Untitled Sermon

Grace, mercy, and peace to you from God our Father and our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ, who loved you with his very life. Amen.

Happy Reformation Day! Today is seen as the birthday of the Lutheran church, on this day in 1517, Martin Luther went and nailed his 95 thesis, his 95 things he wanted to talk about, to took this list and nailed it to the church door in Wittenberg Castle in Germany. Tomorrow is all Saints Day and Luther knew that a whole bunch of people would come to church on All Saints Days, and he knew that a bunch of people, specifically educated people, would see his thesis.

Luther wrote the 95 thesis because as he looked at his church, the Catholic Church, and he saw some problems with it that he wanted to address. Chief of the those problems was the sale of indulgences. If you are familiar with your Lutheran history, you may have heard of these before, but in case you haven’t.

Indulgences were these pieces of paper you could buy from authorized sales men, priests, that would forgive your sins. Like, you could go to church and buy forgiveness, but your way out of purgatory, with actual money. It was taught that while Jesus opened the door for salvation and paid the eternal consequence of sin, you still had to pay the price for the temporal, the here and now consequence of sin. Like, if you stole something, you had to pay it back, but with interest. That kind of thing. This was called penance. Back then, the way they figured it was each sin you committed that you didn’t do adequate penance for, each one of those sins that you didn’t pay back adequately, would cost you about 7 years in purgatory. That’s a long time. That’s for each individual sin. You could rack up years of sins each day. And over the course of a lifetime? Well, you can do the math. But with these indulgence things and spring your soul from purgatory, or the soul of a loved one, like your wife, our parents, or child. And buy your way out of literally hundreds of thousands of years in purgatory. And that was a very appealing thing.

Luther was working at a university and he sees this play out. He read the Bible and was like, “Hold up. Indulgences aren’t in the bible. This isn’t how forgiveness works. I want to talk about this predatory practice.” And thus the 95 thesis were written.

We have before us today a text from Romans 3. Every year on Reformation Sunday, we have the same three passages. We have Revelation 14 about the proclamation of an eternal Gospel, we have John 8 about Jesus setting us truly free, and this, this passage from Romans 3 where Paul discusses the importance of justification apart from the Law.

If you have never done it before, or even if you have and it’s been a while. Just sit down and read all of Romans in one setting. Just cover to cover of Romans and see, hear, what Paul is saying in this book. He starts out discussing how every single person. Every man, woman, and child stands condemned before God. No one. Not one single person has an excuse. All have sinned.

And that means you. When we get to Romans 3 and our text today it says this, Romans 3:19-20 “Now 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. For by works of the law no human being will be justified in his sight, since through the law comes knowledge of sin.”

So we have this path, this road that leads to God. And this is the Road of the Law. God gave us the Law. It’s a good thing to have it, and it is a path to God. There is one requirement on the Law Path: perfection. Keep the law perfectly, never failing once. And when we read through scripture, this is the truth we see. We read the Law. And reading the law is not a pleasant experience. The perfect nature of the law shows us just how not perfect we are. WE can live our daily lives easily fooling ourselves into thinking that we are decent people. You know, I haven’t killed anyone, I haven’t robbed a bank. But reading the law? It takes that sense of goodness I guess away from us. We see just how sinful we actually are. Oh, you mean that when I am angry with my brother that counts as murder? You mean that when I see something that isn’t mine and I want it, that counts as sin too? When we look at our deeds, our thoughts, our words, and it’s not a pretty sight and we see our sin.

And it’s easy to see the fear that the ancient German peasants had. This was the path they knew to God. This was the the fear that Luther himself had. Luther would spend hours on end in confession and in penance. Luther saw that If God has saved me, which he has, and if my sins need to be punished which they do, and if the law is so strict, which it is, than purgatory is not going to be a good time. And if I can avoid it, than I am certainly going to everything I can, pay any price, to avoid it.

But Romans doesn’t end here. It continues. Romans 3:21-26 “But now the righteousness of God has been manifested apart from the law, although the Law and the Prophets bear witness to it— the righteousness of God through faith in Jesus Christ for all who believe. For there is no distinction: for all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God, and are justified by his grace as a gift, through the redemption that is in Christ Jesus, whom 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. It 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.”

Wow. What a text. We have a second path. The path that we sinners can walk. A path paved with he good news of the Gospel. The path of God’s Righteousness. Righteousness is obtained apart from works of the Law. You don’t be a good enough person to get to heaven, to be saved. Not by works of the law. You are saved, you are rescued from hell by, quote, “The righteousness of God through faith in Jesus Christ for all who believe.” Jesus paid the price of admission. He walked the first path, he paved the second, that if you believe in him, you will spend eternity with God in his Kingdom.

There is no distinction. All have sinned. I have sinned. You have sinned. And all are made righteous before God as a gift through Jesus Christ.

Why does God operate this way? Paul tells us. Because God is both just and beautifier. God is just in that your sins need to be punished. And they are. Your sins are punished in Jesus Christ. And God is justifier, where Jesus made you righteous when he took your punishment in your place, where he justified you. This is the pure, unadulterated Gospel. Jesus Christ is the only path to salvation for us sinners because he gave up his perfect life in place of your sinful one. And because of him, you now have an eternal future in God’s presence.

One last thing. On Reformation Day it is easy for us, for me too specifically to boast in being Lutheran. To beat my chest and talk about how great the Lutheran church is. But that’s the not the focus of today. That’s not the focus of being Lutheran. The reformation, Lutheranism, has always been about one thing, and only on thing. Jesus Christ. And we are reminded of the words of the apostle Paul in our text. Romans 3:27-28 “Then 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. For we hold that one is justified by faith apart from works of the law.”

Today, we should boast. Not in Luther. Nor in 95 thesis. We should boast in Christ. That God has made a second path. That even a poor miserable sinner like myself has salvation in Christ alone. Amen.