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REFORMATION SUNDAY October 27, 2024 Pastor Tom Steers Christ the Saviour Lutheran Church, Toronto The hymns in this service were written by Martin Luther and sung during the Reformation OPENING HYMN 556 “Dear Christians, One and All, Rejoice” https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZJF3xuytmFw CONFESSION AND ABSOLUTION Page 184-185 THE INTROIT Psalm 91, verses 1-4 1 Whoever dwells in the shelter of the Most High will rest in the shadow of the Almighty. 2 I will say of the LORD, “He is my refuge and my fortress, my God, in whom I trust.” 3 Surely he will save you from the fowler’s snare and from the deadly pestilence. 4 He will cover you with his feathers, and under his wings you will find refuge; his faithfulness will be your shield and rampart. COLLECT PRAYER: Almighty and gracious Lord, pour out Your Holy Spirit on Your faithful people. Keep us steadfast in Your grace and truth, protect and deliver us from false doctrine, and defend us against all enemies. Help us to remember that we are saved by Your Grace alone, through faith alone, in Jesus Christ alone. Grant that Your Church preach the purity of this Gospel, through Jesus Christ, Your Son, our Lord, who lives and reigns with You and the Holy Spirit, one God, now and forever. Amen. OUR BIBLE READINGS: First Reading -- Ephesians 2: 4-9 Psalm 46 Second Reading -- Romans 1: 16-17 Third Reading -- Romans 3:19–28 THE APOSTLES’ CREEED Page 192 HYMN OF THE DAY 657 “A Mighty Fortress Is Our God” https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=igH38WLuyC0 THE SERMON -- Five centuries ago, Martin Luther posted a challenge to the catholic church on the door of his Church. This simple act started the Reformation. Neither the Church, nor the world, would ever be the same. Luther’s challenge was called the 95 Theses, or arguments against indulgences. It questioned the catholic church’s practice of forgiving sins based on the payment of money. Luther made the startling Biblical argument that God forgave sins based on faith in Christ and repentance, not cash. Luther was a monk, priest, and Professor of Theology. He had been giving university lectures on the Book of Romans and Galatians. To do that he’d studied the words carefully. Before becoming a monk, Luther had been trained as a lawyer. He was exacting. He read the New Testament in the original Greek. What Luther found amazed, and ultimately comforted him. But much more importantly, it brought Christianity back to the truth of the Bible, to the Gospel. It restored our understanding that we’re saved by God’s grace alone, through faith alone, in Jesus Christ alone. The Church 500 years ago taught a distorted theology that either terrified Christians or drove them to despair. It claimed we are, in part, responsible for our own salvation. Jesus does His best, then we have to do the rest. The catholic church still teaches this terrible error Other heretical churches say we ‘choose’ Christ; we ‘make a decision’ to be saved. The baptists, pentecostals, presbyterians, and many other denominations teach this falsehood. All these heresies cause believers to lose hope that they can ever be good enough to merit God’s forgiveness. They place the focal point of salvation on us, rather than Jesus. The catholic church taught that Jesus was an angry avenger, waiting to condemn less than perfect human beings to eternity in hell. But Luther went back to the Word of God, and specifically the Apostle who wrote most of the New Testament letters. He found in the divinely inspired words of Paul a clear and constant theme: our sin debt was paid by what Jesus did for us on the cross, not by our own ‘works’ or merits. Through faith in Christ’s once and for all payment for our sins, we’re forgiven and granted eternal life. And Luther found the Bible taught that faith itself is a gracious gift from God, His work in us. At Luther’s time the catholic church sold pieces of paper, indulgences, with the pope’s seal. They said that in exchange for money, the sins of the buyer would be pardoned. The more money paid, the more forgiveness. Luther was outraged, disgusted by this. He saw his poor parishioners spend money on indulgences they needed for food. Luther argued that there was no Biblical support for the sale of indulgences. So, he did something many academics did at the time, he posted these Theses on the door of his church. Today, that would be like putting something on a community bulletin board or posting it on social media. And Luther did something extremely few churchmen at the time would ever do, he mailed a copy of the Theses to his archbishop, Albert of Mainz. The subject was a sensitive one for Albert. Albert had bought his position as archbishop from the pope for a sum of 21,000 ducats, or gold coins, a huge amount of money then. The vatican’s sale of church positions was common. The imperial bankers loaned Albert the money he needed for eight years. The arrangement was that clergy in the catholic church who reported to Albert would sell indulgences to repay the loan. You can imagine Albert’s reaction when the letter from Luther arrived with the 95 Theses. Albert forwarded the letter and Theses directly to the pope. For Luther, the sale of indulgences was an un-Godly abuse. But Luther also realized the thinking that created the sale of indulgences was the same misinterpretation of Christianity that said people were responsible for saving themselves by what they ‘did.’ It could be paying to see the bones of saints, praying to statutes, or other un-Scriptural practices. Luther came to understand from the Books of Romans, Galatians, and Ephesians that salvation was not something human beings could earn, or merit, in any way. It was a loving God’s free gift through faith in Christ as Saviour. For Luther it was not just what we say ‘no’ to about roman catholicism, but what we say ‘yes’ to in the Word of God, the Bible. And that is the Gospel, which Luther said cannot be denied because of the word of man, whether it be a pope or anyone else. So, we come to the pivotal verses in the Bible about salvation. What theologians call ‘justification,’ or how we, as sinners, are made right with our perfect, Holy God. In passages from Romans and Ephesians, Luther found the truth. In Ephesians 2, verses 8 and 9, Paul wrote: “For by grace you have been saved through faith. And this is not your own doing; it is the gift of God, not a result of works, so that no one may boast.” In Romans 1, verses 16-17, the Apostle sets out the theme for the whole Book of Romans, and gives the key to how we’re saved: “For I am not ashamed of the gospel, for it is the power of God for salvation to everyone who believes, to the Jew first and also to the Greek. For in it the righteousness of God is revealed from faith for faith, as it is written, ‘The righteous shall live by faith.’” And as though that wasn’t enough, Paul goes on to make this even clearer in Romans, Chapter 3, verses 19-26. We read these verses earlier in our service. It’s the heart of the Gospel. Luther said to misunderstand these words is to misunderstand Christianity. Paul wrote: We are justified by God’s grace as a gift, through the redemption that is in Christ Jesus, whom God put forward as a propitiation by his blood, to be received by faith. This is all good news. But even good news, the best news possible, has at times led some to worry, to doubt. The question can come: if we’re saved by faith alone, is our personal faith sufficient? We know Jesus says that even mustard seed faith is enough, but how do we know we even have that? The problem with these questions is they take the focus off Jesus, and put it on us, and our faith. Faith looks to Christ. It’s a relationship in which God does everything. Luther would write that we are utterly passive in this regard. God is not responding to our faith, He’s giving us faith, in fact, He has given us the perfect faith of Jesus. Luther called this the “glorious exchange.” Jesus has taken our sins, and His perfection, including the perfect faith He has in the Father, has been given to believers. Faith is not something we make better by trying harder to believe. Faith is a sweet, simple present that God gives. And for a gift to be a gift, it only has to be accepted, it can’t be paid for, or earned. An infant trusts his or her mother and father more than a hospital nurse. This is not a thing the baby ‘decided’ to do. The infant did not ‘will’ him or herself to have faith and trust. It was a gift given by the loving nurture of the parents for the baby. The little child who says “Daddy” or “Mommy” is expressing the relationship, not creating it with those words. Many TV evangelists say we ‘make a decision’ to believe in Christ, but the Bible says it’s the other way around entirely. As Jesus said to His disciples in John 15, verse 16, “you didn’t choose Me, but I chose you.” The Apostle Paul wants to remove us from the “buy and sell” economy of salvation, a belief system that gives us the credit for being good enough to choose Jesus. Paul wants to free us from all of that, because Jesus has set us free from it. Paul explains that God loved you so much He sent His own son to die on the cross to pay for your salvation, and that’s paid in full. These texts from Romans and Ephesians are at the heart of the Reformation. Luther reclaimed the Gospel and turned the world of his time upside down. We still feel the aftereffects, and spiritually benefit every day of our lives as believers. It would be while preparing his lectures on Romans that Luther had his “tower” experience, in which he came to the realization through God’s Word that his deeds didn’t win God’s favour – it was God’s deeds in Christ. When Luther felt the weight of having to earn his own salvation taken off of him, he wrote: “All at once I felt that I had been born again and entered into paradise itself through open gates. Immediately I saw the whole of Scripture in a different light. I ran through the Scriptures from memory and found that other terms had similar meanings, for example, the work of God, that is, what God works in us; the power of God, by which He makes us powerful; the wisdom of God, by which he makes us wise; the strength of God, the salvation of God, the justice of God by which we are justified.” To understand all this in an even clearer way, we need to understand a shortcoming of the English language. Here’s the problem -- the natural English translation of verses 22 and 26 in Romans, Chapter 3, talks about our faith in Jesus. But this is not what the text actually says in the Greek because of the limitations of English. The Greek points to an interpretation that this is about Jesus’ faith. The original Biblical language at verse 22 of Romans Chapter 3 is that the righteousness of God is through the faith of Jesus for all who have faith. And so, we see in Romans, Chapter 3, that the salvation revealed, is revealed in the faith of Christ. How are we to understand this? As Biblical Christians we confess not only Christ’s divinity, but also, His humanity: He was both true God and true man. To be fully human is to have the capacity to believe. Christ had “faith,” a relationship of trust in the promise of God the Father in order to suffer and die a willing victim on our behalf. He was not going to some sort of ‘make-believe’ death, but the real thing on the cross. Jesus did not raise Himself from the grave. The Bible is clear on this. God the Father raised Him from the dead. Jesus went into that grave believing. The good news in this explanation of Romans is profound. Even though our own faith is often weak and inadequate of itself, Jesus’ faith was not. This also has deep implications for our understanding of Romans 1:16-17. Because there is what can appear to be a strange phrase in Greek: “The righteousness of God is revealed out of faith into faith.” Literally it says that God’s righteousness is revealed out of faith -- the faith of Jesus, into faith, that is, our faith. This is taking seriously what the writer of the Book of Hebrews says when he calls Jesus, “the author and perfecter of our faith.” This sharing in the faith of Christ, this participation in the relationship of the Son to the Father, makes each of us different than we were before. It gives us relief, joy. It offers hope, that our salvation as believers has been accomplished for us, even when we feel lost. Even when fears and momentary doubts trouble us. The faith, the perfect faith of Jesus, seals our salvation as Christians. His perfect life allowed Him to be the complete payment for our sins. It’s all God’s work in Christ. It’s all accomplished for us by our Redeemer. Christ alone. May the peace of God won for us by our Lord and Saviour be with you this day. May the truth and comfort of the Gospel, reclaimed by the Lutheran Reformation, be yours forever. Amen. PRAYERS OF THE CHURCH SERVICE OF THE SACRAMENT Page 194 THE LORD’S PRAYER Page 196 THE WORDS OF OUR LORD Page 197 Pax Domini Pastor: The peace of the Lord be with you always. Congregation: Amen. THE DISTRIBUTION Post Communion Collect (Left-hand column) Page 201 Salutation and Benedicamus Page 201-202 Benediction Page 202 CLOSING HYMN 938 “In Peace and Joy I Now Depart” https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7600yg-c9A8