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Reformation Sunday: A Reflection
Reformation Sunday is a special day for Lutherans. It's like our denominational holiday. It's a day when we remember the teacher and monk Martin Luther, the 95 Theses, the castle church, the diet of worms, and here I stand, I can do no other. It is a day full of those legendary stories that we love to tell. We've got red paramins, brand-spinke nuens, taboot, red clothing, great music, and of course with a mighty fortress. Luther's paraphrase of Psalm 46 turned into triumphant march.
And why would we not commemorate? This is our theological heritage. The beginnings of the Protestant Reformation, Lutheranism in particular. We are justified by grace through faith apart from works of the law. We celebrate. We cheerlead. We puff out our chests a little bit today because we're a bit proud. We're the ones who figured out this whole grace thing.
And on this wonderful day of Lutheran celebration, we read from Paul's letter to the Romans. Because of course we do. Grace, justification, and Paul asking, what then becomes of boasting? Well, Paul, that's a rather inconvenient thing to ask us on Reformation. But perhaps Paul is reminding us that Reformation Sunday isn't ultimately about what Luther did, or wearing red, or even what Lutherans have gotten right. It's about something much greater than that.
We read from the third chapter of Romans, and Paul has spent the first two and a half chapters setting up his case. It seems that no one has anything to boast about. Gentiles, he argues, might not have had the law to guide them, but they had revelation from God in the natural world. And they did not follow what they knew to be true. Jews have no excuse either. They had the law, and yet they did not remain faithful to the covenant that God made with them.
And Paul wraps it all up in verse 23. All have sinned and fall short of the glory of God. That is more than a statement saying that we occasionally mess up, or that we sometimes do something wrong. We are all in the same sinking ship. No human being will be justified in his sight.
But boy, do we try? When we make a mistake, we have a ready explanation. When we hurt someone, we have a built-in excuse. When we fail to do what we should, we have a valid reason. And sometimes we even compare ourselves to other people. Well, at least I'm not as bad as... And even our religious lives become part of the self-justification argument. We attend worship, we volunteer, we give, we serve, we know our theology, kind of. But none of that makes us righteous before God.
Not excuses, not good works, not living as best we can. We still miss the mark. We still go astray. We still fall short. The law doesn't just show us our mistakes. It highlights that we cannot fix our relationship with God through our own accomplishments.
And through the first two chapters of Romans, Paul has basically backed everybody into a corner. Nobody is righteous. Nobody can justify themselves. Nobody has anything to boast about. We are stuck.
And then come two little words that change everything. But now. But now. After all the Paul has said about human sin and being held accountable and silenced mouths, we might expect him to tell us what we need to do next. Try harder. Be better. Follow the rules more carefully. Get your act together. But that is not what Paul says and that is not how it works.
Paul doesn't give us strategies or tips. No holy road map to follow. Instead, Paul tells us what God has done. But now, the righteousness of God has been disclosed. But now, they are justified by his grace as a gift. But now, he justifies the one who has faith in Jesus.
We cannot make ourselves right or righteous. But now, God is acted. We cannot overcome the power of sin on our own, but now Christ has justified us. We cannot earn God's favor, but now, grace is given as a gift. And that is gospel.
God enters our broken world and Jesus Christ goes to the cross and overcomes the power of sin, death and the devil in resurrection. God did this for us without us proving a thing. And that is how God's righteousness is revealed. God acts to make things right between us, doing for us what we cannot do ourselves. And God gives us this righteousness freely as a gift that we can never earn. God doesn't give us a better way for us to save ourselves, but instead, God does for us what we cannot do on our own.
And this good news wasn't something that Martin Luther invented 500 plus years ago. Instead, it was something that he rediscovered, lifted up, brought to the fore, that the church, the people desperately needed to hear this good news again. And God has already given us this gift in Jesus Christ. And our work, our payments, our good deeds, do not earn us the gospel.
And the irony of Reformation Sunday is that we sometimes celebrate a little too much. And we turn Luther's recovery of grace into a reason to boast about how right we are. And trust me, as a Lutheran pastor, I kind of have a lot of writing on Luther being right. But being right still doesn't make us more deserving and Paul's question still stands. What then becomes a boasting? The point of the Reformation was never to make Luther or Lutherans the heroes of the story. It was to point back to Jesus Christ and him crucified in risen.
At the beginning, Paul's question about boasting sounded like bad news for us Lutherans on Reformation Sunday. Kind of a downer, you know, popping all of our red balloons. But perhaps it's actually very good news. Because if there's no room for boasting, there's also no need for us to keep proving ourselves. We don't have to convince anyone that we're better Christians than somebody else. We don't have to pretend that we've got everything figured out. And we don't have to prove that we are worthy of God's love. Christ has already done for us what we could never do. And that is something to celebrate.
So today, let's boldly celebrate Martin Luther in the Reformation. Let's sing our hymns and pull out more stops than usual. Let's give thanks for our Lutheran heritage. And then let us even more boldly celebrate what God has done in Jesus Christ. We cannot save ourselves. But now Christ has redeemed us. We cannot make ourselves righteous. But now God has given us righteousness as a gift. We have nothing left to prove. Because God has already done what we could never do. And that is the good news. And that is where we're celebrating.
Amen.