This is my fourth sermon from my year long pastoral internship at St. Peter Lutheran Church in Dubuque, Iowa. This is for the 20th Sunday after Pentecost, Year A, Proper 25. The images in this post were shown during the sermon.
The texts this week are Jeremiah 31:31-34, Psalm 46, Thessalonians 2:1-8, and Matthew 22:34-46. If you’re paying close attention, you’ll notice that the these texts are a combination of the texts assigned for the 20th Sunday after Pentecost and the Reformation Day texts. That’s because I got mixed up on what texts I was working with partway through the week. What can I say, it happens.
The services this weekend included a baptism at the 4:30 Saturday service, Affirmation of Baptism (Confirmation) milestones at the 10:30 Sunday service, and the second week of the congregation’s fall stewardship emphasis. Whew!
There’s a lot going on today in our life together as Church! It’s week two of our stewardship emphasis talking about gifts in action. At the 5:30 service, we celebrate Anna Meier’s baptism.
Eight confirmation students are affirming their baptisms at 10:30. And, of course, it’s Reformation Sunday. That’s a lot for one sermon from the intern!
Let’s start by talking about today’s holiday. You might not have known that it was a holiday today when you got in the car to drive to worship, but it is.
Today we celebrate Reformation Day, the 497th anniversary of Martin Luther nailing his 95 Theses to the church door in Wittenberg, calling for a debate about what the Church was teaching.
Instead of the debate he wanted, Luther ended up kicking off the Protestant movement, splitting the church he loved, causing wars, and generally changing the course of world history.
Those who have been going to the Table Talk studies the last few weeks have learned a lot more about what led up to the Reformation, and about what happened because Luther challenged the church’s corruption, and called it to a renewed focus on the Gospel.
At the confirmation retreat two weeks ago, the confirmands watched the movie Luther and talked about Luther’s importance.
Martin Luther’s struggle was that he was a perfectionist, and he thought God was too. He thought that to please God and get to heaven, he needed to be perfect, to repent and do penance for every single one of his sins. But no matter how much he did to make up for his sins, he was never sure if it was enough. And he kept committing new sins! It was a crushing, depressing cycle.
As a priest living in a monastery, struggling and trying his best to find acceptance from God, he had a revelation. No matter how hard he tried, he would never be able to meet God’s standard of perfection.
But – and this is the important part – God forgave him anyway. In Jesus’ death, God had already made up for all his sins.
This was Luther’s biggest insight – it’s not up to us. God has come to us in Jesus Christ, bringing forgiveness. We’re all saved by God’s grace through faith, not by anything we do.
So what we’re celebrating today on Reformation Sunday is that insight of Luther’s. Our emphasis on God’s grace as the only source of salvation is what makes us Lutheran. Not that we have a monopoly on God’s grace, or anything like that, but we’re Lutheran because we emphasize that part of Luther’s teaching.
As important as that insight was, it was when he followed through on it that Luther got into trouble.
Because if your salvation entirely depends on God, then going to church and doing good works suddenly aren’t requirements for salvation.
And what really got the church leadership upset, and this is still a dangerous thing to say during a stewardship emphasis, giving money to church does not help your salvation. How much God loves you has absolutely nothing to do with how much you put on your offering pledge card, or whether you put 10% of your income into the offering plate or not!
Instead, everything good we do is because of what God has done for us. We’re freed to truly do good deeds. If you think you need to give money or go to church to get God’s approval, then it turns out you’re really doing everything good for yourself, for your own benefit.
But, because we know the good news that we are saved by grace, we’re not stuck in that cycle anymore. We can give of ourselves, we can love our neighbors, yes, we can even give money without having it be from self interest.
In the Gospel lesson for today, we hear once again about the Pharisees, the religious leaders, trying to trip up Jesus by asking him tough questions.
We’ve heard them for several weeks now asking him these tough, technical questions about things like whether it’s proper to pay taxes, the details of the resurrection and where Jesus’ authority comes from.
This time, they ask Jesus what commandment is greatest. And he answers that the greatest command is, “You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your mind.’ This is the greatest and first commandment. And a second is like it: ‘You shall love your neighbor as yourself.’
Love the Lord your God with all your heart. And love your neighbor as yourself. If you don’t understand the idea of being saved by grace, those commands are impossible.
You can only love God with your whole heart and love your neighbor as yourself if you’re freed from being stuck in your own self interest, if you recognize that God has set you free by grace.
So as followers of Christ, we’re given that message to share. God trusts us as the church to share the news of grace with the world.
As Paul puts it in his letter to the Thessalonian church, we have been entrusted with the Gospel. We carry the message that the greatest commandment is to love God by loving our neighbors. All the other laws in the Bible are just ways of explaining how we live out this core of being a Christian.
And we carry the message of what God has done for us, to make it possible for us to live a life of serving others.
We carry a message of freedom, of liberation. It’s good news!
And we share this message in community here, as the church, as the baptized people of God. Really, that’s what baptism is. Baptism is the way a person joins the church, recognizing what God has done for them.
In baptism, God joins us together to do God’s work. Our selfish need to gain God’s approval drowns, and we’re given a new life, a new chance to live in the security of God’s grace.
And the church’s job is to pass on this good news, to pass on the faith, the hope we have. We are entrusted with the message, and because we care about others, we share that message.
The students who are affirming their baptisms at the 10:30 service have each selected a Bible verse that’s meaningful for them. I think if parents were going to pick a verse for confirmation or baptism, the last verse from our second lesson might be a good one.
Paul writes, “So deeply do we care for you that we are determined to share with you not only the gospel of God but also our own selves, because you have become very dear to us.”
That’s what happens at baptism. You parents have shown that you care for your children so deeply that you’re determined to share with them the most important news in the world, the news of God’s love for them.
When you bring/brought your children for baptism, you promised to teach them about God by bringing them to church, placing God’s Word into their hands, and teaching them about Jesus. Teaching them the story of what God has done and is doing in their lives.
Part of why we celebrate Reformation Day each year and why we celebrate baptisms and confirmation publicly in church is that we all need to be reminded of God’s grace.
We need to keep refocusing on what matters, on the Gospel.
We need these constant reminders, because we’re really good at screwing up the message we’re trusted with. The message of the Gospel is simple. God loves us, so Jesus came to save us by God’s grace shown on the cross.
But we’re scared of how radical that message of grace is. We want it to be harder. We want to do something. We want to be good people so God will love us.
We want to have rules to follow. We forget that we’re loved already, and we start imagining that God sees us the way other people see us, or the way we see ourselves.
Baptism and affirmation of baptism are not like graduations, like you’re somehow supposed to have it all figured out. No, this is the beginning of a lifelong process of learning to live as children of God saved by grace.
As Martin Luther put it, “the Christian life is nothing else than a daily baptism.” He talked about making the baptismal sign of the cross on your forehead every morning as a reminder. We need to remember again each day that God has claimed us. We need to keep reforming.
On this Reformation day, remember that God has claimed you, and God has entrusted you with that message of amazing grace for the whole world.
Amen.
[Baptismal bowl image via CreationSwap]