Romans 3:19-28; John 8:31-36 | Göttinger Predigten im Internet

Reformation Sunday | October 29, 2023 | Romans 3:19-28; John 8:31-36 | Paula Murray |

Romans 3:19-28

¹⁹Now we know that whatever the Law says it speaks to those who are under the Law, so that every mouth may be stopped, and the whole world may be held accountable to God. ²⁰For by works of the Law no human being will be justified in His sight, since through the Law comes knowledge of sin. ²¹But now the righteousness of God has been manifested apart from the Law, although the Law and the Prophets bear witness to it — ²²the righteousness of God through faith in Jesus Christ for all who believe. For there is no distinction: ²³for all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God, ²⁴and are justified by His grace as a gift, through the redemption that is in Christ Jesus, ²⁵whom God put forward as a propitiation by His blood, to be received by faith. This was to show God’s righteousness, because in His divine forbearance He had passed over former sins. ²⁶It was to show His righteousness at the present time, so that He might be just and the justifier of the one who has faith in Jesus. ²⁷Then what becomes of our boasting? It is excluded. By what kind of law? By a law of works? No, but by the Law of faith. ²⁸For we hold that one is justified by faith apart from works of the Law.

John 8:31-36

³¹Jesus said to the Jews who had believed Him, “If you abide in My word, you are truly My disciples, ³²and you will know the truth, and the truth will set you free.” ³³They answered Him, “We are offspring of Abraham and have never been enslaved to anyone. How is it that You say, ‘You will become free’?” ³⁴Jesus answered them, “Truly, truly, I say to you, everyone who practices sin is a slave to sin. ³⁵The slave does not remain in the house forever; the son remains forever. ³⁶So if the Son sets you free, you will be free indeed.”

As we will discover again next week, our beloved dead are never far from us. Whether they are buried in the near grounds of the Stone Church Cemetery or in the quite distant lawn of Morris Hill Cemetery in Boise, Idaho, we carry our dead, some beloved, some not so much, around in our genes, our hearts, our personalities. You have heard it said that we are what we eat. Maybe, but only so long as it takes us to convert the energy contained in our foods to kinetic energy, or for the cells of the organisms we eat to die. We are, in a much more permanent way, the sum total of all who have had some part in the making of our bodies or our minds. Everyone who has ever had any part in our making, from our mothers and fathers, to the second-grade teacher who doted on us, to the employer who insisted we grow up and put our all into our work, we are the result of their cumulative efforts, positive or not. The poet and priest, John Donne, wrote “That no man is an island, entire unto himself,” and by that he meant quite a lot more than we are surrounded by others who have some say in our lives and how we live them.

That short line, “No man is an island,” actually occurs some two-thirds through the sonnet, so it comes almost at its very end. It is those last 14 lines that are quoted everywhere, not the lines that set them up. Why is that, you ask? Well, if you’re not asking but wondering why I’m taking you through a 17^th century sonnet rather than biblical verses relating somehow to Reformation Sunday, wait a few minutes; it will all come together. I can tell you why the first 13 lines are not quoted, not because the last 14 verses can truly stand on their own, but because those folks teaching English lit these days, for years, actually, are not much interested in the Church or the Church’s Lord. John Donne, a priest of the Church of England, preacher and teacher of the faith, theologian and diplomat as well as poet, founded his thesis that no man is an island in nature of the Church and of her Lord Jesus Christ.

“No man is an island, entire of itself,” Donne wrote, “every man is a piece of the continent, a part of the main.” The main or the continent of which Father Donne speaks is neither the actual land on which we spend our days nor even the web of relationships into which we are born and die. The Church bells toll, meaning ring, for us all, counting off the years of our lives one by one to the sum total of them when we take our last breath. The Church bells toll our years across the lands of Christendom, or did, once, because we are all of us, baptized Christians, connected through Baptism to that body which is Christ, the Church. Of the Church, Donne wrote, “The Church is catholic, universal, and so are all her actions; all that she does belongs to all. When she baptizes a child, that action concerns me: all mankind is of one Author, and is one volume; when one man dies, one chapter is not torn out of the book, but translated into a better language; and every chapter must be so translated; God employs several translators; some pieces are translated by age, some by sickness, some by war, some by justice; but God’s hand is in every translation, and His hand shall bind up all our scattered leaves again for that library where every book shall lie open to one another.”

Here now, is where we make our connection with Reformation Sunday, with the Church, and the Church’s work. We think of Reformation Sunday as a celebration of the life of Martin Luther and the start of the Lutheran Church, and the Protestant churches generally. Protestant because they protested the state of the Church. We often use the day to do a bit of rah rah, you know, cheering, for our team, Team Lutheran, which can feel pretty good given that we’re a small proportion of the Church on earth. That and a bunch of brats in sauerkraut and cider, potato dishes and other fixings makes for a good day. Let’s party like its 1517! That’s the start date of the Reformation, at least the one that we’re a part of, All Hallows Eve, or the vigil of All Saints, October 31, when Luther, an irate theologian and parish pastor, nailed 95 debate points concerning the teaching and practice of the late medieval Church on the Wittenberg Church doors. And, yeah, he probably did that since church doors functioned as community billboards.

Nailing his largish number of arguments on the church door is not what got Luther into trouble. After all, he was the pastor of that church. Mailing them is what got him into trouble, because he sent copies of his debate points to notable theologians and Church officers throughout Europe, even to the Pope, who took exception to being told that, among other things, grace could not be purchased, not even to build St. Paul’s Cathedral in Rome, or to spring our beloved dead early from heaven’s unlikely waiting room, purgatory. We tend to focus on the indulgences, on the idea that money could pass from the hands of a grieving mother or spouse, to be spread about the many layers of Church officiants and local princes, and affect God’s judgment in heaven. The very notion that a pretty certificate covered in seals and ribbons was proof positive that our loved ones got 300 years knocked off of their 700-year sentence to purgatory seems ridiculous to us. It did, I suppose, to Luther as well, but what really got him railing against the leadership of the Church of his day was the greatly diminished understanding of what the Church actually is, and what the Church exists to do.

And that made him mad, and a lot of other people also, because it obscured the true nature of the Church and the Church’s Lord. Luther was not the only theologian unhappy with the Church’s drift away from the Gospel. The Church, and the Church’s leaders, were much too entangled with the world, and had come to serve less as spiritual leaders but more like the political leaders of the day. This happened because even the spiritual leadership of the Church must have to do with the world, with the way we all live our lives. The Church must support its priests and nuns; the hungry must be fed; women must be protected from being married off against their will, a thing in those days; orphans need homes; children must be taught to read and to figure, and so on. Necessarily the Church at every level owned land, stood against greedy and powerful political leaders who treated their people as disposable resources, fought even against the encroachment of a vicious and predatory form of Islam. But, there is a balance to be maintained; the Gospel of salvation through Jesus Christ must always come first, and that balance had been lost.

The balance was lost in great part because empires, even a Churchly one, must be maintained, and the Church became like those money lenders and animal sellers in the Temple. We cannot equate Luther with Jesus, overthrowing the tables of the money lenders and chasing the animal sellers out, but it was, in part, the leadership of the Church’s greed and desire for position that led to the Reformation we celebrate today. Over time, and often, at it seemed in those days for good reason, the Gospel became less about the free gift of grace described in holy Scripture, and more about other things, things which had a worldly value attached to them, and not a salvic one. The faith of Luther’s parishioners, indeed, the faith of the whole of Christendom was sadly diminished, corrupted, and in danger of being lost.

Martin Luther did not undertake that first debate with the intention of splitting the Church into factions and making of himself the great leader of one of those factions. He wanted to challenge the Church to return to its roots, ad fontes, to go back to that which is of the greatest importance, a true faith in the saving nature of Jesus Christ as described for us in God’s Word. That the Church did split into factions is a monument to the reality of sin, and the Church on earth will continue to be fragmented so long as we do not trust in the Word given us and the Word Who sacrificed Himself for us. Nonetheless, it is right and salutary, as the Church’s liturgy tells us, to continue to pray for a reforming spirit among us, so long, as again, that spirit is the Holy Spirit, not the world’s, and the movement of the reform is to bury us in the Word of God and build up trust in the atoning death of Jesus Christ on the cross.

We have great need of that holy and reforming Spirit, for as the Church we are, again, in far too much danger of consumed by the world’s mores and not faith in Jesus Christ. The Gospel of salvation has been discarded in too many places not just for reasons of greed and power, but also for fear of worldly cultural trends and political movements. But adoption of such things does not save the Church or make it relevant, but make it just one more corporation among the many vying for people’s attention in unhealthy ways.

I want to finish off a quote from Donne’s sonnet. He wrote, “No man is an island, entire of itself; every man is a piece of the continent, a part of the main. If a clod be washed away by the sea, Europe is the less, as well as if a promontory were, as well as if a manor of thy friend’s or of thine own were: any man’s death diminishes me, because I am involved in mankind, and therefore never send to know for whom the bell tolls; it tolls for thee.” Through the Church, Christ contends for the spirit of everyone of us, His death on the cross having won the final battle against sin and death. We exist, as a body, for no other reason other than to make Christ crucified known to a world lost in an increasing darkness. We keep the faith, not only because through it we are saved from sin and death and granted life perpetual, but because our neighbors receive through faith the same gift.

References

² Donne, John, Devotions Upon Emergent Occasions, Project Gutenberg, 2007, original publication 1623

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Paula Murray