Reformation Sunday
Texts: Romans 3:19-30;
Jer 31:31-34; John 8:31-36
See also the accompanying Sermon Notes
REPENTING THE FAILURES OF THE REFORMATION
(HINT: COLONIALISM AND NATIONALISM)
I grew up in the Lutheran Church–Missouri Synod, and my home-church had a K-6th grade school. I have many fond memories of that school; I’m grateful for the education I received there. It’s also strange that one of my strong, lingering memories was our celebration of Reformation Day in Mrs. Brown’s First Grade class. I suppose it’s strange partly because Reformation Day is also Halloween, and we all know which of those two gets the big celebration these days. No one celebrates Reformation Day anymore. October 31st is all about Halloween! Which has almost become as big as Christmas in our culture. But at Faith Lutheran School in the 1960’s I don’t remember any Halloween celebrations; I do remember our Reformation Day celebration. Strange, right?
But there’s something else strange about my memory of a Reformation Day celebration back in 1962. Sixty-two years later, here in 2024, I do think we need to observe and remember Reformation Day, but not so much in celebration as in repentance. We need to repent for the tragic misunderstandings of the Reformation which have led to five centuries more of human bloodshed instead of really helping us to renew and reform our understanding of the Gospel.
For, you see, in those 95 Theses which Martin Luther nailed on the Wittenberg church door on October 31, 1517, he detailed his many disagreements with the Catholic Church of his day, most of which revolved around the selling of indulgences. I agree that the practice of selling indulgences — basically, trying to sell God’s forgiveness — is really bad. Luther was surely right that God’s forgiveness is a free gift of God’s grace, which he primarily based on his reading of St. Paul. And there is a lot of good that comes from the insight about grace.
But (and this is a huge “but”) 500 years later I think he missed the main point of what that grace of forgiveness is all about. He missed the most important thing that he should of disagreed with. In those 95 Theses there was not one word about what we call today the Doctrine of Discovery.1 In Papal decrees of 1452, 1455, and 1493, the popes of Luther’s time had decreed that as European ‘explorers’ went out across the globe, they were free to simply take over the lands of other people, conquering and enslaving those peoples if need be. What gave them the right to do so? Well, their worldview was that they were Christians who had the key to salvation, the key to going to heaven. They had the right beliefs and practices, approved by God, so supposedly that gave us Christians simply the right to take over — to be in charge wherever we go. Somehow if we ‘discovered’ new lands, they were simply ours to take. Today, 500 years later, we of European descent finally realize what a horrible mistake the Doctrine of Discovery was in the 1400’s. But in 1517 there was nary a hint of objecting to the Doctrine of Discovery in Luther’s 95 Theses. His silence on that issue is deafening today.
You may have noticed that the last of the three papal decrees which formed the so-called Doctrine of Discovery was in 1493. We all know what happened in 1492, right? Columbus sailed the ocean-blue and ‘discovered’ America. We talked about Columbus in last week’s sermon. How in brutally conquering indigenous peoples in America, he was doing totally the opposite of what we are called to do as true followers of Christ.
The Gospels tell us how Jesus crossed all the ethnic and religious boundaries of his day in order to show us human beings a new way to live that brings us together instead of dividing us. He calls us to seeing each fellow human being as an equal for whom mutual service should be the natural way. Jesus himself came as a Messiah, as an anointed king, who serves — again, this was our reading last week. This is the opposite of Gentile emperors and kings who come to rule over others.
Fifteen hundred years later, Christopher Columbus came in the name of Christ but not in the Way of Christ. He came not to bring a way of human beings mutually serving one another in order to make our lives better. No, he came as a brutal conqueror to enslave others and make their lives a living hell. That’s why I agree with calling the national holiday celebrated on the second Monday of October Indigenous People’s Day instead of Columbus Day. We need to remember the innocent slaughter of so many people rather than the slaughterer. Indigenous People’s Day is a day for us of European descent to repent — and, I think, to also be grateful that indigenous people of our time forgive us and seek renewed relationships of mutually serving one another. To realize together the ideal of all people being created equal. Christopher Columbus came to conquer in the name of Christ. The Indigenous People of this land call us to live together in the Way of Christ.
This week, I’m inviting us to a new relationship with another October holiday: Reformation Day. And, basically, for similar reasons. Martin Luther tried to recenter our understanding of the Gospel by a certain reading of St. Paul’s writings, an understanding he called Justification by Grace through Faith. Just like Luther missed how wrong the Doctrine of Discovery is, he missed that the heart of the Gospel in Paul’s writings is the results of grace. That in God’s grace God is, as we saw this summer when reading Ephesians 2, creating one new humanity in place of all the divisions we human beings create. (In Eph 2:8, it says we are saved by grace. Lutherans say, “Yea, that’s the Gospel!” But in verse 11 it says, “So then,” and a few verses later says that the point of grace is God creating one new humanity.) We might conclude that the two are related: Luther missed the wrongness of Doctrine of Discovery, because he missed the heart of the Gospel. He missed that the whole point of grace is to bring us human beings together in ways that we stop killing each other over every which-way in which we see ourselves divided, and that instead we are empowered to start working together to make our lives better. Paul speaks of our unity in Christ, rather than our division, over and over in all of his letters. I’ve given a sampling in your Sermon Notes. The point of all these passages is that in our baptisms, we are no longer Jew or Greek, male or female. Those things which divide us begin to melt away.
This way of reading Paul’s Gospel has finally become clear to me through the work of a scholar by the name of Douglas Campbell who has given us, I firmly believe, a more faithful way to read Paul. It began with a huge book fifteen years ago2 — huge because he knew he was arguing against 500 years of Protestant theology. This year, he pared it down quite a bit to this extremely important book: Beyond Justification: Liberating Paul’s Gospel.3 I would love to study it with you. The title Beyond Justification captures what I think our Second Reading is saying, when Paul says in verse 21, “So, then, beyond religion. . . .” The Greek word that I’ve translated as “religion” is nomos. [See the translation I used in worship.] The most ordinary and literary translation of nomos is the word “law,” which you’ll see in most translations. But for a Jew like Paul the Greek word nomos is an attempt to translate the Hebrew word Torah. Again, the word Torah can be translated simply as “law,” but for Jews Torah is so much more than what we ordinarily mean by law. A better translation of Torah would be “teaching,” as in teaching God’s prescribed way to live flourishing lives. Torah names the essence of their religion, of their sacred teachings, of their entire way of life. So for a Jew like Paul it is extraordinary to say that there’s actually a way of life that goes beyond Torah, beyond religion.
What is that way? The faith (or faithfulness) of this Jewish man, Jesus the Messiah. Jesus lived a faithfulness to the way of God that goes beyond the Torah of Moses. Paul leapfrogs over Moses in his letters again and again and goes back to Abraham and Sarah. Torah is a way of covenant that begins with Abraham and Sarah. And what is the ultimate significance of that covenant to Abraham and Sarah? That they would be the means of blessing all the families of the earth (Gen 12:1-3). They would be the ones who finally bring the human family together.
And how did their descendent, Jesus of Nazareth, bring this about? By his blood as a source of unification.4 In other words, instead of spilling the blood of other human beings from whom we feel divided, he let his own blood be spilled on this instrument of execution under the law known as the cross. In short, instead of inflicting violence on others, due to our many divisions, he suffered the violence in order to begin to heal our divisions. This faithfulness to God which took Jesus to the cross is beyond Torah as a religion, since we human beings have come to practice our religions as reasons for being divided from each other. At the same time, Paul will go on to explain how the cross is the fulfillment of Torah in the sense of covenant to Abraham and Sarah in uniting and blessing all the families of the earth. That’s why Paul must be the “apostle to the Gentiles.” To begin this process of healing our divisions.
I need to make one more brief point about today’s Second Reading. I think that my translation, with the guidance of Douglas Campbell, is more faithful to Paul’s understanding of the Gospel. I’ll save all the subtleties for a class sometime in the months ahead. For now, I’d like you to know that I also changed the length of the reading itself. I added two verses at the end. [Once again, consult my translation which was used in worship.] When Protestants created this Reformation Day celebration, they chose Romans 3:19-28. I added verses 29 and 30. Why? Because I’ve come to see those verses as the whole point of the passage. Paul is engaging with a Christian teacher who thinks that Gentiles should become Jews in order to follow the Jew Jesus of Nazareth. You have to be circumcised and observe the Sabbath like a good Jew practicing the Torah. Paul is saying, No! No! No! It’s not about conversion to a religion. It’s beyond religion in the sense that Jesus has become our Way of living together in peace beyond our divisive religions. The whole point of Jesus’ faithfulness to God on the cross is to have his blood unify us beyond our religious practices. Our unity exists not in forcing the same religious practices and beliefs on one another but rather simply in the oneness of the God who created us. The opposing teacher is trying to say that it’s about the God of the Jews only. And Paul, once again, is saying, No! No! No! Our unity is not one of religious practice or belief in God. Our unity as human beings comes by virtue of the oneness of God, who lovingly created us to be one family, full stop.
So on this Reformation Sunday, nine days before a consequential election in which our unity as a nation is on the line, let us repent of our tragically mistaken versions of the Gospel which lead to division and further violence. Versions like Christian Nationalism which we’ve been talking about.5 So let us rededicate ourselves to the Paul’s version of the Gospel, which calls us to go beyond our religious differences, and so many other causes of division, in order to seek a path forward that promotes healing and unity. That seeks to help us to lovingly serving one another in ways which make all of our lives better. Amen
Paul J. Nuechterlein
Bethania Lutheran Church,
Racine, WI, October 27, 2024
Notes
1. There are many resources on the Doctrine of Discovery. The most succinct is by indigenous teacher Mark Charles in this 7-minute video: https://youtu.be/N3oc84aLC-Q?si=2COGxSEU2xdIsa2l
2. Douglas Campbell, The Deliverance of God: An Apocalyptic Rereading of Justification in Paul, Eerdmans: 2009, 1248 pages.
3. Douglas Campbell, Beyond Justification: Liberating Paul’s Gospel, Cascade Books: 2024, 322 pages.
4. If you consult my translation, you see that I translated in v. 25 the Greek word hilastērion as “source of unification.” The NRSV translates it as “sacrifice of atonement.” The Septuagint, the Greek translation of the Hebrew Scriptures, uses the word hilastērion to point to the mercy seat in the ark of the covenant, which resided in the Holy of Holies in the First Temple — in other words, the place where atonement, reconciliation, or unification takes place. For more on this translation, see ch. 16, “Atonement and ‘Justification’ in Romans 3:21-26,” in Campbell’s Deliverance of God, especially pages 653-56. He ultimately suggests the translation as “God intended Christ to be a singular act of atonement, through that fidelity, through his blood.”
5. Here the hint in the title of this sermon is explicitly named. I see the chief failure of the Reformation to be a misreading of Paul’s Gospel that opens the door to the past 500 years colonization and nationalism. If we see the heart of Paul’s Gospel as the bring together of Jew and Gentile, the resolving and healing of our differences, then we must see the projects of colonization and nationalism — grounded in racism, sexism, and religious triumphalism — as anti-Gospel.
