Paul is trying to make] is to bring us to a sense of our responsibility for our sins, and the realization that we cannot rescue ourselves. Consequently, he brings us to a desperate dependence on God. Paul was convinced that there was no other way out of the human predicament than Christ. As he understands it, the law only makes us aware of our plight, by bringing us to the awareness of our sin.” End quote.
But in our text for this morning, Paul proclaims the Gospel, the good news that through Christ’s life, death and resurrection, the righteousness of God has been revealed. Although we cannot free ourselves from our human propensity to sin, God has, through our faith and baptism into Christ’s death and resurrection, freely and without merit, forgiven our sin, bringing us into a new relationship with him. And through the power of his Holy Spirit, God gives us power to amend our lives, leaving our past sins behind, as we strive to witness to his redeeming grace to those around us.
It is not that we deserve God’s favor. It is as if we come before God, our judge, guilty of many offenses, yet, God acquits us of our sins, because of our faith in Jesus the Christ. That is the message of these first three chapters of Paul’s letter to the Romans – the Sovereign God, to whom we owe our very existence, freely, out of his gracious love, forgives us of our sins.
Once again, let me quote Kysar. “Have you ever known people who stubbornly refused to believe an idea in spite of all the evidence and arguments presented to them? After a while, it dawns on you that lack of evidence or logic was not the issue. The issue in those cases is that the idea was so personally threatening that no discussion was going to break through. In other words, the idea in some way seemed to annihilate a precious unchangeable feature of a personality.” End quote.
Well, for persons like Luther, who struggle under the guilt of knowing their own sinfulness in relationship to the sovereign will of God, they may struggle with being able to accept God’s free, unmerited gift of redeeming grace. Yet that is the Gospel, and it needs to be proclaimed.
And for those who feel that if they try hard enough, they might be capable of redeeming their lives through social and political initiatives, the Word of God confronts them through his Law, that such an endeavor will never reach perfection. For true righteousness only comes through acknowledging our sinfulness, and our need for God’s gift of redeeming grace.
And if we can, through the power of God’s Holy Spirit, come to embrace the truth of God’s Word, as it confronts us as Law and Gospel, and come to accept it as the terms of our relationship with God, then I believe that we can face the political and social challenges before us with an open and qualified endeavor.
Amen.
