Readings for Reformation Sunday (ELCA)
Jeremiah 31:31-34, Psalm 46, Romans 3: 19-28,
+ John 8:31-36

Collect

Gracious Father, we pray for your holy catholic Church. Fill it with all truth and peace. Where it is corrupt, purify it; where it is in error, direct it; where in anything it is amiss, reform it; where it is right, strengthen it; where it is in need, provide for it; where it is divided, reunite it; for the sake of your Son, Jesus Christ, our Savior, who lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit, one God, now and forever. Amen.

Homily

One of the courses I took in my first year in seminary was called The European Reformation. The professor was Dr. Dale Johnson, a specialist in Church History. I’ll never forget the way he opened the first lecture. When the class had gathered, and all of us rowdy first year students had settled down, Prof. Johnson stepped to the lectern and said, “As soon in coin in coffer rings, the soul from Purgatory springs.” None of us knew what that meant, but we came to find out that this was a little advertising jingle used in the Medieval Church to entice people to buy down their loved one’s time in Purgatory. It may seem funny to us, but to the common person in Medieval Europe, the idea that human beings who don’t go straight to Hell spend time in Purgatory before they go to Heaven was taken for granted. Nobody but the most holy saint ever died with their spiritual balance sheet in the black. So everyone had some remedial sanctification to accomplish when they died. And the belief was that buying your deceased loved one a Papal indulgence would move the tally along in the right direction. At the root of this religious economy was the simple idea that to give praise to God you needed a priest, and to receive grace from God you needed a priest.

It was just this kind of abuse of the means of grace that Martin Luther raged against when he walked up to the church in Wittenberg, Saxony, and nailed a piece of parchment to the door listing 95 reasons the Church had to change. Related to the sale of the pope’s indulgences, item #6 on his list says this:

The pope cannot remit any guilt, except by declaring and showing that it has been remitted by God…^[1]

Luther’s argument became the heartbeat of both the European and the English Reformations: the Church doesn’t forgive sins; the Church announces and demonstrates the forgiveness of God. This may sound like word-smithing, but it’s define and essential truth: Christ is our great high priest, and the salvation that he reveals by his life, death, and resurrection becomes effective in our lives when we put our trust in him, not because we earn it. As St. Paul says in our lesson from Romans today,

Then what becomes of boasting? It is excluded. Through what kind of law? That of works? No, rather through the law of faith. For we hold that a person is justified by faith apart from works prescribed by the law.

Like Martin Luther, Thomas Cranmer—the Archbishop of Canterbury—realized that nothing we could do or achieve would qualify us to receive the Sacrament of Christ’s Body and Blood. So when Archbishop Cranmer compiled and published the first Book of Common Prayer in 1549, he wrote a new prayer commonly known as the Prayer of Humble Access. It goes like this:

We do not presume to come to this thy Table, O merciful Lord, trusting in our own righteousness, but in thy manifold and great mercies. We are not worthy so much as to gather up the crumbs under thy Table. But thou art the same Lord whose property is always to have mercy. Grant us therefore, gracious Lord, so to eat the flesh of thy dear Son Jesus Christ, and to drink his blood, that we may evermore dwell in him, and he in us. Amen.

At the center of this prayer is Cranmer’s claim, “thou art the same Lord who property is always to have mercy.” The word “property” refers to the essential nature of the Divine Being. Like an essential property of water is that it freezes at 32^o Fahrenheit, mercy is an unchanging essential element of God. This doesn’t mean that the wrong in our lives doesn’t matter, it means that the wrong in our lives doesn’t separate us from God. In the Eucharistic liturgy, the Prayer of Humble Access comes right before the Communion of the People, and it is prayed by everyone in unison. In the moment, we realize that we are caught up in the history of God’s eternal love and mercy: we find ourselves wrapped in the arms of the Savior. We don’t need to buy indulgences, and we don’t need to whip ourselves with guilt and shame. We simply need to acknowledge the grace being given, and offer our love in return.

This act of devotion in the Sacrament is, I think, the most important meaning of bringing offerings to God: we give ourselves completely into God’s care and God’s mercy. This dedication of our lives to God reveals itself in many ways and may indeed have financial implications. We are called to trust God in our spiritual lives in our emotional lives, and yes, in our physical lives. Certainly this is true. But if giving money to the church isn’t the outward sign of a passionate, inner spiritual relationship with Jesus, then it becomes a moralistic obligation rather than an act of love. We tend the sacred places of Church and Altar, because it is here that the love of Christ is proclaimed and where we discover through the beauty of the Sacraments that his love can pass through us into the lives of others.

This is the truth that Jesus is talking about in our Gospel lesson today when he says, “If you continue in my word, you are truly my disciples, and you will know the truth, and the truth will make you free.” To live our lives from a place of complete trust in the promises of Christ is to become his apprentices, his students, his disciples. And as we “continue in his word” our knowledge and love of God grows more and more articulate, and becomes more and more deeply felt. To know the God of eternal mercy, and to know Christ as the eternal sign of that mercy, sets us free from the shame of our sins and the wounds of our suffering.

For all who desire to follow Jesus, regardless of the outward appearance of our religion or our denominational subscription, Christ’s call is the same: You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, soul mind and strength and you shall love your neighbor as yourself; on these two commandments hang all the Law and the Prophets (Mt. 22:37-40). To return the love of Christ that we have experienced means to follow this Commandment. We cannot claim him as Lord, and then not do what he asks us to do. But neither do we engage in so-called good works because we hope to be saved thereby. Rather it’s the opposite. Because we have experienced the salvation of the Creator in the person of Jesus, we respond to his love by becoming like him in the way we live our lives. So our works of charity and piety, and the contribution of our material substance to our common fellowship, become our way of life as the outward sign of our love.

As we each pray over our pledge forms, preparing to renew our trust in Christ for another year, let us hold tightly to the promise of the Lord given through the words of the Prophet:

I will put my law within them, and I will write it on their hearts, and I will be their God, and they shall be my people. No longer shall they teach one another or say to each other, “Know the Lord,” for they shall all know me, from the least of them to the greatest, says the Lord, for I will forgive their iniquity and remember their sin no more.

Amen.

[1] https://www.luther.de/en/95thesen.html