Due to me potentially being exposed to COVID-19 this week, we did not gather for in-person worship this weekend. Here’s the Scripture and sermon for Reformation Sunday. In the Reformation, Martin Luther called the Church to return to basics. God is faithful and offers us salvation by grace as a gift, not because of any works we do.
The texts for this week are Jeremiah 31:31-34, Romans 3:19-28, and John 8:31-36.
Grace to you and peace from God our Father and the Lord Jesus Christ. Amen
I don’t know if any of you watching this are Dallas Cowboys fans, but if you are, you have my sympathies. As a Packers fan my sympathy is limited, but the Cowboys really are having a rough year. So far they’re 2-4, and quarterback Dak Prescott is out for the year.
After a really bad game a week or two ago, Cowboys owner Jerry Jones was asked if he had confidence in Coach, Mike McCarthy, and he said yes, because (and I quote) “He has great, and I mean great, football fundamental basics. With that, you build on that.” (source)
I think it’s true in most sports: When it seems like everything is falling apart, the solution is to back to basics, back to the fundamentals. Faith isn’t a sport, but I think for us in our faith lives, it’s vital to go back to the basics every so often, and Reformation Day is a perfect opportunity.
In the first reading from Jeremiah, we heard a promise from God to God’s people, and this promise comes at a really low point for Israel. Over the last few generations, God’s chosen people had turned away from the Lord and worshiped idols instead of God.
Centuries earlier, God had promised to protect them and make them a mighty nation, a light and example to all the other nations of the earth, and they would be God’s people. And now, they’ve turned away. They’ve abandoned their side of the covenant, and so God has let other nations capture them and take them into exile. They’re at risk of being totally destroyed as a people.
That’s when this promise comes in. The days are surely coming, says the Lord, when I will make a new covenant, a new promise. It won’t be like the other covenant they broke. This time, says the Lord, I will be their God and they shall be my people, and they will all know me, and I will forgive them and forget about their sins.
Back to the basics: God will forgive everything the people have done wrong. They will be God’s people, and the Lord will be their God. God will keep the covenant even when the people are unfaithful.
It takes a few hundred more years, but God fulfills that covenant. God keeps that promise.
That’s what Paul’s explaining in Romans 3. The old covenant, the old agreement relied on the people doing the right thing and following the law, which turned out not to work so well. It turned out that the main thing the law and the commandments were good for was pointing out how badly we humans did at following directions. Give us one simple rule, one fruit from one tree that we’re not supposed to eat, and we’ll go for it every time. We always want to go our own way instead of God’s.
The law reveals our sin, our rebellion against God. It’s like testing for a virus. Testing doesn’t make people sick or cause new cases; it reveals the condition that exists inside a person. Once you know how God calls you to live, you realize how far away from that you really are. As Paul says, “Through the law comes the knowledge of sin.”
Back to basics: We’re all sinners. Verse 23 of the Romans reading: “All have sinned and fall short of the glory of God.” None of us meet the mark of how God calls us to live under the law.
500 years ago at the time of the Reformation, everyone knew about sin and guilt, but the church had wandered away from God’s solution. The main issue that set Martin Luther off was the church selling indulgences, which were paper certificates saying your sins are forgiven, but really, the problem was the church had wandered away from Jesus.
They’d started treating salvation and forgiveness as something God would give you through the church if you did enough to earn it, maybe spent your life feeding the hungry, or serve on 3 church committees, or click the share and like buttons under the sermon video, or give enough life insurance money to the church to build a nice new addition onto a cathedral. If you do enough good things, you can make up for your sins and earn forgiveness. You can follow God’s law if you just try hard enough.
Martin Luther called the church back to basics, first back to the fundamental fact that we are all sinners under the law and the law reveals our sin. But then, Luther kept reading in Romans 3, and learned that yes, all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God, and they are now justified by God’s grace as a gift, through the redemption that is in Christ Jesus.
Jesus is the fulfillment of the new covenant. God is born as a human being, Jesus Christ, who does what we could never do and fulfills the law. Through Jesus, our sins are forgiven, remembered no more.
Luther called the church to recognize God’s forgiveness as grace, as a gift we cannot earn, but that God freely and generously gives to us. As Paul writes in the quintessential verse of the Reformation: “For we hold that a person is justified by faith apart from works prescribed by the law.” All we can do is to trust in what Jesus has done for us. That’s what faith is: Trusting in Jesus.
In this Gospel reading, Jesus tells the Jews who had believed in him—and notice this isn’t like last week, where there were people out to get him, trying to trap Jesus. This time Jesus is speaking to people who are already following him, people like us—Jesus says, if you follow me, you will know the truth and the truth will set you free.
And the people listening, who again, are already interested in following him, are confused, because they don’t feel like they need to be set free. They’re not prisoners or slaves, they’re from the right family lineage, they’re following God as well as they know how. So they’re confused. Why would we need to be set free?
Jesus tells them, if you commit sin, you are a slave to sin. Sure, you can stop sinning for a while. You can do your best to make up for what you’ve done wrong, but eventually you’ll slip and fall back into sin. You need the truth to set you free. Everything you’re doing—all your best efforts—are temporary. You need to hear the truth, which is that you can’t make it on your own. To have a permanent place with God, you need a rescuer.
That has to have been uncomfortable for them to hear, right? I think perhaps our biggest challenge as Christians and as a church in the world today is that people don’t believe they need a Savior. They don’t believe they need Jesus. I say “they” but often it’s us. We live (at least I do) as if we don’t need Jesus to be our redeemer, our savior. We pretend we’ve got it all figured out and we don’t need anyone to set us free. We deny or we hide the truth.
There’s a lot of areas in this world where it’s hard to know the truth. I watched the presidential debate on Thursday night, and I thought it was much better as a debate than the first one, but to put it as gently as possible, telling the truth didn’t always seem to be the top priority.
But again, let’s go back to basics. God’s word is true. What God says about you when God claims you as beloved, that’s truth. The Son of God has come to set you free, giving you a permanent place in God’s household.
To understand that truth, you have to know the basics: You are a sinner, and you can’t save yourself. But God loves you too much to leave you in that condition. Jesus has come to forgive you, to set you free. This is a gift from God.
Infant baptisms like we planned to celebrate this weekend are a perfect demonstration of this, because the baby does nothing to deserve God’s forgiveness. She is not repenting, or doing good works to make up for sin. He’s not asking for any of this to happen. In fact, sometimes babies get pretty upset about getting baptized, because they have no idea what’s going on. And that’s ok, because in baptism, God is the one doing all the work.
Back to basics: Salvation is God’s work, not ours. The Son sets you free; you don’t free yourself.
You are a child of God because God has claimed you. You are forgiven because God has chosen to remember your sin no more. Jesus’ death and resurrection for you are a gift of grace.
Hold on to those basics. You are a sinner, and you are redeemed, and you are loved by God now and forever.
Amen