It’s 2 o’clock in the morning sometime in the year 1517 and Martin Luther’s stomach was eating him alive. He had just gotten up – at 2 a.m. -- to BEGIN his prayer regimen for the day, and he was gripped with intense anxiety because he didn’t know if he was going to heaven or hell.
Luther’s father had wanted his son to study law but Luther was so obsessed with this feeling of spiritual limbo that he decided to enter the monastery and become a monk. Maybe this would ease his mind.
Luther’s predicament wasn’t unusual in the early 1500s. This anxiety about one’s fate was widespread in Europe. And the key source of this anxiety was the Roman Catholic Church which had embraced the message in Ecclesiastes 9:1: “No one knows whether he is worthy of God’s love or hate.” So the church taught that people needed to “do their best” to become holy, but the question was, who knew if their best was enough?
Dietrich Kolde wrote Mirror of a Christian Man in 1470. It was the most popular Catholic catechism of the day. Kolde wrote about the people’s lack of certitude about salvation. “There are three things I know to be true that frequently make my heart heavy. The first troubles my spirit, because I will have to die. The second troubles my heart more, because I do not know when. The third troubles me above all. I do not know where I will go.”
The church began selling “indulgences” – payments which supposedly helped people account for their sins and become more holy and worthy of salvation. One Catholic Priest named Tetzel was particularly prominent in carrying this out. He preached in town squares and cathedrals, regularly saying “Do you not hear the voices of your dead parents and other people, screaming and saying ‘Have pity on me . . . We are suffering severe punishments and pain, from which you could rescue us with a few alms, if only you would.” And he used a jingle: “As soon as the coin into the box rings, a soul from purgatory to heaven springs.”
So people would purchase these indulgences, or another option was to buy relics. Frederick the Wise of Wittenberg amassed and displayed a collection of 19,000 relics including:
· A piece of the burning bush
· Milk from Mary
· Piece of Jesus’ crib – all acquired at great cost.
· The relics were worth 1,900,000 days of indulgences.
Before I continue, I want to pause to say a word about our Catholic friends. There’s no question that the Catholic church was mired in deep corruption in the 16th century. And there remain significant differences in our theology and practice today. But I want to just note that when we speak of the Reformation, we really need to speak of reformations, plural. Because while the protestants sought renewal – so too did Catholics. And those Catholic movements had a great impact on refocusing the church away from the abuses of the 16th century.
That said, the days of corruption was the environment in which Luther began his study of theology. But Luther was not driven per se by the corruption of the Catholic Church. He was not a part of some Consumer Protection Agency or citizen watchdog group against ecclesial abuse.
No, Luther was gripped by this basic theological question: How can I know, if my salvation depends significantly on what I do, whether I’m saved or damned? And that is the question that triggered the Reformation. As Luther wrote, “I tortured myself with prayers, fasting, vigils, and freezing; the frost alone might have killed me.”
And then, Luther read Romans 1:17. “For in it the righteousness of God is revealed through faith for faith; as it is written, “The one who is righteous will live by faith.”
This verse, for Luther, was a revelation as to the nature of God and God’s approach to salvation. Salvation didn’t rest in what we did, but rather in God’s grace.
For me a more straight forward rendering of this point is found in Paul’s letter Ephesians 2:8 “For by grace you have been saved through faith, and this is not your own doing; it is the gift of God.”
In the words the Reformation historian Carl Lindberg, “Luther’s conversion experience set medieval piety on its head. He came to see that salvation is no longer the goal of life but rather its foundation.”
Now Jesus told a number of parables that highlight the grace of God. One is the prodigal son in which God unconditionally welcomes home the one who had gone and spent the family inheritance.
In a second parable, Jesus tells the story of a landowner who hires people to work in his fields. It’s as if someone in Blue Springs drove their pick up to the old Shell station on 63rd street in Raytown where folks looking for day labor would congregate. And the owner says: Look, if you go work in my fields for the day, I’ll give you $100. And the laborers agree to go.
At noon the landowner needed more laborers and went and hired them. Then at 3:00 p.m. he needed yet more and so hired more. And finally at 5:00 p.m. he needed more and hired still more. Then it came time to pay the workers. The landowner paid those who started at 5 p.m. the SAME $100 and then he paid the workers who started at 3 and noon. When it came the turn for those who started at 8 a.m., they were full of anticipation, thinking they would certainly receive more than the originally agreed $100. But when they received $100 also, they were enraged. How is it that those who started at 5 p.m. were paid the same as us? It wasn’t fair.
WE wouldn’t operate that way. But God’s ways are not our ways. God doesn’t dispense grace according to what WE do. It’s not based upon our merit. It is only granted by God in God’s loving freedom.
John Calvin was another giant from the Reformation – and is particularly embraced by the Presbyterian tradition. He was only 8 years old when Luther nailed his 95 theses to the door of the church in Wittenberg – so Calvin was a 2nd generation reformer.
Calvin, generally speaking, made two big marks on the Reformation. While he didn’t do the original thinking like Luther, Calvin took all the main strands of reformed theology and organized them in what remains arguably the most significant writing of the Reformation -- “The Institutes of Christian Religion.” He first published the Institutes when he was 26, but he would rework and expand them across his lifetime. Calvin’s second main contribution was to implement many of the Reformation ideas in the city of Geneva Switzerland.
In his “Institutes of Christian Religion,” Calvin affirmed justification by grace through faith. Related to this, Calvin went on to write about another doctrine which if you’re Presbyterian, people will often ask you about. And that is . . . , right, Predestination.
In writing about Predestination Calvin was addressing that theological uncertainty and anxiety that Luther faced. And depending on where you lived, people who followed Reformed ideas faced persecution. So Calvin meant to assure people by this doctrine of predestination.
At its basic level, Predestination, which is also known as “election,” means that before we do anything, God knows us, God saves us, and God calls us to service. The Bible is full of stories of God choosing people, from Abraham to the people of Israel. And in John 15:16, Jesus says: “You did not choose me, I chose you.” At a time when people had doubts about their salvation, or they were suffering persecution, this doctrine was meant to be an assurance of God’s love and role in their lives.
Now Calvin took this doctrine one step further in what is referred to as “double Predestination.” This is the idea that God knows, saves and calls SOME people – but then God eternally damns other people before they are born. Scholars believe Calvin took this added step because he believed in an all-powerful God and he couldn’t otherwise fathom why some people would reject God in their lives.
This is one of the reasons I’m a Presbyterian. Not because of double-Predestination, but because of the Presbyterian motto that we are “Reformed and always reforming.” That is to say, we are always seeking to respond to the living God and to live a living faith. There may those who still embrace double Predestination. But as a denomination, we rejected this idea officially in 1903 when we made an amendment to the Westminster Confession of Faith in our Book of Confessions. This Confession from the 1640s upholds Calvin’s view on double Predestination. But in 1903 a section was added that affirms “In the Gospel God declares his love for the world and his desire that all men are saved.”
There have been many reformed theologians, since the start of the Reformation itself, who have rejected double Predestination. Probably the most significant reformed theologian of the 20th Century, Karl Barth, rejected Calvin’s stance, saying that while he agrees that there are “yeses and nos” to be sorted out, God embraces all people through Jesus Christ as is written in Ephesians 1:3-4:
Blessed be the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, who has blessed us in Christ with every spiritual blessing in the heavenly places, just as he chose us in Christ before the foundation of the world to be holy and blameless before him in love.
Where Luther and Calvin stand firmly together is on our original question: what is the source of our salvation – and the answer to that remains that we are only justified -- made right with God -- by God’s grace. Our own strivings, as much as the idea may bug us, has nothing to do with it.
Does this mean there’s no place for good works? No, doing good works is as important as ever. But rather than doing good works IN ORDER THAT we can saved, we instead do good works BECAUSE we are already saved in Jesus Christ. This can be a HUGE shift in how we think about our life and how we live our life.
In Calvin’s day, his adopted city of Geneva became a center point in Europe for those who were poor and in need. Janet, Elyse and I were in Geneva last summer before Janet was teaching in the Netherlands. There I saw this engraving on a side of building that chronicled Geneva’s response to the poor. Then, in a walking tour, a guide told us about this building. Notice the top story that’s a bit recessed. People in Geneva routinely build an extra story on top in order to house the poor and the homeless.
We have many opportunities through this congregation to serve the needy in our community. And we will soon be embarking on our stewardship campaign in which we’ll be asking for the congregation’s financial support for all of the ministries of the church. This is not a chance for you to buy a ticket to heaven or to otherwise score points with God. Instead, it’s an opportunity for you to respond to the almighty God who already knew you, already saved you, and now calls you to serve.
