Luther-The game-changer!

 

 

 

There is a very popular word at the moment, I have heard it repeated three times recently, so it must be in vogue.  I first hear it in an advertisement for Wayfair, an online furniture and accessories store: A man appears and is told that there is no shipping fee for anything on Wayfair. His response, “Game-changer!”  Then, I read a passage by Ken Dryden, the great hockey player, who talked about the problem of checking to the head and injuring people in hockey. He said that there needs to be a change, and what he is advocating is called “a game-changer”.  And last night in the World Series, a certain pitcher came on at a very sensitive time in the game, and the LA Dodgers commentator said, “When he comes on, it is a game-changer!”  Everything is “a game-changer” right now!  I woke up the other day thinking that this word has become an earworm:  You can’t get it out of your head, like a piece of music.  I thought, “If these are game-changers, what Martin Luther was doing 500 years ago makes him one of the great game-changers of all time!”

 

It is remarkable that 500 years after the Ninety-five Theses were placed on the door of the Wittenberg Cathedral we are here today recognizing that event.  Five hundred years might not in the great scheme of the solar system seem very long, but in terms of our knowledge and memory of history, it certainly seems that way.  On this very day, something like 13 percent of the world’s population subscribe to the reformed ideals that were really started by Martin Luther.  Thirty-three to forty percent of the entire Christian community ascribes some degree of recognition to Martin Luther for its foundations.  Multiple, denominations, too many even to mention, almost too frightening to account for, subscribe in many ways to what happened 500 years ago.  Historians look back to those days and they saw that what Martin Luther did was “a game-changer”.  

 

It shattered what was known then as the Church-State synthesis, where basically what the Church said was in sync with what the governors, the princes and those in power said.  There was this power base of Church and State.  It had arisen from the feudal system that manifested itself in the medieval period.  It was a powerful thing!  The Church and the State seemed as if it was they were one and indivisible in the minds of many people.  Yet, in the midst of all of this, an Augustinian monk places some theses on the door of a cathedral and suddenly there was a cascade of emotions, divisions and changes.  What started out as a theological rebuke of the Church that he had known growing up as an Augustinian monk, shattered that synthesis.  He brought it into question and changed the world around him. 

 

In Germany, he changed the princes, who to a large extent had once again been under the influence of Rome, and who now ascribed to this new movement led by Luther.  They started to follow what became a reformed and reforming movement.

 

It wasn’t long before Henry VIII in Britain decided, with the influence of a theologian named Cranmer, to turn the tables on Rome from the Church’s point of view, mainly over divorce, but also over many other reformed doctrines.  In a sense, England became a Protestant country.  The cascading schism continued:  In Geneva, John Calvin followed perhaps with greater intellectual vigour than Luther, this great movement and created a Protestant state built on Protestant principles in the city of Geneva and elsewhere in what we know today as Switzerland. But it didn’t really happen in the full sense of the word.  Then, there was the schism that was caused by persecution. Europe experienced migration due to the suppression of the Reformation. Reformers had to flee. 

 

This migration led to many different changes, so much so that you can trace even the Mayflower and the Puritans who came to the coasts of what is now the USA precisely because of their convictions on the basis of what Martin Luther had started 100 years before.  The Thirty Years War, which was to divide Europe along confessional lines massively shook up The Holy Roman Empire.  This even included, by the way, very contentious today, the Catalans having their own say – just thought I would mention it!  The Treaty of Westphalia was to change the picture of what had been The Holy Roman Empire.  All of this because of an Augustinian monk hammering some theses on a cathedral door!  And the history that has followed has been both glorious and ignominious.  It has been one of immense joy and liberation, violence and sectarianism.

 

No one who has any knowledge of history’s flow would suggest that what happened 500 years ago wasn’t a game-changer.  It was a massive one for the Roman Catholic Church itself, never mind all the reform movements that came out of it.  The Council of Trent in the 1540s was an attempt under the Roman Catholic Church to a retrenchment and a re-affirmation of its doctrines that had now been shaken at their very core by the presence of these reformers.  So, you see the movement of Ignatius Loyola and the Jesuits to evangelize the world in the name of Rome came out of, and were a response to, the Reformation.  The Counter Reformation, as it is sometimes called, also subscribed to the belief that there were seven sacraments and not two, as Luther had suggested, for he had introduced the concept that Baptism and Holy Communion Eucharist were the only biblically sustainable sacraments, and that the other ones were not.  Rome and The Council of Trent reaffirmed that there were seven and not two sacraments.  The Council of Trent also reaffirmed their belief that the Bible was not the sole source of revelation when it comes to authority or matters of faith and doctrine, and they took their stand and held their ground. But believe-you-me, Luther and those who followed him had a massive impact on them. 

 

Luther had a massive impact on the intellectual views of his day.  During his time, the predominant, influential philosopher was Aristotle.  Aristotle believed that you could go as a theologian from what they called “nature” to “grace”.  In other words, you could look at corporal things to reflect and embody the things that were gracious, the things that were of God and/or the Cross. Therefore relics, sacraments, icons, images, all manner of things, including Papal power could be a manifestation of the grace of God in this philosophy.  Martin Luther turns that on its head.  Everything for Luther starts with the grace of God, which is what I am looking at primarily tonight.  It was a game-changer because of the literacy movement, from translating the Scriptures into the vernacular, to making them accessible to any person no matter who they were.  If you had any form of literacy, you could have access to the Scriptures, no longer mediated through priests or Church doctrines.  This revolutionized the intellectual basis of the western world and fundamentally changed the way the western world was to think. Literacy became a driving force within the culture of its time.

 

There was also a renewed interest in humanism.  Maybe it was because of the influence of those who came before Luther or working contemporaneous with Luther, such as Erasmus and others, but clearly the place of the individual, the will of the individual, the freedom of the individual, the importance of human life, and the respect for decision making and the faith of an individual took on much greater importance as a result of Luther’s writings and works.  One could probably say there would not have been The Enlightenment had there not been Luther, or certainly if there had, it wouldn’t have been accelerated to the extent in which it was.  Luther was a game-changer!  Anyone who would suggest otherwise or simply want to peg him back 500 years in time clearly does not recognize the nature and the profundity of what he did.

 

Our question this morning is:  does it really matter?  Do the things for which Luther stood and his convictions really mean anything?  I would like to suggest they do, and I do so in the most profound way.  The former Senior Minister here, Reverend Doctor Stan Lucyk, who has been a good friend of mine over the years, loves to wear his stole, which is Lutheran. On it is the Lutheran symbol: in the middle of it a heart with a cross in it and white petals on the outside, and then the four great, what they call solas of the Reformation wrapped around it:  Sola Scriptura, sola fide, solar gratia, solus Christus.  Every time Stan wears it, he reminds me that he is wearing it, and says, “I have one of these and you don’t.”

 

And I go, “Yes, I know.  You are more holy than I am, Stan!!”

 

Every time I look at it I am in awe, because I realize, “You know, that is where my faith is.  That is exactly what I want.”  I would wear that to the grave precisely because at the very heart of it all is Christ and his Cross, but the Christ and his Cross come because I know that I am part of people of the Word.

 

In our passage from Timothy 2, there is one of the clearest expressions of the wonder of the Word of God as revealed in Scripture, and I just want to repeat a couple of the verses: "All Scripture is inspired by God and is useful for teaching, for reproof, for correction and for training in righteousness, so that everyone who belongs to God may be proficient, equipped for every good work."

 

“All Scripture is inspired by God.”  Now, the Scripture of course to which Paul was referring is probably what we know as The Old Testament, although there have been those who have speculated, and I think rightly so, that already by the time of Paul there was what we know as the Kerygma, a core teaching about Jesus of Nazareth.  There was within Paul’s own history a canon of letters that had been written already, and if Timothy 2 is as some suggested, maybe even a later piece that was written, it reflects nevertheless that the people of God are people of the Word, and the text has sacredness to it because of the power of the Holy Spirit. You can’t have the reading of Scripture without the devotion of the Holy Spirit.  This was a key theme of Luther’s.  It was the same with the sacraments:  You couldn’t have the sacraments without the real preaching of the Good News from Scripture.  The two came together; Word in sacraments; Word in spirit.  

 

These, for Martin Luther, became the ground on which he stood, and he stood on it firmly, because he believed that it was there for reproof, and it was there for, and let’s not misunderstand Luther, for good works.  Scripture is the way that guides us, becomes the norm, the authority on which we stand.  When we wonder where we should stand, when there are complexity of voices, when the Church is confused even in its authority, when people are unsure of where to turn, Martin Luther said nothing new.  He wasn’t pushing us forward into anything that was particularly radical in the sense of its newness, but was radical in its reaffirmation of what it is. Namely that the Scriptures become formative for Christian life and witness.  Paul had said this, according to young Timothy, 1,500 years before Luther.  We hear it again, and when we wonder in this shifting world, when we are unsure where to listen or where to turn, there are the Scriptures and the way that they bear witness to Jesus Christ.  

 

If there is something that I love about Luther the most though, it is that he recognized that we are people of the Cross.  Central to all Luther’s teachings there was a phrase in the Heidelberg Disputation, which I will mention tonight, where he says, “Crux probat omnia” – the Cross is the test of everything.  Christ is the centre, not the boundary, not the addition, not subservient to anything that we might establish in religious terms, but Christ and Christ alone is central.  For this, we should all give our lives.

 

One of the criticisms of Martin Luther has been that at times in his passion for Christ he was uncertain as to how to treat the Jewish people.  There has been a litany of articles and reports given about Luther’s anti-Semitism.  There is nowhere to hide on this.  Some of the things that Luther said about the Jewish community are simply reprehensible and very much a reflection of the attitude of the time.  Maybe, in 500 years we’ve come a long way in rediscovering the Jewishness of Jesus.  Maybe we have come to see what Luther did not see in his passion for Christ:  that Christ died once and for all – for all!  Nevertheless, despite all of that, throughout the history of the world people have turned to the teachings of Luther, even in moments when ironically, paradoxically, Jews are being persecuted, and it is the influence of Luther’s solus Christus and sola Scriptura that have been so powerful.  Just before World War II, in Germany, German pastors were being asked to subscribe their adherence to the teachings of the German church, which was following the teachings of Adolf Hitler, and a group of pastors led by both Reformed and Lutherans made a statement in defiance of this, saying they would not subscribe to the convictions of worldly powers.  Over 400 years after Martin Luther, these theologians in Barmen wrote these words:

 

Jesus Christ, as he has attested for us in Holy Scripture, is the one Word of God, which we have to hear and, which we have to trust and obey in life and in death.  We reject the false doctrine as though the Church could and would have to acknowledge as a source of its proclamation apart from and besides the one Word of God, still other events and powers, figures and truths as God’s revelations.

 

 

We are finally people of faith – sola fides.  Do you know how incredibly powerful that is?  We are people of faith, not by power, not by might, not by authority, not by having a Christian culture, not by having those who are in positions of power to represent us.  We are people of Faith first – not second or third!  What we believe and in whom we believe is inviolable, and that we have the courage to proclaim it and we have the freedom to live it.  It doesn’t matter where you go on the globe this day there are people who follow in the footsteps of Martin Luther, who take their stand on faith and faith alone even if it means that they lose their own lives.  There is no authority and no power that is greater than the faith within you, and it is that faith within you that becomes the source of your conscience and soul.  There is no one else who can give that to you, and there is no power that can take it away from you.  You cannot buy it; you cannot sell it; it cannot be taken from your heart.  If you have faith, it is yours, and it is in Christ alone.

 

This transforms the whole way we live.  Martin Luther wrote that even in our occupations, even in the work of the laity, especially maybe in the work of the laity, there is honour and there is respect and importance:

 

 

 

For those of us who stand in the great tradition of the Reformers, for those who believe in our hearts in sola Scriptura, in sola gratia, in sola fides, there is always at the centre of it all, for all its warts and divisions it has engendered, all its confusions and obsessions, all of the ways it has moved around, there is still at its core solus Christus – by Christ and him alone – the game-changer! Amen.