I began the sermon with a joke [To hear the joke and listen to the full sermon go to MCC's website at http://www.mcchurch.org/sermons/?sermon_id=24.
As a pastor AND historian
of the Reformation, I’m like what my wife was to me – too knowledgeable to be
duped by easy praise. I know the good as well as the bad, the truth as well as
the fiction, the praiseworthy elements as well as the painful parts. So my hope
is not so much to celebrate the Reformation with you today but to commemorate
it – to remember it well; not so much to lavish praise but “speak the truth in
love”; not so much to say “yeah us” but “praise him” and that him is not Martin
Luther. It’s Jesus. Today I would like to focus on a Reformation understanding
of Scripture – but not so much the idea of Scripture alone, which is easily understandable
enough, but the Reformation legacy of “who”
reads the Scripture, “how” one should read it, and the one legacy that we must
unlearn. Well, let’s begin with Scripture!
Jesus
says, “39 You study the Scriptures diligently
because you think that in them you have eternal life. These are the very
Scriptures that testify about me,
40 yet you refuse to come to me to have life.”
~ John 5:39-40
1.
Who reads the Bible? “Sinners
read the Bible.” How do you hear that phrase? Do you place a comma – Sinners, read
the Bible! - a sort of outward focused “get your life right,” sort of rant? Well,
a strategy toward Bible reading anchored in the spirit of the Reformation is
that there is no comma. It’s sinners NOT saints who read the Bible, Martin
Luther insists.
“You
study the scriptures,” Jesus says – but who is the “you”? Martin Luther would
argue that the first point to proper Bible reading is to figure that out. Many
of us, myself included, imagine ourselves standing with Jesus not the Pharisees.
But if we think that we are always comfortably on the side of Jesus we’re
probably missing the point. Martin Luther wants you to acknowledge your actual place
– standing with sinners. That’s the only place to stand if you wish to read the
Bible rightly. You see Pharisees are bad readers of Scripture BECAUSE they never
imagine themselves as sinners. They are devoutly religious people who memorized
scripture, prayed scripture, debated scripture, and just don’t get it – they
still manage to miss God.
Yet,
according to Martin Luther, Christians alway do everything, including Bible
reading – “simultaneously righteous and sinful.” He writes:
The
saints are always aware of their sin and seek righteousness from God in
accordance with God’s mercy. . . In reality they are sinners; but they are
righteous by the declaration of a merciful God. They are unknowingly righteous,
and knowingly sinners. They are sinners in fact, but righteous in hope.
Luther
argued that reading the Bible correctly, getting the Christian life right,
wasn’t about some new Biblical tools or study helps or even a high view of
inspiration but happened when you acquired a proper orientation – “knowingly” a
sinner, he says, “in fact,” a sinner. Luther’s reform set about demoting (not elevating)
who a good Bible reader was – a sinner NOT a saint.
Maybe
a more modern analogy might help us understand Luther’s point. This is not
Martin Luther’s image but my own. In the mid-1800s, the entrepreneur John Tate began
making compasses. After his first batch, Tate and his employees realized a terrible
mistake that would end up causing the company to become bankrupt. You see, he
had failed to mark which way was north making the compass useless. Luther’s
vision of Bible reading argued that to understand the Bible rightly required
that one understand it much like a compass. A compass, of course, always points
in two directions North & South. If you don’t understand this you will read
it wrongly no matter how well the compass works. In the same way, Luther argued
that correct Bible reading demanded that you understood which way it pointed.
He understood these two poles to be law and gospel. He writes, “The distinction
between law and gospel is the highest art in Christendom . . . Virtually the whole of the Scriptures and the
understanding of the whole of theology depends upon the true understanding of
the law and the gospel.” Luther’s Commentary
on Galatians (1535)
So,
on the one hand, the compass always points south – the law, which aims to
convict you of sin and to show you how much you need a savior. For Luther this
is because the law tells us what we ought to do but can’t; while the gospel (north
on the compass) tells us what God has done for us. The law shows us that we
need to be forgiven; the gospel points to the fact that we have been forgiven.
Friends,
if your Bible reading doesn’t expose your lack, doesn’t reveal your brokenness,
doesn’t uncover your sin, then you are not reading it as someone connected to
the Reformation. You’re not understanding the purpose of the compass you hold
in your hand.
So,
who should read the Bible? Sinners. And good Bible reading always aims to help
us remember that reality – “knowingly,” Luther says.
But
“how” should one read the Bible? Well, Luther says you need to know what the
Bible is all about. Joke about the children sermon – “I know the answer is
Jesus but it sounds like a squirrel to me.”
2. It’s not about a squirrel! It’s about
Jesus.
Jesus
clearly states that the Scriptures are God’s story about himself and Luther
whole-heartedly agrees. Jesus is the Word of the word. The Bible contains the
Word of God – Jesus. In his preface to the Old Testament Luther wrote that the
Bible was “the swaddling clothes and the manger in which Christ lies.” He
argued, therefore, that readers of the Bible need to understand its “plain sense”
which meant understanding the story the Bible wanted to tell – the gospel – the
good news of Jesus Christ – which was not a command but a story.
For
Luther it’s not trying to find Jesus under every rock of the Old Testament but getting
our story straight, a story of what God has been wanting to do from the very
beginning which culminates in Jesus of Nazareth – his life, death and
resurrection. The Bible, in other words, is not so much a book about being good
but God’s goodness.
In
the NT and throughout Christian history there are two themes that relate to
Jesus: 1. One stream is that of imitation. It’s text focus on Jesus’ life as a
model for the believer – “Have
this attitude in yourselves which was also in Christ Jesus” (Phil. 2:5); “For
you have been called for this purpose, since Christ also suffered for you,
leaving you an example for you to follow in His steps” (1 Peter 2:21). As a former monk whose sole purpose was to live a life of imitation
Luther discovered only shame, fear and failure. He worried that a singular
focus on it turned the gospel into a series of commands that people would
inevitably use to justify themselves or to judge others. It promoted both
self-righteousness and self-loathing. Imitation, in other words, became one
more means of law - believing that it’s the scriptures themselves, rather than
Jesus, that give life.
2.
The second stream, however, is participation. For Luther this was the vision of
Paul. “30 It is because of God that
you are in Christ Jesus, who has become for us wisdom from God—that is, our
righteousness, holiness and redemption. 31 Therefore, as it is
written: ‘Let the one who boasts boast in the Lord.’” (1
Corinthians 1:30-31). It means that we believe whole heartedly in what Christ
has done for us rather than what we do ourselves. Luther, like Paul, used
marriage to illustrate this notion. That just like marriage, salvation came
about not by first imitating but by saying “yes” as one does in a marriage
ceremony. When we trust another and offer our “yes” we gain all that was
there’s while our spouse takes on all that was ours. So Christ has fulfilled
the law for us – we need not do it in order to be saved because he has already
done so. We simply need to say, “yes” to him.
Luther
wrote, “The law says, ‘Do this,’ and the it is never done. Grace says, ‘Believe
in this,’ and everything is already done.”
And
friends, in a day and age of constant surveillance, accusation and shame via
Facebook or Twitter, where being right trumps being in relationship, I pray
that we can hear this grace anew – that we are sinners saved apart from what we
do but because God graciously loves us - and be thankful for Martin in helping
us rediscover this great grace. But
while grace is something that we should be thankful for learning from Martin.
We must also unlearn a dangerous Reformation legacy that also connects to
Luther - his struggle to extend grace to others, particularly when reading the
Bible differently from himself. Luther got grace right, I believe, but he
failed to understand it’s broader implication for Bible reading.
The great Lutheran
theologian Reinhold Niebuhr echoes this warning, “The Church can disturb the
security of sinners only if it is not itself too secure in its belief that it
has the word of God. The prophet himself stands under the judgment which he
preaches.” Luther would have done well if he could have remembered that.
I’d like to close
with a story from the Reformation that illustrates what we should unlearn. In
1529, a German prince, Philip of Hesse wished to unify two branches of the
Reformation: the Swiss Protestants led by Huldrych Zwingli and the North German
Protestants led by Martin Luther. So he invited them to his castle in Marburg.
Their time
together, however, did not start out well. Zwingli began by quoting from the
book of John and then saying, “This text will break your neck.” Luther responded
that he knew well how to give Zwingli
“a blow to the face.”
Not surprisingly, discussions
broke down from there and the two sides, who eventually agreed on fourteen
points of doctrine save one (concerning the Lord’s Supper), could not unite –
Luther, in the end, even refused to call Zwingli and his entourage “brothers.”
This is the one
Protestant legacy that we must remember in order to change; to recall so that
we can forget it. It’s the Evangelical idea exemplified by Luther, that reading
the Bible correctly allows one to be ungracious, that right belief permits us to
be unkind, that proper theology is good reason to use the Bible to “break”
another’s neck or “punch” one in the face. We have to confess that many of us
have followed in Luther’s footsteps – we’ve received a gospel of grace and then
have been most unChristlike in our use of it. We have dismantled the manger of
the word of God and bludgeoned others with the pieces. We’ve betrayed the Word
– Jesus himself.
And this same
Jesus forgave his betrayers, prayed for the unity of the church and, Paul tells
us, broke down the wall of hostility between all people. If we submit to that, if
we nail that to the doors of our churches, who knows, maybe we will experience
another Reformation.
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