The temptation in all times, the temptation in the Middle ages and the temptation of many in our time, is to make religion a matter of rules, and to believe that those who obey the rules are the ones who are good, and saved, and those who do not obey the rules are the ones who are damned. Which is bad enough as religion, but what made it worse is that God is made the enforcer of this system of rewards and punishment.
What Luther did was break through all of that and establish for all time that Christianity is not about law, but about grace. So Luther talked an awful lot about grace. He also talked about freedom. Freedom, he said, is what you experience when you receive grace.
We read Paul's letter to the Galatians as our Epistle lesson for this morning, the fifth chapter. That passage was such a crucial passage in Luther's understanding of his own life. The fifth chapter reads:
For freedom Christ has set us free...do not submit again to a yoke of slavery.
Those who experience grace are free. But it was not freedom from rules and morality. As a Christian you are free from the law, but you are not above the law. You are free now to obey the law, to be moral, for the right reason, not the wrong reason. You are free now to be moral for the love of God, or for the love of neighbor, not for the love of self.
That is the problem without grace. We do things, we even do good things, for the wrong reason. We do them to boost ourself, or to put other people down, to make ourself look good in comparison. You have heard that expression, "He was a good man in the worst sense of the word," which suggests that there are some people who are good, but not very nice. And the reason, Luther would say, is that they are in bondage to the self. Doing good things does not free you from sin. Luther's definition of sin, original sin, the sin that affects all of us, is so wonderfully descriptive in Latin, incurvatus se, "turned in upon the self." Bondage to the self.
We recognize that as a characteristic of the egoist, who talks about me, me, me all the time. But Luther's profound insight is that it can also be the characteristic of the humble person, who may also be concerned about me, me, me all the time. Even the religious professional, like himself, who has set out on a lifetime vocation to save his soul by following a rule, a regimen; that is concerned about me, what I am doing or what I am not doing, how good I am or how wretched I am. Preoccupation with the self is the bondage that holds all of us.
The Gospel is that we are freed from ourselves by God's grace. To experience that grace is to experience freedom. You are no longer curved in upon the self. You are now free to love the neighbor, as Paul so beautifully expressed it in the letter to the Galatians, with "love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, self control; against such there is no law."
Which means, you do this not because it is required. When you are filled with God's grace you do it because you now love God and love the neighbor as yourself.
Having discovered that the essence of Christianity is grace and freedom, Luther opposed everything that was opposed to grace. It was as if he had taken Paul's counsel literally: "You are free...do not submit again to a yoke of slavery."
The most immediate form of slavery that he saw was the system of indulgences. Luther was not alone in this protest. The sensitive leaders of the Church before Luther also protested indulgences, and after Luther, they were removed.
Indulgences were added on to the system of penance. Penance was doing good works. Good works would result in merit. You could accumulate merit by doing a lot of good works. There are some people who obviously have a whole lot of merit stored up because they are so good. The saints, for instance, they have a lot of merit stored up. The religious, those who spend full-time doing good things. And Christ, who because of his sacrifice on the cross, has an infinite amount of merit stored up for us poor sinners. The pope was the one who was able to dispense the merit of Christ to those who are in need of it.
The deal with indulgences was that you could purchase the merits of other people to help yourself at the Last Judgement. You can't be too careful, you know. So there was an incentive to build up as many merits, or to buy as many merits, as you could. The most attractive dimension of this was that you could purchase merits for those in purgatory. It amounted to buying your or someone else's salvation.
In 1517, the indulgence sellers came to Wittenberg where Luther was a professor in the new university founded by Frederick the Wise. Indulgences were bad enough in themselves, but the money being raised by the indulgence campaign of 1517, was to pay off debts that had been accumulated by an archbishop who was buying his third archbishopric. This is such an outrageous story it has to be told.
His name was Albrecht, and he is already the bishop of two sees. He was now trying to buy another, and you can't do that. So he was fined 10,000 ducats for the sin of accumulating offices. And since he was only twenty-three years old, and you had to be thirty years old to be an archbishop, he was fined 21,000 ducats for being too young.
The deal he cut with Rome was that he could pay off the fines and keep the archbishoprics. To pay off this fine of 31,000 ducats, which was a small fortune, he borrowed the money from a bank, the House of Fuggers, in Augsburg. Jean and I visited it there.
Here was the deal. The archbishop was allowed now to sell indulgences in Germany, half the proceeds would go to pay off the loan to the House of Fuggers, the other half would go to Rome for the construction of the new Cathedral of St. Peter.
The archbishop hired the best indulgence seller he could find, a man named Tetzel, who planned to come to Wittenberg on All Saints Day in 1517, a perfect day for selling indulgences. It would be like selling ties on Father's Day. Indulgence sales were held in front of the cathedral, or the church. There would be rides for the children, clowns, acrobats, food. It would be a carnival.
On October 31, the night before All Saints Day, what we call Halloween in this country, Martin Luther nailed to the door of the Castle Church, in front of which the sale would be held, ninety-five theses for debate on the abuse of indulgences, and other practices of the Church. Ninety-five indictments against the Church of the Middle Ages.
Very few events have had such an immediate and dramatic impact. It was as if Germany were a dry, grass field, and Tetzel's coming to Wittenberg was like a Santa Ana wind, and Luther held the torch. The conflagration changed all of Germany, then Europe, then the British Isles, then America and the rest of the world. Luther became a national hero overnight.
Frederick the Wise was his prince. He rallied behind him. Frederick affectionately referred to Luther as "my monk." He was proud of the notoriety that Luther had brought to the University of Wittenberg.
There were political dimensions to this, as is usually the case. Frederick did not like Albrecht, the man who was buying the archbishoprics. He feared that Albrecht was gaining too much power. He also had long resented the Vatican for its imperialistic policies and taxation. So for a number of reasons, Frederick supported Luther. Without that support, there would have been a Reformation, but it would not have been like a Lutheran Reformation.
The pope called for Luther to recant the ninety-five theses. Luther refused. Luther was summoned to Rome. Frederick intervened. He had enough influence in Rome that he could do this. He said that Luther would meet the papal representative half way. He feared Luther's life if he were to leave Germany. So the papal legate came to Augsburg and Luther met him there.
Luther stayed in the monk's quarters in St. Anna's Church. Cardinal Cajetan, the pope's representative, stayed in the House of Fuggers, the palace of the banker who loaned Albrecht the 31,000 ducats. Cajetan brought from Rome a staff of servants, including decorators to decorate the quarters in which he would stay.
Luther entered the cardinal's room at the Fuggers House. The cardinal was seated on a platform as a prince of the Church. Luther prostrated himself before the cardinal, a symbol that as a monk, he had given a vow of obedience to the authorities of the Church. For three days they talked. Cajetan argued from the councils of the Church and the canon law. Luther argued from scripture alone. In all future debates between Luther and the Church, this will be the impasse. The Catholic Church arguing from the authority of the Church, and Luther arguing from the authority of scripture. That impasse would never be transcended.
On the third day Luther embarrassed Cajetan by pointing out some contradiction in his reasoning. Cajetan, angry, ordered Luther out of the room. He told him not to come back until he recanted. Luther left the room, he left the building, he left the town, and went back to Wittenberg, under the protection of Frederick. Cajetan then realized what he had done. His mission was to put this German trouble to rest, either by recantation or incarceration. Now there was nobody either to recant or to incarcerate. He demanded Frederick to surrender Luther. Frederick said, no.
In Wittenberg Luther would begin to write. The printing press had been invented 100 years before, and Luther would be one of the first best-sellers. Between 1517 and 1520, Luther would write thirty tracts which were distributed in 300,000 copies. Luther never received a penny from any of his writings, but he made a awful lot of publishers rich. These thirty tracts form the blueprint of the Reformation.
The first affirmation is the priesthood of all believers. Luther said there is no need now for a mediator between the individual and God. That was a revolutionary cry in those days, and I will tell you why. The medieval society was a hierarchical society. The serfs were at the bottom, the kings at the top, and God above the king. The Church was patterned the same way. The laity were at the bottom, the bishops and pope were at the top, and God was above the pope. In both systems, if you were at a lower level, you had no access to the upper levels, except through a mediator. It was unthinkable that a serf would ever approach a king. So it was unthinkable that a common lay person would ever approach God without a priest.
The doctrine of the priesthood of all believers dismantled that system. It was in large part the reason for the feudal system also being dismantled.
Luther also wrote about the sacred calling of the Christian, in which he attacked the dual system of two vocations: the religious vocation and the secular vocation, the religious vocation holier and higher than the secular vocation.
Luther said that all Christians have a religious vocation. You are to be a Christian where you work in the world. So vocation, calling, a word that had been reserved for the religious, is now a part of our vocabulary. We all have vocations. We all are to be Christians where we work. He wrote, a charwoman on her knees, scrubbing the floor, was doing an act as acceptable to God as the cardinal on his knees, saying his prayers.
It would be reformers who came after Luther who would translate all of this into political freedom, especially the Calvinists, and John Knox in Scotland. Luther did not do this. Luther countries remained monarchies. And in an unfortunate tract, influenced I am sure by the indebtedness that he felt toward Frederick, his prince, he condemned the Peasants Revolt, which he had in large part inspired by his writings about freedom. He condemned the peasants and stated that it was a Christian duty to obey authority. He said this because he believed that anarchy is worse than tyranny. So he said even if your king is a tyrant, you should, as a Christian duty, obey him. These writings would haunt the Church for hundreds of years, and especially in this century, and especially among the Lutherans in Germany.
Next he replaced the authority of the Church and its councils with the authority of scripture. Then he made scripture available to everybody. He translated the Bible from Latin into German, the language of the people. We discovered when we were in Germany that Luther is remembered there as much for the translation of the Bible into German as he is for the other reforms. That is hardly mentioned, however, in English speaking countries. But the German Bible is to the Germans what the King James Bible was to the English language. It gave shape and form to the language.
It also fueled the fires of individualism. You place a Bible in everybody's hand, in their own language, and you teach them how to read (and Luther did that, Luther started schools to teach people how to read), then tell them they can interpret it for themselves, you don't need some authority above you to tell you what the Bible says, and pretty soon they will start thinking for themselves.
Luther had no idea how all of this would turn out. But the floodgates were now opened, and for the next 400 years, freedom would be the preoccupation of the western world, for good and for ill.
In 1520, the pope once again declared Luther's writings heretical and ordered all his books burned. The students at Wittenberg took all of the papal books out of the library and burned them. The pope then asked Charles V, the Holy Roman Emperor, to call a "diet." A diet was a meeting of the "electors." The electors were the princes of the Holy Roman Empire, who elected the emperor. So a diet was a meeting of the major powers in Europe. He called the diet to meet at Worms for the purpose of trying Martin Luther for heresy.
Frederick provided an armed guard for Luther, and a cart. It was the first time that Luther would ride anywhere. He walked everywhere else, including to Rome and back once. Now he rode through all the small towns of Saxony, Thuringia, and Franconia on his way to Heidelberg, across the Rhine, over to Worms. Everywhere he went, the crowds gathered and cheered him.
The emperor was Charles V, the grandson of Ferdinand and Isabella of Spain. He was made king of Spain, and a bunch of other territories, at the age of fourteen. At the age of nineteen, he was made the emperor of the Holy Roman Empire, when his grandfather, Maximilian, died and Charles inherited the Hapsburg territories. He was twenty-one when he called the diet at Worms. He is of Spanish origin, but was raised in the Netherlands. He could speak French. He could not speak either German or Latin. So he had no idea what was going on in the debate before him at Worms.
Luther walked into the room expecting to debate theology. He was told to sit down. The attorney for the pope pointed to a stack of books on a table, and he asked Luther two questions: "Did you write these?" and "Will you recant?"
Luther's lawyer demanded that the titles be read. This was a stalling tactic so he could consult with Luther as to what to do. Luther asked for twenty-four hours to form a reply. It was granted.
The next day Luther entered the room. The room was packed with people straining to hear him. He began the speech that he had prepared to defend his writings. The emperor interrupted him, and said, "Answer the question. Will you recant?" What followed is one of the most famous speeches in all history.
Unless I am convinced by the testimony of scripture and by clear reason, for I do not trust either in the pope or in councils, for it is known that they have often erred and contradicted themselves, I am bound by scripture and my conscience is captive to the word of God. I cannot and I will not recant anything, since it is neither safe nor right to go against conscience. Here I stand. May God help me. Amen.
With that the emperor got up, left the room, thus dismissing the assembly, since you can't continue without the emperor. The Germans cheered, the Italians hissed and whistled, and Luther walked out of the room. Carlyle, incidentally, will say this is the beginning of the modern age, an individual standing before authority, and defying authority in the name of individual conscience.
The next day the emperor said that Luther was a heretic, and he must proceed against him. Frederick then filibustered the diet to give time for Luther to escape. Soldiers of another German elector whisked him away secretly. He was taken to Wartburg Castle. There he would let his hair grow out to cover his monk's tonsure, let his beard grow, and take on the uniform of a knight. He stayed at Wartburg Castle for a year.
There he would translate the Bible into German. It was there in this castle legend says--and I always find that the legends are much better than the facts--that he wrote, Ein Feste Burg Ist Unser Gott, "A Mighty Fortress Is Our God."
When he returned to Wittenberg he found that he had created something of a crisis, because all of these monks and nuns were fleeing the cloisters now in waves. They came to Wittenberg to ask Luther, "Now what do we do?" Luther ran, therefore, something like a marriage bureau. Then in 1523, he, himself, got married. It was a great scandal, fueling salacious rumors, which continued long after Luther's death, about why he began the Reformation in the first place.
He married Katherine Von Bora, an ex-nun. She escaped from her nunnery twice. The first time they caught her and brought her back. Then she escaped again and went to Wittenberg. It was a marvelous marriage.
This is Father's Day, so it is appropriate that we should note that Luther lifted marriage and family up to the status of a holy vocation. There is nothing that Luther did in the Reformation that had such an immediate impact in Germany than his definition of the family. He said that it was a holy vocation. In the wedding ritual of the Methodist tradition, marriage is defined as "a holy estate instituted by God." An "estate" in Luther's theology was an institution ordained by God for the preservation of the goodness of life. There were three estates: the government, the Church, and the home. You entered all three with vows, because all three were considered to be holy vocations. The vow of marriage is the vow of faithfulness, because fidelity is necessary for the preservation of the home, and the home is necessary for the preservation of the goodness of life. On this Father's Day, I point out that it was Luther who made marriage and the home a vocation, a calling, for Christians.
Luther loved being a father. He wrote music for his children. He brought the evergreen tree into the house, started the custom of the Christmas tree. And he loved Katherine. At one point he wrote that he feared for his soul, because, he said, "I think I love Kate more than Christ."
Luther was a man of his time. He transcended his time in some ways and achieved immortality. But in other ways, he remained mired in his age and thus dated, and even dangerous. I mentioned his teaching about the state is an anachronism. He participated in the anti-Semitism of the Middle Ages, and never transcended that. That is a shame.
But God used him mightily. I believe God used Luther because Luther was transparently honest, without any sham, hypocrisy or pretense. He was often as crude as his peasant origins. They used to expurgate Luther's writings for the more gentler descendants of Luther. Still Luther manifested the genuine Christian spirituality that is based on an honest admission of who we are: that we are creatures, and we are sinners, and we are in need of God's grace.
In the last days he went to Mansfeld, where he had spent some years as a child, in order to arbitrate a land dispute between the counts of Mansfeld. He took his three sons with him. He went there in November. The proceedings extended longer than expected. He wrote to Katherine that he would not be home for Christmas, and what a sad expectation that was for him, for he loved Christmas.
He stayed in the house of one of the counts in Eisleben, which is the town in which he was born. He did not feel well the whole time he was there. He preached frequently in the church across the square from the count's house, including the day before he died. His text is the same that was read for us as the Gospel lesson for this morning from Matthew.
Come to me, all who labor and are heavy laden, and I will give you rest. Take my yoke upon you, and learn of me; for I am gentle and lowly in heart, and you will find rest for your souls. For my yoke is easy, and my burden is light.
Luther couldn't finish that sermon. He said, "I am too weak to continue." He went across the street to the count's house. The next day he died, with his three sons at his bedside.
They took his body to Wittenberg and buried him in the Castle Church, the church on whose doors he nailed those ninety-five theses. Philip Melancthon preached the sermon. Melancthon was Luther's younger colleague at Wittenberg, perhaps his closest friend. Melancthon will be the architect, really, of the Reformation, and the founder of the Lutheran Church. He was a tremendous theologian. He preached the sermon at Luther's funeral. He did not compare Luther to the saints in the Church. Instead he compared Luther to the heroes of the Bible.
Katherine was there for the service with her children. After the service they went home. That night she sat down and wrote her sister about the events of the day, and concluded by saying, "We have lost this dear and precious man."
Let us pray: Gracious God, we give you thanks for the heritage which is ours and the Reformation. We pray that we, like Martin Luther, might open our lives to the influence of your grace and the power of your Spirit, that we, too, might be faithful disciples of our Lord. Amen.
