The Catechism

When it’s Reformation at a Lutheran church who else do you talk about than Martin Luther, right? It has been helpful that Luther has been on my mind lately to be able to talk about him and how he relates to our texts today. One of the main reasons that Luther has been on my mind lately is that we have been studying Luther’s small catechism in our Wednesday Bible Study.

The study has been great so far and very informative for me as well as those who have been in the class. The very first chapter of the book is the background on Luther’s catechism and how it came to be. I’m not going to assume that you all are huge history fans so to keep it short I just thought that I would share with you that catechisms have been around as early as St. Augustine. Just to give that some context, Augustine was alive during the mid 300’s to the early 400’s.

One of the most important distinctions Luther made and changed when he created the Small Catechism, which is what I want to emphasize for us today, is that he changed the ordering of his small catechism. Now this might not seem that important but we’ll get to the importance of that in a moment. What he changed was that he put the 10 Commandments at the beginning of the book. Luther felt that it was vitally important for all Christians and especially new ones to be able to understand where Israelites and now Christians started out their journey and what it was that God was trying to accomplish for them. You see, the Law makes us aware of our sin and helps us to try to avoid it by living according to God’s commands.

One of the things that we talked about in our Wednesday Bible Study is that the Israelites had just been in a very law oriented and established society in Egypt and then had been thrust into a state of lawlessness when they were thrust into freedom and into the desert as they headed off to the promised land. Because of this lawless state that had been created the people needed rules to guide them by and since God was their king God was the one who had to create the laws and pass them down to for the people to follow. This gave the Israelites the laws that showed them what they needed to follow when it came to God, the first three commandments, and what they needed to follow to live with one another, the last 7 commandments. This is what the Israelites were meant to live by during that wilderness time and for centuries to follow.

None of this is too hard to follow really because we can parallel this to our own society. We have laws created by our governments that tell us how to act and behave with one another so that we can all live in harmony with one another. If we didn’t have laws then each person would simply live as to how they felt about things. If each person did that then you might have a situation that you find when you read the book “Lord of the Flies”.

But we do have laws and the laws govern what do can and cannot do to keep us safe. What is interesting about laws though which I alluded to in the 10 commandments is that more often than not, laws and rules simply make us aware of our shortcoming or get us in trouble when we get caught doing something wrong.

In fact our text today from shows us that from the law comes the knowledge of sin and that the law silences every mouth. The law does not justify us, meaning it does not make us right and following the letter of the law of God will not change our state of living in sin. Which brings us back to Luther and the Small Catechism. Luther put the 10 Commandments first to show us that the law was first, but he also did it to show us that since the law doesn’t justify us and the law does not save us then we need something more. First we need to be made aware of our sin and our need for something greater than us. We also need to know the rules that we should follow in order to live lives that align with the way that God would have us live.

This was a huge struggle for Luther in his early days as a monk. He followed the rules and laws of God and of the Augustinians, but instead of feeling better and closer to God he felt even worse because under all those rules he was constantly reminded of how unworthy he was of God’s love and how he was unable to attain no matter what he did.

It wasn’t until later in life when he studied Romans that he discovered the freedom that was available to him and to everyone and that that freedom was not being told to people. So when Luther created his catechism he put the 10 Commandments first so that we could see and know the law like we talked about, but also so that we could know that it was not the law that saved us but it was the righteousness of God that is found through Jesus Christ. So after the 10 Commandments come his explanations to the Apostles Creed and the Lord’s Prayer. We move from God’s laws and our understanding of our shortcomings to see God’s love and grace as revealed in Jesus Christ.

Romans puts it so well when Paul tells us that we have all sinned and fall short of the glory of God. It’s 100% true! I have sinned, you have sinned and under the law that is the end and the verdict of everything. But Christ fulfilled the law. Christ came to finally do what was originally intended by the freedom and wilderness journey of the Israelites. As I mentioned God was the king of the Israelite people and God chose them to be God’s people so God wanted a way to claim them and help them and to do that God chose the 10 Commandments. Then God decided to claim all people again, but also in a different way. God knew that people couldn’t do it on their own. Rules and laws worked, but it didn’t accomplish God’s ultimate goal and plan and so Jesus was sent to complete that end goal; to make us all God’s children.

So Jesus was given up to the hands of people as a sacrifice so that all people would be forgiven of their sin, so that all would be worthy and all would be called children of God. This covered all sin for all time. Sin previously committed and sin still being committed today. God did this to justify us, to make us right with God so that there were no barriers that could possibly separate us from God’s love. That love was shown through grace, a gift given to us through Jesus Christ. We were redeemed and made holy and righteous through him.

Luther rediscovered that it is God's grace, mercy and forgiveness that gives us that relationship with God. He read Romans and realized that we had wandered back into the wilderness and were trying to receive God's love from following laws, instead of paying attention to the grace we received from the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus Christ. On this Reformation and Confirmation weekend we need to continue to remind ourselves that we are given eternal life, a relationship with God, and a place in heaven not because of anything we have done, not because of any law that we have followed or any verse of the Bible we have memorized. It is all through our faith in the one who did everything for us before we were even born. Jesus did everything for us already. It was his righteousness, it was he who justified us, and it was he who paid the price for our lives and who covered our sins. It is because of Jesus that we don’t have to worry about anything other than loving the one who first loved us. Today as we celebrate the Reformation we give thanks to all those who worked and fought tirelessly to remind us all that God’s grace is the most important thing we can ever have in our lives. This is most certainly true.