Reformation Sunday

Consider William. He's fifty-five years-old, at the peak of his business career, awaiting his first grandchild, and... he has cancer. In fact, he's not doing well in his struggle against the disease. Something else you should know about William is that he never has attended church regularly. I mean, he believes in God. Of course! But now, as he fights this battle against cancer, God feels very far away. God seems very distant. Then William receives a visit from a well-meaning friend who says to him, "Just have faith in Jesus, and let him into your life.  He’ll help you fight this thing." With William wondering where God is, is that a helpful thing to say?

Or what about Louise. She is a thirty-five-year-old mother of two small children, who has just gone through a messy divorce. She’s been a regular churchgoer most of her life. Her current emotional turmoil has been deepened, because she’s just begun to have memories of being sexually abused as a young child by her father. As a result, her faith in God has been shaken to the core. How could God have let this happen to her? Where was God when she needed protection from her own father? Louise, too, receives a visit from a well-meaning friend who says to her, "Have faith in Jesus, and he will bring you through this." Again, is that a helpful thing to say?

As people of faith, we believe that Jesus has the power to help ease the burdens we bear throughout life. I began with the examples of William and Louise, because for each of us there are times in our lives when it is all we can do to survive. When it’s so hard to do the most basic simplest things, is it really helpful to hear that there’s something else we have to do, namely, believe in Jesus? Given their respective situations, do William and Louise hear the call to faith as something to help unburden them? Or, with God already feeling distant in their lives, do they instead experience it as another burden? Yet another thing to add the load of all the other things that they’re carrying. If they already don't feel close to God, or Jesus, the call to faith can seem to them to be just one more thing that they can't do. The call to faith is another difficult work to do rather than an experience of God's grace.

We celebrate Reformation Day today, and the Reformation was waged around the issue of works vs. faith. The essential teaching of the Church in Luther's day was that one had to earn salvation by doing certain works. Luther said, "No, we are saved by God's grace through faith in Jesus Christ. We are saved by faith alone, not by anything we do." But what has happened since then in the Protestant church, is a revival of something we must do to be saved, namely, believe in Jesus. William and Louise show us how believing in Jesus can be just one more thing to have to do in order to be 'saved' from their ordeals. It seems like the Reformation has gotten off track. Instead of eliminating works as the means of salvation, we’ve simply reduced our works down to only one. In modern Protestantism, we’ve reduced the works you must do in order to be saved down to one: Namely, believing in Jesus. That's certainly simpler to be sure, but is it what God intended? Is that really how we are saved?

Let's take a look at the reading from Romans, which has become the signature text of the Reformation. It testifies to God's grace through faith in Jesus Christ, as opposed to any laws being laid down about what we must do to earn salvation. Rightness with God is not something we earn but something God displays on the cross of Christ and grants to us as a free gift. This is what we call “grace”.  Verses 21-22 sums it up: “But now, apart from the law, the righteousness of God has been disclosed, and is disclosed by the law and the prophets, the righteousness of God through faith in Jesus Christ for all who believe.”

"Through faith in Jesus Christ" -- that has been the theme of the entire Reformation. But if people like William and Louise experience the call to faith as a work, then somewhere the Reformation has gotten off track? Let me suggest one little change in this theme of the Reformation, that we are saved through faith in Jesus Christ. It requires a very brief lesson in New Testament Greek.

The original of that all-important phrase in verse 22 is: "dia pisteos Hiesou Christou." Compare that to the English: "through faith in Jesus Christ." You may notice a different number of words, four in Greek and five in English. The word "in" does not appear in the Greek. That's because the Greek phrase is in what grammarians call the genitive case. For the rest of us non-grammarians, it simply means that the phrase shows possession -- in this case, it is "faith" that is being possessed by someone.

The problem in translating the Greek is that you have at least two choices of who is doing the possessing, of who possesses the faith. The choice made by our translators is that the context implies that it is us, the believers, who possess faith in Jesus Christ. In this case, it is through our faith that we are saved. But the other choice, which is actually the more common way of translating kind of phrase, is to make it Jesus Christ who possesses the saving faith. We are saved "through Jesus Christ's faith," or "through the faith of Jesus Christ."

This seemingly little difference in translation can make a big, big difference in our understanding of the Reformation: rather than being saved through our faith in Jesus Christ, we are saved by the faith of Jesus Christ. It's not that these two are mutually exclusive, but putting the emphasis on Christ's faith makes our faith a matter of grace, not a matter of our own doing, our “work” as it were.

Your and my faith is not something that we decided one day to choose on our own. It is not something we have done. Rather, it was something done for us. It was Christ who had the faith that saves us, a faith in God that took him all the way to the cross; and because he is risen, he can give that faith to us!

St. Paul uses the phrase over and over: "Christ living in us." The power of saving faith is not something we have done. It’s something Christ has accomplished and then given to us through the Holy Spirit. That faith, because of Jesus, comes to dwell in us! Now, that's really radical grace!

Again and again, Jesus makes it clear that nothing we do can gain for us our life in the world to come. It’s the spirit that gives life. And where does the spirit come from? It comes from God. No one can come to Jesus unless God the Father makes it happen first. God sent Jesus. And then God sends us to Jesus.

Jesus makes this super clear in the way he does ministry. Jesus cares about those who are on the edge. Throughout the Gospels, Jesus encounters people whom society has declared unfit and wants to ignore. But Jesus seeks them out, sees them, recognizes them, and spends time with them and, in doing so, honors and blesses them.

By the way, this is not what people expected Jesus to do. It’s not what any self-respecting messiah should do. God has standards! And if God isn’t going to stick to those standards and punish sinners and reward the righteous, then what can we count on? How can God just forgive sin? Shouldn’t God’s forgiveness at least be preceded by genuine repentance?  If God is holy and just, then sin should be punished, right? Or at least repented? Because if that isn’t the case, what’s to prevent us taking advantage of God and making a mockery of God’s justice.

The God we meet in Jesus doesn’t care about our sense of justice. The God we meet in Jesus doesn’t care about our sense of fairness. The God we meet in Jesus doesn’t care about any of the other ways we seek to order our world. The only thing this God cares about is seeing – and seeking out – the lost and bringing them home again. God’s love routinely trumps our sense of justice. And God’s compassion overrides all our sense of fairness. Which can be rather upsetting – whether to the crowds of Jesus’ day or to us. That is, until we are the ones who are down and out; until we become William or Louise. Until we are made to feel invisible, whether because of our actions or those of others, whether because of illness or loss, whether because of our gender or race or age or sexuality or apparent lack of faith or whatever. Whenever we feel on the outside, abandoned, invisible…that’s when we need a God who sees us, seeks after us, and promises to bring us home.

What Luther and the Reformation recognized was that they had been worshiping the wrong God. Martin Luther was taught to see and fear a God of holiness and justice, a God who expected righteousness and punished those who could not meet that standard. From this point of view, Jesus becomes little more than a whipping boy. Jesus simply becomes the one who stood in and took the beating we deserved.

Luther agonized over God’s righteousness.  And then he finally realized that righteousness isn’t the standard God sets for us. Righteousness is the gift God gave to us. Righteousness isn’t a requirement! Righteousness a promise!! The God Luther expected was all about justice; the God he met in Jesus was all about love. Jesus didn’t die in order to make God forgiving. Jesus, the one who’s faith saves us, died to show us how forgiving God already is. No wonder Luther described meeting this unexpected God by saying it was like having the gates of heaven opened to him!

I recently read about pastor who shared that, when one member of her youth group asked her friends what they imagined Jesus thought about them, the overwhelming answer was disappointment. They assumed Jesus and God were disappointed with them. How sad is that? And you have to ask yourself, “Why?” Well, it’s because we still define God in terms of righteousness, sin, punishment, works, and so on.

Here’s the thing: There is just one specific task that Jesus assigns us; the one specific responsibility with which Jesus charges us is to make disciples. We do that by opening the heavens for the people around us. We do that by showing them what grace looks like, feels like, sounds like, tastes like. Let’s surprise them – just like Luther and the crowds that gathered around Jesus were surprised – by God’s unexpected salvation and grace. It’s a message that is still needed to be heard and so easy to share: God sees us, God accepts us, God loves us, and God brings us home. No exceptions! AMEN