The Authentic Self

September 22, 2023 ~ Vincent

This entry is part of a series called “The Gospel in a Postmodern World.” Learn more about the series here.
Preached on November 6, 2022
Scriptures: Psalm 51, Romans 3:9-20

This is sermon three in our series on the Gospel in a postmodern world. In our first week, we talked a little about the current state of things in the West. Statistically, Christians are more likely to lose their faith than in any prior generation and conversions are rarer than ever before. Rather than assume that it’s just a product of every church being incompetent or suggesting that the Gospel needs a hip new revision for a new era, I went in a different direction. I suggested that the current Western cultural movement, Postmodernism, is one that is especially challenging for Christianity to flourish in. The doctrinal orthodoxy of pop-culture is not kind to our faith. We can’t just keep doing the same old same old. We have to accept that we are missionaries in this new world, and the first step for any missionary is to evaluate the culture. Know it. Know the advantages and the disadvantages. Know the challenges and the easy moves. Know what people expect. Then you can go from there.

In week two, we talked about truth. The postmodern world is typified as a post-truth world. There is no popular framework for real, objective truth. There’s only subjective truth. What’s true for me is not what’s true for you. Truth is little more than an opinion that’s accepted by all present. This will not do. Christianity, from its inception, claimed to be genuinely true, not partially true or a truth in a competing market of reasonable truth claims. Christians have to be people concerned with OBJECTIVE truth, calling people back to a genuine reality that was created by God.

And then we had a slight departure from the series in Reformation Day. Which was fun! I love doing a little history. We talked about Martin Luther and the origins of Protestantism. We learned about sola Scriptura and sola fide. And near the end of the sermon, I mentioned that works righteousness was making a comeback. People today, if they assume a god exists, don’t see themselves as someone who needs salvation from the God in question. All in all, they don’t tend to see themselves as something that needs saving. Which makes sharing the gospel in a traditional way a challenge. “Hey, did you know God will forgive all your sins in Jesus Christ?” “What sins?” “The ones you’ve done your whole life long!” “That’s pretty presumptuous of you. I haven’t really done any sins that matter. Actually, I’m one of the good ones. Shame on you for being so judgy.”

And some of you may feel as though that’s an untrue statement. You might think, “Hey, most people would agree to their sinfulness on some level, Vincent. You’re just being judgy.” So let me clarify my observation here: how many people that you meet genuinely consider the core of their humanity to be tainted by original sin? How many people genuinely think that they’re only capable of good by God’s grace, without which they are only able to sin? Not a lot. The average assumption about human nature isn’t that it’s hopelessly flawed. It’s that it’s actually shockingly good. Let’s think about a pop culture example that states this theory pretty clearly.

How many of you saw The Greatest Showman? It came out about 5 years ago. It was actually up for a few awards, if I remember correctly. It’s this musical about the circus. In that movie, there’s a group of people that belong to the circus’s freak show. They’ve had hard lives. They’ve been made fun of. They’ve been ostracized. But now? Now that they’re in a community together, they’ve gained the confidence to be themselves… and they sing this power ballad: This is Me.

I am not a stranger to the dark
Hide away, they say
‘Cause we don’t want your broken parts
I’ve learned to be ashamed of all my scars
Run away, they say
No one’ll love you as you are
But I won’t let them break me down to dust
I know that there’s a place for us
For we are glorious
When the sharpest words wanna cut me down
I’m gonna send a flood, gonna drown ’em out
I am brave, I am bruised
I am who I’m meant to be, this is me
Look out ’cause here I come
And I’m marching on to the beat I drum
I’m not scared to be seen
I make no apologies, this is me.

What is the assumption about our singers? That deep down, they’re incredibly beautiful. They’re different in a way that scares the world, and so the world has tried to keep them down. So they have to band together and resist the pull of society! They have to learn to be authentically themselves in a hostile world.

The problem isn’t with me! The problem is OUT THERE in society!

Now, obviously in that example, it’s hard not to agree. Being mean to a bearded lady because they look different is unambiguously cruel. But that ballad spoke to people from every walk of life. It won the Golden Globe award for the Best Original Song, it was nominated for an academy award and a Tony, and it had millions of replays on every music streaming service you can think of. And why? Because it’s easy to relate. It’s easy to feel like someone who is uniquely beautiful that’s being held back by society. That’s part of the philosophical lens of the postmodern world. Sin isn’t something in me. I’m pretty amazing once you get to know me. SOCIETY is the sinful thing. If you tell me Im sinful, that’s not gonna resonate. It’s mean. I’m pretty good. If you tell me society is sinful… oh, man. AGREED. Society IS dreadful. We need to get rid of that thing so that I can start being my authentic self!

The orthodox Christian view is very different than the modern Western view. And just to drive that point home, I want to look at two philosophers. One a very orthodox Christian theologian. One a philosopher of the Enlightenment. Both men wrote a book named Confessions. Both of those books detail a story in which they stole produce. But the takeaway for each man is totally different depending on how they think about sin and what needs redemption.

Our orthodox Christian is Augustine of Hippo. In his Confessions (written sometime in the fourth century) when he was a teenager, he was hanging out with his friends one night… and they saw this tree of pears on someone else’s property. And what did they do? They stole the pears! They snuck into the yard, filled a basket with the pears, and made off with them. Why? Not to eat them. As a matter of fact, they had better pears at home. They just threw the basket of pears to some pigs and laughed about the whole thing. No, they stole them because it wasn’t allowed. They wanted to break the rules. They wanted to steal. They wanted to destroy something beautiful! He writes:

“It was foul, and I loved it. I loved my own undoing. I loved my error–not that for which I erred but the error itself. A depraved soul, falling away from security in thee to destruction in itself, seeking nothing from the shameful deed but shame itself.”
-Augustine, Confessions

For Augustine, why did he destroy the pears? Because something is wrong INSIDE. There’s something deadly wrong. That’s why we need salvation… because from our birth, something inside is veering us away from life towards death. That’s sin. That’s the problem. Original sin was something humans were born with. Because of humanity’s fall when Adam and Eve ate that fruit that God told them not to, humanity’s nature itself was changed. We went from law-abiding creatures to law-breaking creatures. So every one of us, regardless of what we’ve done specifically, is tainted by original sin.

Now, let’s move to Rousseau. Rousseau was a philosopher in the Enlightenment and he ALSO wrote a book called Confessions. Make no mistake, if you’re a nerd, you don’t accidentally write a book called Confessions without knowing what you’re doing. He’s deliberately drawing his audience’s attention to Augustine. And he ALSO includes a story about produce theft with friends! But notice how he tweaked things. He’s working for this guy whose mother has a little garden growing nearby. And this boss asks him to regularly go steal a little bit of asparagus from that garden, sell the asparagus, and give him the proceeds. He’s really uncomfortable that he would be asked to do this by an authority, but he wants to please the boss, so he does it. And after a few times, he starts to become bitter. He asks himself a question: “Why am I taking on all the risk with none of the reward?” So he starts skimming a little off the top. But that’s not really enough to make it worth the punishment that he would endure if he were caught stealing, so he starts stealing other little things that he finds around the house. Apples. Trinkets. Anything that he can get his hands on. He’s been put in an unjust situation! In his mind, additional theft at least gives him what he’s owed for his boss’s unfair demands. Notice what slowly twisted him. Was it his inner desires? No! The real culprit was society! He writes:

A continual repetition of ill treatment rendered me callous; it seemed a kind of composition for my crimes, which authorized me to continue them, and, instead of looking back at the punishment, I looked forward to revenge. Being beat like a slave, I judged I had a right to all the vices of one.
-Jean-Jaques Rousseau, Confessions

Rousseau doesn’t believe in original sin like Augustine does. He believes in what I’ll call “the beauty of authenticity.” He thinks people are fundamentally good. The thing that causes trouble is society. Society warps people. It makes them want to be other than what they are. They start to try to be better than. Bigger than. Smarter than. They want to be the boss! And for them to be better than, others have to be lesser than. People, fundamentally good, are warped by the society around them. People have to learn to let go of society’s corrupting grasp and be the beautiful creatures they always were.

Pears and asparagus. Both stolen. Both thefts encouraged by friends. But the locus of conversion is very different. Do we need to convert individual people? Or do we need to convert society?

And some of you, I’m sure, are saying, “Vincent, slow down. Aren’t they both right? Isn’t it true that society needs changing and people need changing?” Sure. But what we’re trying to identify is the root problem. If it’s society, I can set out to create bulwarks against unrealistic expectations and oppressive forces to recover the goodness that each person secretly holds in their hearts. It’s not going to be easy, but it’s doable. If the problem is that original sin has corrupted human hearts… well that’s a bigger challenge that we can tackle. That’s when we need to get someone much bigger involved.

The seeds that Rousseau planted during the Enlightenment took root. And they grew. And today we see their expression in movies like The Greatest Showman. People are wired to critique the world around them. Ask anyone! Ask, “What cultural forces are preventing you from being yourself?” You’ll get a laundry list of answers. Easy. Ask someone, “What sins are preventing you from being yourself?” and you’ll get a less warm answer. Similarly, it’s really hard to talk to someone about a God that forgives their sins when people aren’t really concerned about their own sins. It’s much easier to talk about a God that wants to change the world around me.

And I include myself in that. Remember, as we critique culture, we’re a part of it. We don’t get to say, “This is what other people do!” No, this is what WE do too. It’s really hard to talk about personal sin, it’s easy to talk about societal sin. That isn’t a natural human instinct to push the blame onto someone else. It’s a cultural shift. The early Methodists were required to be in small groups. You couldn’t be a Methodist without being in a small group. It didn’t work that way. And during your small group, you had confession time. With everyone there. And you named every sin that you were wrestling with. And everyone there prayed for God to help you with those sins. Can you imagine doing that today? No way! That sounds insane! Give me a justice group or something. Let me go solve the problem OUT THERE! But the problem in here? Psht. Get that outta here. It’s good enough.

So let’s think about this shift. Can Christianity let go of its commitment to original sin and shift to focus primarily on societal sin? No. No we can’t. That’s not to say we can’t acknowledge that there’s sin out there. It’s not to say that we can’t work to try to help those affected by it. But we can’t say, “people are fundamentally good and we just need to work on some really good laws until we get it just right and THEN everything will be good.” We can’t. The problem is deeper than that. According to the Bible, we could come up with the most perfect society in the world, all the best laws, totally remove all oppressive forces, totally remove all need to feel better than or worse than… and we’d still manage to mess it up.

Turn in your Bible to Romans 3 verse 9:

What shall we conclude then? Do we have any advantage? Not at all! For we have already made the charge that Jews and Gentiles alike are all under the power of sin. As it is written:
“There is no one righteous, not even one;
there is no one who understands;
    there is no one who seeks God.
All have turned away,
they have together become worthless;
there is no one who does good,
    not even one.”
“Their throats are open graves;
    their tongues practice deceit.”
“The poison of vipers is on their lips.”
“Their mouths are full of cursing and bitterness.”
“Their feet are swift to shed blood;
ruin and misery mark their ways,
and the way of peace they do not know.”
“There is no fear of God before their eyes.”

Now we know that whatever the law says, it says to those who are under the law, so that every mouth may be silenced and the whole world held accountable to God. Therefore no one will be declared righteous in God’s sight by the works of the law; rather, through the law we become conscious of our sin.

Most of what we have in this section is just Paul quoting other parts of the Bible. He’s quoting several different psalms and Isaiah. Why? To talk about our sin. And is this because Paul hates people? Not at all. He thinks that people have a problem that’s deeper than societal pressures. He thinks our hearts are fundamentally infected. And if you have an infection in your heart, do you worry about polishing up your social interactions? Do you say, “Man, I just try harder and the infection will just go away!” No. You don’t solve an infection with willpower. You call a doctor. Paul is trying to tell us that there’s this infection in our hearts. And he knows the doctor: Jesus.

What shall we conclude then? Do we have any advantage? Not at all! For we have already made the charge that Jews and Gentiles alike are all under the power of sin

What’s going on here? Paul is addressing whether or not Jews have an advantage over Gentiles in regard to sin. After all, they had the law, right? Surely someone who knows the law will be in less trouble than someone who doesn’t have the law! They’ve got everything right there! You might think about this as though it’s about church people today. Don’t we have an advantage against sinning? We’ve got the Bible! We’ve got church tradition! But what does Paul say? NO! You’re not any better off! You’re a sinner. You’ve got the same infection that they’ve got. You need a doctor just as bad. Sin isn’t just a problem that requires some better laws. It’s deeper than that. You need something bigger.

And now Paul gives us that big list of Scripture quotes:

“There is no one righteous, not even one;
there is no one who understands;
    there is no one who seeks God.
All have turned away,
they have together become worthless;
there is no one who does good,
    not even one.”
“Their throats are open graves;
    their tongues practice deceit.”
“The poison of vipers is on their lips.”
“Their mouths are full of cursing and bitterness.”
“Their feet are swift to shed blood;
ruin and misery mark their ways,
and the way of peace they do not know.”
“There is no fear of God before their eyes.”

Look at what he’s doing here. He’s naming all of humanity first off. Little babies. Old folks. Everyone. Nobody is righteous. Not one. All have turned away. And now he goes all throughout the human body to show just how lost we are. Our throats. Our tongues. Our mouths. Our feet. From head to toe: infected by sin.

And every so often, there’s someone who gets tripped up by that word “fear.” Fear of God means respect in this context. Don’t get tripped up. It’s reverence in the face of his awesome majesty. It’s the sobering recognition that he’s in charge of every aspect of everything ever. It’s that feeling of proper smallness in the face of infinite bigness. It’s not fear that he’ll hurt you. That’s not what Paul is trying to say. He’s saying, nobody has a right relationship with God. Not one of us.

The problem should be clear at this point. It’s not JUST what’s outside. Sure that’s wrong. But more than that, there’s a problem inside. Let’s read on to see the solution.

But now apart from the law the righteousness of God has been made known, to which the Law and the Prophets testify. This righteousness is given through faith in Jesus Christ to all who believe.There is no difference between Jew and Gentile, for all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God, and all are justified freely by his grace through the redemption that came by Christ Jesus.

There’s the solution. Faith in Christ is the only thing that can cure us. Our works aren’t enough. Just like with Martin Luther last week, you can try and try and try and no amount of effort will ever be enough to solve the problem. Every person on earth is redeemed not by works, but by faith. A commentator named Handley Moule writes: “The harlot, the liar, the murderer, are short of it; but so are you. Perhaps they stand at the bottom of a mine, and you on the crest of an Alp; but you are as little able to touch the stars as they.” Everyone falls short, but everyone can be justified freely by His grace. The doctrine of original sin matters because you can’t cure a disease that you don’t know about. If we say we’re all good inside and it’s just a matter of outer troubles, we’re addressing the wrong problem.

But what do we do if maintaining sinfulness is a part of the core Christian thing? How do we evangelize to people who don’t see themselves as sinful? If you don’t need to be saved, how can I introduce a savior? I spoke with a campus minister from the university recently, and he actually brought this up. He mentioned that evangelizing to people by talking about their sinfulness and need for a savior might have worked 50 or 60 years ago, but today, it’s just a non-starter. People don’t recognize their personal sin or need for a savior. But something that has proven to be especially effective is evangelism about relationship. We live in a timeframe where people are more isolated than ever. In Robert Putnam’s landmark study, Bowling Alone, one of the metrics he used to check societal isolation was the size of groups that people went bowling in. Now, people go bowling by themselves more than ever. Bowling leagues are much smaller than they were in the past. And that’s just the metric he chose as his central conversation piece for the book. Social clubs are dying in droves, petitions are less common than ever, people know their neighbors less, people meet their friends more rarely. Community is at an all time low. People are lonely. This campus minister recognized that and used it to evangelize. He talked to people about how God wants to be in relationship with them, despite all the ways they’ve been pushing him away. THAT worked. THAT was effective at opening a conversation about God.

People may not feel guilty, but they feel alone. They know that something is wrong in this world and they’re desperately trying to fix it. Do they need to know about sin? Yes. Absolutely. But leading with that isn’t going to make sense. It’s going to feel like an attack and people will defend against an attack. Guilt versus innocence may not make sense, but loneliness and closeness do. It’s not a perfect substitute. After all, if I’ve hurt God, can’t I do something to make it better? There’s that gap where it’s not completely addressing the sin problem. But, you know, it’s not works-centric and it’s still accurate. Sin is a doctrine that will probably take some time for people to understand in our era. That’s ok. Not everything will make sense all at once. Sometimes, you just need to get a foot in the door and see where things go. When I was first Christian, I barely had anything that looked like a genuine Christian faith. The only doctrines I thought seemed good were Heaven and a good God. The rest just seemed crazy! But the deeper doctrines need more time to teach. I was hooked by the lure of eternity and and God pulled me in from there.

As we evangelize today, it’s important to recognize that people won’t see themselves as sinful. This is a hard doctrine. And unlike objective truth, a debate won’t gain us any ground. But we can pivot. We can acknowledge that we are far from God. Our relationship is weak. Only through Christ’s sacrifice can we approach God afresh. And when people start to encounter God, they’ll recognize that it’s not enough to just say hi. Something more is necessary. Something that transforms what they are into what they were always supposed to be. And it’s a good reminder for us too. When we don’t feel particularly sinful. When we’re convinced that we’re just a good person trapped in crummy circumstances that someone else really ought to clean up… well that’s when we need to recognize that our relationship with God is weak. If we’re blaming the world as though he doesn’t know what’s going on in it, we need to spend some time with him. Only then will we start to see the transformation that we need.

Amen.

Reformation Day

September 12, 2023 ~ Vincent

This entry is part of a series called “The Gospel in a Postmodern World.” Learn more about the series here.
Preached at The Plains United Methodist Church on October 30, 2022
Scriptures: 2 Peter 1:10-21, Romans 1:8-17

Happy Reformation Day, everyone!

I’ve noticed a lot of Methodist churches don’t regularly celebrate Reformation Day, which is a shame. It’s a great opportunity to look back at our own history; to see where we’re from and what some of our core DNA is. We need to give it the attention it deserves. At one of my past appointments, I spoke about Martin Luther during the sermon, and afterwards a woman came up to me and said, “Wow, Martin sounds great! I haven’t met him yet. Does he go to the other service?” Who can’t blame her for what she doesn’t know? It’s on us pastors for not teaching it enough.

For those curious, Martin Luther did not go to the other service. Martin Luther lived in the 16th century. He was the founder of Protestantism. Without him there would be no Methodists! There would be no Anglicans from which Methodists could come! Not only would there be no Protestants, but what we know today as the Roman Catholic Church would look different as well. Martin Luther is a big deal so I think it’s worth a little time to tell his story and remember about one of the great Protestant heroes.

I want you to imagine that the year is 1521. You are in an imperial court in the city of Worms, a city that’s in what we know today as Germany, but was known back then as a part of the Holy Roman Empire. This room is full of some of the most powerful people in the world. Among them is Charles V, the singular man who is the archduke of Austria, the Prince of Spain, the lord of the Netherlands, the duke of Burgundy, and the emperor of the Holy Roman Empire. He is a big deal. There’s also a papal envoy dressed in some of the finest clothes imaginable. In front of that envoy, a monk stands next to a pile of books.

The envoy speaks: “Martin Luther, this court has reconvened. Yesterday we asked you two questions. The first: ‘Are you the author of these books in front of you?’ You answered yes. Our second question: “Do you renounce the ideas contained therein and recant your heresy?’ You asked to be granted a 24-hour recess. This was granted, but we are back today, Mr Luther, and we need an answer. Do you renounce the ideas contained within these books and recant your heresy?”

You wouldn’t have expected things to turn out like this given where this story starts. It starts in a little kingdom called Saxony. Saxony was not the kind of place where life-altering things tended to happen. It was in Northern Germany. Northern Germany wasn’t well developed. It was really rural. Southern Germany had a lot of stuff. Northern Italy had a lot of stuff. Northern Germany? Not so much. There were no ruins of an old Empire to build on. There were no great trade routes. Most of their top items to sell were natural resources; grain, fish and minerals. Saxony wasn’t the kind of place where big things happened.

None of that was helped by the politics of Saxony only a few generations back. When King William II of Saxony died, his two sons split the kingdom and each inherited half of it. The elder brother got to choose how the lands were split, and the younger brother got to choose which area he wanted to inherit. And so the elder split the lands: one of the two parcels was a long, twisty portion of land that was mostly rural, and the other was a little clump of land that had all of the major cities in it. The choice fell to the younger brother: did he want to rule the urban center of the lands, or the larger rural area? He took the urban area, leaving the elder brother, a man by the name of Ernest, the jaggedy rural strip.

Since Ernest was the elder and got second pick of the lands, he got something extra: the title “Elector of the Holy Roman Empire.” I don’t want to get too far into the weeds describing the political system of 16th century Germanic kingdoms, but here’s a really basic understanding: imagine if the United States had a weak federal government and strong state governments. In this model, the president would still exist, but he would appear on the global stage to represent the collective interest of the states. Individual states would have a lot of autonomy. The president wouldn’t really have much say over them. That’s basically what the Holy Roman Empire was. There were a bunch of really small kingdoms, some so small that they were just singular cities, all bound together in mutual interest and represented by an emperor that they got to elect. Not everyone got to vote for the emperor though. Only a very small group called “the electors” got to vote. Ernest may have inherited the rural lands, but he was an elector, and that made him, strangely, an important man with a somewhat unimportant kingdom.

That’s the legacy of 16th century Saxony. Not exactly the center of the world. But when Ernest passed away, his son, Frederick the Wise, was looking to change all that. Frederick was bound and determined to make little Saxony the kind of place where things happened. The capital of Saxony, Wittenberg, only had 2,000 people in it and 400 buildings, but it was the biggest city there was in Saxony, so that’s where he started. He created two plans to make Wittenberg a destination for people all over the world.

The first was to create the biggest collection of relics the world had ever seen. Relics were basically Christian artifacts. The presiding theory of the day was if you looked at a relic God would bless you. It was a very mechanistic process. Look at the thing? Get the blessing. Frederick started collecting relics and managed to get his hands on over eighteen thousand of them. He even managed to collect a vial of milk from the Virgin Mary and a twig from the burning bush. Now, you can decide if you think those relics were legitimate or not, but people at the time thought they were VERY legitimate. Pilgrims started flocking to Saxony to see all of his relics laid out in Wittenberg’s chapel. They wanted to soak up all of God’s grace that they could!

Frederick’s other plan was to build a university in Wittenberg. He’d build a massive, top-notch university and people would come from all over the place to attend! Maybe, some of them would even stick around and become citizens of Saxony. So he started hiring professors. He even bought one of those newfangled printing presses! Printing presses were a bit of a curiosity at this point. Books weren’t all that common. They weren’t even written in language that the average person understood. They were only in Latin, the language of scholars. Frederick wasn’t sure how exactly this printing press was going to help him, but new things were exciting and his university would have nothing less but the very latest in technology.

Even with Frederick’s ambitious plans in full swing, the average person would not have expected much from little Saxony. Nor would people have looked at the hero of the Reformation, Martin Luther, and expected great things from him. Martin was from a middle-class family. His dad owned a mining business and managed the business side of things, which was both expensive and risky. He had to take out loans to buy the mining rights to a piece of land and he never knew when there might be a cave-in or flooded tunnel that would impact his ability to pay off the loan properly. He spent most of his life in debt as he took out and paid off different loans, but all things considered, he was pretty good at what he did. The mining business did well enough, so he sent his son, Martin, off to college in a place called Erfurt, a big city in the area, in the hopes that he would become a lawyer. If he was a lawyer, Martin would be able to help the family business a lot.

That was not to be. Martin went to college, and one day, while he was coming back to campus from a little trip, there was a storm. We’re not just talking about a little rain. We’re talking about howling winds crashing thunder! Lightning struck right next to him! He was sure he was going to die. He prayed to God, “Let me live through this and I will do whatever you want. I will give my whole life to you,” and the storm subsided. So, true to his word, he gave his life to God and became a monk. His father was not particularly enthusiastic at first, but he warmed up to it over time. He saw his son’s sincerity and wanted what was best for him. So, Martin started living in his local Augustinian monastery there in Erfurt. He found a mentor that he really admired. Things were going well! Unfortunately, his mentor moved away. There was this little university that was just getting started up in Saxony’s capital, Wittenberg, and it was hiring up all of the professors that it could. Since Martin’s mentor was both a monk and a professor, he took a job and transferred over to a monastery in Wittenberg. Unfortunately, Martin didn’t have a lot of friends around the Erfurt monastery after his mentor left. The other monks weren’t on the same page as him. They decided to transfer him to their branch in Wittenberg so that he would be near his old friend and out of their way. When you’re a monk, you don’t really get a say in the matter. They’re not asking if you’d like to be transferred; they’re telling you that you’re getting transferred.

You might think that Martin would be overjoyed to be back with his friend. He was not. He was really frustrated. Wittenberg was full of nothing! All of Saxony was full of nothing! That was the kind of place where barbarians settled! Nonetheless, as he settled in, things turned out pretty well for him. He became a pastor and worked at the local church. His mentor helped him get on-staff at the university where he taught as the professor of biblical theology. Everything was slowly turning out ok.

Now we have the right person (Martin) in the right place (Wittenberg) for the Reformation to kick off, but there’s one critical element we haven’t discussed: the powder keg. The event that blew up and kicked everything off. At the time, the Catholic Church was selling something called indulgences. An indulgence was basically a little certificate from the pope that said all of your sins were forgiven. They were also transferable. You could buy one and apply the forgiveness to someone else. A lot of people would buy them for their dead relatives. The popular assumption of the day was that your dead relatives were probably in purgatory. Heaven was only for the super holy Christians, Hell was for non-Christians, and purgatory was for Christians that were too sinful to make it into Heaven. God would purify them over the course of a few thousand years until they had been fully cleansed of their sins. That process of purification was said to be pretty unpleasant, so you wanted to help your dear sweet relatives get out of there in any way you could. Buying the pope’s indulgences was the best way to get grandma to Heaven.

I’m sure many of you find that thought process unthinkable, but there’s a long series of ideas that were accepted over time before selling indulgences started to make sense. I won’t go through all of it, but it starts with ideas like, “Well, if you go to a holy site, isn’t it reasonable to think that God would bless you?” Sure, ok, that makes sense. God probably blesses pilgrims that go to holy sites. “Well, what if Christians do something to help others? Like defending them from persecutors by going on crusade? Will God bless them for doing that?” Ok, sure, intellectual baggage of the crusades aside, maybe it’s reasonable that God would bless people that set out to help others in unfortunate circumstances. “Well now, what if you donate a large amount of money so that someone else can do those things? Wouldn’t that also deserve a blessing? Because you’re the reason someone else can do it.” Right there, you’ve already got the fundamental framework for indulgences. You’re just a hop, skip, and a jump away from writing certificates.

Martin hated the church’s sale of indulgences. They were getting ready to sell them in Saxony for the third time in five years. Saxony wasn’t wealthy! Why did they keep selling them there? And all the money from the indulgences was going to fund repairs of Saint Peter’s Basilica, a really fancy church in Italy. Why did the pope need the money of peasants to fund a church for the wealthy? And Martin saw the negative effects that indulgence sals had on people, both rich and poor. Poor people that had to scrimp and save so they could buy a certificate for grandma to go to Heaven. The rich, on the other hand, didn’t worry as much about living a Christian life when indulgences were around. They could do whatever they wanted as long as they made sure to grab a certificate for themselves when they were done. The whole thing had gotten completely out of hand.

As this was happening, Martin had a rapid spurt of spiritual growth. He was someone who seemed to have it all: he was a professor, he was a monk, and he knew his Bible forward and back! But he had a dark secret: he hated God. Martin hated God because he thought that he would never be good enough for him. The popular theory to explain how law and grace functioned in the Christian’s life was via something called “imbued grace.” They thought that God gave you enough of his grace to go out and keep the law pretty well. If you made mistakes, well, then God would be angry. If you asked for forgiveness, he might punish you a little less severely, but you would still be punished to some degree. And after it was done, you were expected to go and live a perfect life again. Martin believed it, just like everyone else, and so he tried very hard to live a life without sin. He realized that when he really thought about what he had done on a given day, there was always sin to be uncovered. There was always a moment when he was jealous or when he was short with someone, and so God was always angry and waiting for him to do better. His best wasn’t good enough.

But everything changed when he was teaching a class on Romans. Romans is like that. Some of the most famous Christians of all time converted while reading Romans. Saint Augustine, one of the most famous Christians of the 4th Century, converted while reading Romans. Martin Luther converted while reading Romans. John Wesley converted while reading Romans. The book of Romans is powerful. Let’s look at one of the passages that was on the top of his mind. This is Romans 1:8-17:

First, I thank my God through Jesus Christ for all of you,because your faith is being reported all over the world.

This is a letter from Paul to Roman Christians and you can see that he’s impressed with them. He’s impressed that they have such incredible faith in a place like Rome. Christians in Rome endured a lot of persecution. Torture and even death, depending on who was in charge at the time. It would have been incredibly dangerous. You would need an impenetrable faith! But this is the kind of church where people had impenetrable faith. They didn’t stumble; they endured.

God, whom I serve in my spirit in preaching the gospel of his Son, is my witness how constantly I remember you in my prayers at all times; and I pray that now at last by God’s will the way may be opened for me to come to you.

In other words, he wants to visit them.

I long to see you so that I may impart to you some spiritual gift to make you strong— that is, that you and I may be mutually encouraged by each other’s faith.

I love the humility here. One of the great apostles says, “I want to give you a gift and the gift… is that you and I get to sit down and build each other up.” Faith is not just a one-way street! It’s something that takes people coming together. People that are mature and very wise and people that are brand new! We all stand to learn and be built up by one another.

I do not want you to be unaware, brothers and sisters, that I planned many times to come to you (but have been prevented from doing so until now) in order that I might have a harvest among you, just as I have had among the other Gentiles. I am obligated both to Greeks and non-Greeks, both to the wise and the foolish. That is why I am so eager to preach the gospel also to you who are in Rome. For I am not ashamed of the gospel,

The gospel would have seemed pretty ridiculous by a lot of the popular philosophies of the day. The average Roman would think that the gospel was nonsense! “Your God’s so great? Well, why’d he get crucified then? A powerful god doesn’t end up dying on a cross. I can find a god more worthy of my worship than that.” The average Jewish person would have been equally disinterested: “Your god is supposedly great, but he hasn’t delivered us from the Romans. I don’t see any grand miracles that he’s done. He rose from the dead and apparently did nothing worthy of note for me.”

But Paul is not ashamed of the gospel, regardless of what others think! He goes on to say why:

because it is the power of God

How often do you think about the gospel in that way? How often do you understand it not just as a collection of words, but as something powerful? As words that crackle with energy? The gospel is the power of God! It’s not just something for us to mull over in our spare time. It’s the kind of force that changes hearts and minds.

For in the gospel the righteousness of God is revealed—a righteousness that is by faith from first to last, just as it is written: “The righteous will live by faith.”

This whole time, Martin had been trying to be good enough. And here we see one of the major themes that comes up again and again throughout Romans: you’ll never be good enough to earn salvation. On our own, we are not capable of perfectly keeping God’s law. God grants us salvation not because of our works, but through faith in Christ. When we reach out and trust in him, that makes all the difference. Our salvation isn’t through legalism. It’s through love! God looks down and sees not a guilty person, but someone who has been cleansed! Who is innocent! Who is pure! Someone covered by the perfection of Christ.

We are saved by faith, not works. Does that mean we should go on sinning? By no means! Paul specifically says that later in this same letter to the Romans. But if our salvation isn’t based on legalism, we should be able to act however we want, right? No! Paul says that a true Christian should be transformed through their encounter with God. We shouldn’t want to sin anymore. We should be totally different creatures, empowered by God to seek what is right instead of what is wrong. And besides that, our motivations for doing what’s right should change. We don’t keep the law out of fear of God’s punishment. We do it out of fear of hurting our relationship with him. We want to make him happy. We should naturally want to honor and cherish the one we love. Our relationship with God may not be based on maintaining a code of conduct, but we should still want to honor the God who saved us with everything we do.

And here, inspired by the words of Scripture, we see Martin articulate one of his big ideas: sola fide. We are saved by faith in Christ alone, not by our works. Not our abilities. Not because we’re good enough, but because we have faith in Jesus. We reach out to him and accept the sacrifice he made on our behalf. Martin’s big idea didn’t come from the intellectual trends of the day, but through scripture alone. There’s another one of his big ideas: sola Scriptura. That’s Latin for “by Scripture alone.” Scripture is the only authority that we can rely on to ensure that we’re practicing real Christianity and not just something that we made up.

Now we’ve got the who, the where, and the what. Everything is in place. Martin Luther started preaching what he had learned in Romans. And the indulgence sellers came into Saxony and started preaching their doctrines. This is a selection from the sermon of a man named Johann Tetzel. He was selling indulgences in Wittenberg, and this is what he preached:

You should know that all who confess and in penance put alms into the coffer according to the council of the confessor, will obtain complete remission of all of their sins… Why are you standing there? Run for the salvation of your souls!… Don’t you hear the voices of your wailing dead parents and others who say, “Have mercy on me, have mercy on me, because we are in severe punishment and pain. From this you could redeem us with small alms and yet you do not want to do so.” Open your ears as the father says to the Son and the mother to the daughter, “We created you, fed you, cared for you, and left you our temporal goods. Why then are you so cruel and harsh that you do not want to save us, though it only takes a little?” (20-21, A Sermon, Johann Tetzel, as found in The Protestant Reformation, Hillerbrand)

THAT was the last straw. THAT was what made Martin Luther write his ninety-five theses. Ninety-five reasons why indulgences were bad! Ninety-five reasons that the pope was wrong! Ninety-five ways the church was failing! And he didn’t just keep this debate in academic halls. He started writing books. These were books written in a language that regular people could actually read. He wrote for the average person because he thought they deserved to know what was going on. He also made sure that people had access to the Bible in their own language so they didn’t have to take his word for it. They could go to the Word of God and look for themselves! He looked to Scripture alone (sola Scriptura) to find the truth, and now everyone else could do the same. Because even if he was eloquent, his words weren’t worth anything. God’s word was worth something. It was and still is the final authority on all things.

Some people get a little confused about Luther’s relationship with tradition They think he brought this new, unheard of understanding to the Scriptures and represented a radical break in Christianity from its past. That is not the case. Yes, he trusted Scripture alone as the ultimate authority, but that doesn’t mean he was ignorant of tradition or uninterested in the Christians that went before him. Read some of his writings sometime! You won’t make it far without finding a citation from one of the great thinkers from the first 1500 years of the faith. The man was a professor that sold books. His goal wasn’t to prevent people from reading and learning from those who went before him! His goal was to reconnect with early Christianity and recover the faith from people who had slowly twisted it over the years. Sola Scriptura doesn’t mean separating yourself from the collected body of Scriptural knowledge and just believing whatever you want to believe about the Bible. It means learning as much about it as you can about God’s word, educating yourself on what it’s saying to you, and taking it as the authority above any earthly thinker, regardless of how popular they might be.

Well, after he posted his ninety-five theses, things got difficult. It turns out posting ninety-five reasons why the pope is wrong doesn’t exactly put you in his good graces, and in those days, the pope was shockingly powerful. Pope Leo X wrote a papal decree called Exsurge Domine, which is Latin for “Arise, O Lord.” It basically said: “Martin Luther, turn from your heresy or burn for your heresy. The choice is yours.” And that brings us back to where we started: an imperial court where a monk is being questioned. He was asked, “Do you recant your heresy?” Here is how he responded:

“Unless I am convinced by the testimony of the holy Scriptures or someone can reasonably prove to me that I have erred (for I neither believe in the pope nor the councils alone since it has been established that they often erred and contradicted themselves) I am bound by the Scriptures which I have cited at length and my conscience has been taken captive by the word of God. I am neither able nor willing to recant. Here I stand. I can do no other.”

From there, things got really crazy. He was whisked back to Saxony, where he went into hiding. Remember how Frederick the Wise was deeply invested in making Saxony a place where things happen? Turns out that no matter how devoutly Catholic he was, he wasn’t willing to give over someone who attracted as much attention and sold as many books as Martin Luther. Martin’s big ideas kept spreading, and more and more people started hearing the things that he was saying. That is how Protestantism started.

Why do I think this story is worth our consideration? It’s not like anybody is going around selling indulgences today, right? After all, why would they? The average person isn’t convinced they’re particularly sinful. They may not perceive themselves to be perfect, but they don’t think they’re a bad person, and that ought to be good enough for God. Works righteousness has made a significant comeback in the modern era; the bar for salvation-worthy works is just a lot lower than it was in Luther’s day.

People simply don’t understand the seriousness of sin anymore! In an environment like this, we need to remember our solas: sola fide and sola Scriptura. From whence comes our salvation? Not from ourselves! Contrary to popular belief, we’re not particularly good. We’re saved because God is particularly good. He’s the only one with the power to save us. The best thing we can do is to trust our lives in his hands. To have complete and total faith in him, rather than ourselves. Sola fide. And how do we know that this is the case? Not because we’ve kept up with the philosophical trends of the day particularly well or because we’ve read the articles that have harvested the most clicks. No. Our authority is not the shifting sands of public opinion. It’s Scripture alone. Sola Scriptura. We look to the word of God and that is our rock and our anchor.

Aside from the solas, Luther’s boldness is so incredible. He stands for what’s true, even knowing that he might be killed for it. That’s the level of boldness that the church desperately needs to reclaim today. Only a few generations ago, it was socially advantageous to participate in a church. It didn’t matter if someone believed any of it; they were happy just to be participating in a normative institution of American culture and reaping the benefits that came along with it. You can find records where businessmen with almost no interest in religion move to a new town and immediately join the local church. Why? So that they can promote their business and be seen talking to the right sort of people. People gave up their Sunday mornings to get something tangible. Churches that participated in that cultural quid pro quo are in a hard place today. Why? Because things don’t work that way anymore. Nobody stands to gain new clients or a good reputation because they go to a local church. At best, the church is neutral on both of those axes, and at worst, it may actually cost them a good reputation to be a regular participant in an orthodox church. The next generation of Christians will not be enticed into Christianity because they stand to gain anything in the secular world. To the contrary, they will have to pay something.

Martin Luther was willing to pay any price when it came to keeping the word of God. I pray that each of us would be willing to do the same should it fall to us.

Amen.