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 wa…