Reformation Sunday
Texts: Rom 3:19-30;
John 8:31-36; Jer 31:31-34
YouTube: https://youtu.be/eGBBu6NcB_o
Sermon Take-Home Notes
RE-INTERPRETING SALVATION: GOD IS SAVING US FROM
THE HELLISH VIOLENCE OF ALL OUR NATIONALISMS
Reformation Sunday is a good time to check in on the basics of our salvation. That’s what Martin Luther was trying to do 500 years ago: to give us a new understanding, a fresh understanding of salvation. But after 500 years, we might need a refresher again.
Two basic questions we could begin with: How is it that we are saved? By what means? And what are we being saved from? How would you answer those questions? I can repeat them: How is it that we are saved? And what are we being saved from? When I was growing up in church, I think the most common way of answering these questions was this: we are saved by believing in Jesus, and we are being saved from being sent to hell in the afterlife. In short, we get to go to heaven for an eternity by believing in Jesus. Does that sound familiar?
Over the past sixty or so years, I’ve come to answer those questions quite differently. How am I saved? My answer is no longer about my believing in Jesus but about Jesus’s faithfulness to me in going to the cross to reconcile the whole world. And what am I being saved from? My answer is no longer about God punishing me in hell for an eternity but about God saving me from the seemingly endless hell of violence which we human beings make for ourselves because we refuse to be reconciled with one another. We constantly fail to be reconciled with God and each other, so God sent Jesus the Messiah to reconcile us through dying on the cross and being raised from the dead. God is saving us from the hellish consequences of our refusal to be reconciled as equally loved children of God. To see our salvation as being about Jesus saving us from God sending us to hell could not be further from the truth. God sent Jesus to save us from the hell of our own making.
Let me make this more personal. I am nearly seventy years-old and have been graced with our first precious grandson — perhaps our only grandchild. At this stage of my life, I’m not worried about my being saved in the afterlife. As I said, I no longer believe in hell as a place where God might send me in the afterlife. I trust that God has reconciled with me through Jesus so that I will experience grace-upon-grace in eternity. What I’m most worried about these days is the world that my grandson will grow up in. My most fervent hopes for salvation is for him being saved from any fresh hell of human sinfulness that he might have to grow up in. I’m afraid that the current round of nationalism will bring the hell of human violence that is typical of any nationalism. It’s been less than a hundred years ago that a nationalistic movement in Germany led to the hell of the world tearing itself apart in war. Are we heading down a similar road with our white Christian version of nationalism right now? Is that what’s in store for my precious grandson? How can I be a part of God’s saving us through Jesus from the hell of our seemingly endless rounds of nationalism?
The first step for me is to understand how the faith I grew up with has had a tendency to lend itself to nationalism. Let me take a moment to explain how I’m even using the term “nationalism.” I consider nationalism to be any way of human beings organizing themselves based on division rather than reconciliation. Nationalism is fundamentally a way of thinking based on inequality. (We talked about “equality-thinking” vs. “inequality thinking” the past two weeks [Proper 24C-25C and “Proper 25.5”].) It is based on the belief that some groups of human beings are superior to others. When paired with religion, as it so often is, nationalism is the belief that God favors some people over others. And those favored people are the ones that God wants to be in charge, ruling over the less favored people. In Nazi Germany of the 1930’s, it’s clear how everything was structured on white Aryan Christians were being elevated above all others, with Jews tabbed as the ultimate enemy. I’m seeing similarities in the rising nationalism in our country right now, that there’s clear lines being drawn between peoples as the basis for governance.
The bottom line is this: If we believe that Jesus came to reconcile all things in creation, to heal all our divisions — which is what St. Paul’s main message is (see the quotes in your Sermon Notes) — then nationalism is the opposite. Nationalism is a strategy based on seeing a fundamental inequality among human beings such that it justifies ruling over others with violence. I submit to you that it is the quickest way to hell there is.
Jesus came to save us from that. He launched God’s reign in the world precisely by letting himself be cast out by both Jewish and Roman nationalism. Hanging on the cross, he is an “illegal,” dare I say, to both Jews and Romans. Since God’s rule is completely nonviolent, suffering our violence on the cross and then raising Jesus on Easter is the only way that God could begin to show us our problem and to save us from the violence of our endless nationalisms.
It is the only truth that can truly set us free. In John 8, Jesus is engaging with fellow Jews who believe that being descendants of Abraham automatically wins them God’s favor over others. Jesus is trying to set them straight by eventually showing them the truth on the cross — by himself suffering nationalistic violence on the cross. That is the only truth that will set them free from the hell of their nationalistic violence.
St. Paul is fighting the same battle in the first part of his Letter to the Romans. The main point of his letter is that Jews and Gentiles both receive the same merciful forgiveness through the cross and resurrection of Jesus.1 If you read through the first several chapters of Romans, it becomes to clear how he sees his ministry as the bringing together of all people, Jew and Gentile. Paul has heard, though, that the same false teachers that had gone to his churches in Galatia have now gone to Rome. Their teaching represents a lapse back into Jewish nationalism by saying that practicing Torah is required of all followers of Jesus. That Jesus had been a Torah-practicing Jew, so his followers need to be, too. Paul had argued strongly against this in his Letter to the Galatians, and he spends the opening chapters of Romans arguing against it, too. Jewish nationalism — namely, thinking that the Jewish ways of Torah are fundamentally better than all other ways — is what Jesus came to end. No, Torah (read as a promise to Abraham and Sarah2) is one of the pointers to God’s intended unity.
I have my own translation of today’s Second Reading in the Sermon Notes that I think helps to make Paul’s argument more clear. Verses 22-23 are pretty clear in any translation: “For there is no distinction, since all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God.” In other words, because Jesus was willing to die as an outsider to Jewish Torah, he reveals that there really is no distinction when it comes to sin. We all do it. Especially when it comes to nationalism, each group of human beings seems prone to the same kind of thinking in terms of inequality, in terms of some people being superior to others. Paul is squarely denying this. We are all equal in our sin, but so are we also all equal in receiving God’s loving mercy.
The equality in Paul’s thinking is made more clear by the last several verses in my translation. I mentioned before that the same false teachers of a nationalistic form of Christianity had first been to Paul’s churches in Galatia, and then had gone to Rome. But there’s an important difference. Paul himself had started the churches in Galatia; they had an intimate relationship. Paul had never even been to Rome yet, on the other hand, so in his letter to the Romans he was speaking to relative strangers. How should Paul approach that?
There’s a new proposal that’s come onto the scene in recent years — from New Testament scholar, Douglas Campbell3 — that I find convincing. He suggests that Paul has the idea, ‘Maybe I’ll use a rhetorical form the Romans are very familiar with. Their own politicians use it all the time.’ It’s called Diatribe, where you do your best to speak in the voice of your opponent — to lay out their argument in their own words — and then you argue against it. It’s amazing to me how differently the first four chapters of Romans reads when you consider that in some places Paul might be voicing his opponent’s view.4 It’s especially clear in three or four places where Paul uses a rapid-fire question-and-answer — a back-and-forth dialogue, like at the end of today’s reading.5 Paul has just laid out his view, and now his opponent has some questions: ‘What does that do to our Jewish pride?’ Paul says, “It’s excluded!” The opponent: ‘By what practice of Torah?’ Paul: ‘By no practice of Torah. We’re trying to say that the cross of Jesus takes us beyond the practice of Torah in many ways.’
And then finally that ending, which for me is the whole point of the passage. By the way, I needed to add two verses to today’s reading, because the lectionary ends at verse 28. In verse 29, the false teacher is saying, ‘But isn’t God the God of the Jews only?’ And Paul says, ‘What!? And not of the Gentiles, too? Of course, of the Gentiles, too. God is one!’ The whole point is that in the faithfulness of Jesus going to the cross, and being raised on Easter, that faithfulness now embraces both Jew and Gentile, circumcised and uncircumcised. There is no distinction in our sinning, and there is no distinction in God’s response of grace.
Siblings in Christ, isn’t this precisely the Gospel message we need today in standing against a Christian form of nationalism? In fact, there’s ways, like I said at the outset, in which the form of the Gospel message, when we older members grew up, is open to nationalism itself. It sees a basic divide between believers and unbelievers, a divide that sorts the world into Christians and non-Christians so that we’ve ended up justifying Christian rule over all others. Isn’t that what we did when we enslaved Africans? Isn’t that what we did with the indigenous people of America? We counted them as pagans and justified our ruling over them with a deadly violence. No, the Protestant way of reading the Gospel has proven itself unfaithful to the one who took upon himself the violence of Jewish and Roman nationalism.
On this Reformation Sunday, let us first commit to a more faithful understanding of the Gospel message as standing against all forms of nationalism. Let us dedicate ourselves to learning to see the reign of God coming into the world through Jesus as first and foremost a movement of equality for all people. As a movement that seeks the mutual flourishing of the whole creation. As a movement working to save us from the fresh hell we make for ourselves through movements like Christian Nationalism. Let’s be part of saving the world for our children and our grandchildren. Amen
Paul J. Nuechterlein
Bethania Lutheran Church,
Racine, WI, October 26, 2025
YouTube: https://youtu.be/eGBBu6NcB_o
Sermon Take-Home Notes
Notes
1. Paul announces his thesis in Romans 1:16: “For I am not ashamed of the gospel; it is the power of God for salvation to everyone who has faith, to the Jew first and also to the Greek.”
2. In both Galatians and Romans, Paul brings Abraham into his argument to frame Torah primarily as the promise of God to bring unity to all the families of the earth, as superior to an understanding of Torah as a law that divides between law-abiders and law-breakers.
3. First proposed by Campbell in his expansive, scholarly book The Deliverance of God: An Apocalyptic Rereading of Justification in Paul (Eerdmans, 2009); and 15 years later in an easier read for non-scholars, with Jon DePue, Beyond Justification: Liberating Paul’s Gospel (Cascade Books, 2024).
4. For such a reading of the first three chapters in Romans, see my webpage “Nuechterlein on Reading Romans 1-3 in a New Way.”
5. You will find simpler dialogues at: Romans 3:1-11 and 3:27–4:3. Much of Romans 9–11 is a more complex form of a constant question-and-answer dialogue.
