6th Sunday of Easter
Texts: John 14:23-29;
Rev 21:10, 21:22–22:5
YouTube: https://youtu.be/ym7zex7Dkss
Sermon Take-Home Notes
RACISM AS THE HEART OF THE GOSPEL MEANS
LUTHER WAS WRONG — AND THAT WE NOW HAVE A NEW PROJECT
OF READING SCRIPTURE MORE FAITHFULLY
I begin with the Bold Proposal from last week (Easter 5C): In today’s world, the heart and soul of God’s gracious Gospel is the healing of racism. This isn’t a side issue. It’s the center of what God’s reign coming into world looks like in our historical moment.
I need to make clear that I’m basically proposing nothing less than a new version of the Gospel — or what I hope is a more faithful version of the Gospel — from that of what we’ve been taught, growing up as Lutherans. For Sts. Peter and Paul in the First Century, the Gospel of Grace saved us from all our human divisiveness, that leads to so much bloodshed and suffering — beginning with the divide between Jew and Gentile. So the central Gospel mission in the First Century was to begin to heal the divide between Jew and Gentile. By analogy, the Gospel is about healing the racial divides in the 21st Century.
From the very beginning, it also included healing the divide between male and female, too. As we see in today’s First Reading about Lydia, women immediately had a more prominent place in the church. The story which immediately follows is about the healing of a Gentile slave girl. As St. Paul wrote in Galatians, when we are baptized into Jesus the Messiah, there is no longer Jew and Gentile, slave and free, male and female. We are all one (Gal 3:28). The Gospel is about the healing of our divisiveness. There are still these different categories of people, of course, but the point is that they are no longer reasons for dividing us. The Gospel is about healing all of our divisions so that we might all be one human family. That’s what God’s gracious sending of Jesus accomplishes, saving us from the terrible consequences of the human family being perpetually being divided against itself. Through Grace, we are to be transformed into one new humanity.
The corollary to what I’m saying is that Martin Luther got it wrong. The Gospel is not about Justification by Grace through faith.1 He didn’t get it all wrong. He got the Grace part right: the Gospel is about Grace. We are saved as a free gift from God, an act of pure grace on God’s part through the faithfulness of Jesus the Messiah. But he was wrong about what that salvation looked like. He missed what this Gracious salvation looks like in the world, namely the healing of all our divisions. He missed, for example, that the heart and soul of the Gospel Mission in the First Century was the healing of rift between Jew and Gentile.
So he missed the great divide which was beginning to take shape in the Europe of the 16th Century: White Supremacist Racism. The popes of the 15th Century had already begun to send out the so-called explorers like Christopher Columbus, with an anti-Gospel mission. They were explicitly being sent out to conquer anyone wasn’t white. Luther disagreed with lots of what the popes decreed, but not what is now known as the Doctrine of Discovery2 — that white Christians have the duty to take control of whatever they “discover” — of whatever lands aren’t “Christian.” Luther completely missed that, and at the end of his life he also descended into a terrible anti-Semitism. I propose to you that both of these catastrophic errors are because he essentially missed the heart of the Gospel. He was selectively reading Scripture for “Justification by grace through faith” and thus missing the theme that’s everywhere in the New Testament, the healing of the divide between Jew and Gentile. He got the Grace part right, but he very much missed what the results of Grace are supposed to look like, the healing of our human family.
This is huge, right? Saying that the Lutheran Gospel we were taught has some big holes in it that can lead us to miss the main point? Namely, the healing for us of white racism in the modern world? It’s something that I now have to demonstrate over time. I remember watching a movie about Luther in which he took his task as preaching about Justification by Grace through Faith each and every week. To do so, he had to find that theme throughout the Bible. If he couldn’t somehow find Justification by Grace through Faith in most Bible readings, then it means he was wrong. Well, I’m proposing to you that he was wrong.
Here’s my quickest example. It’s from Ephesians 2. Verse 8 reads: “For by grace you have been saved through faith, and this is not your own doing; it is the gift of God. . . .” There’s the Gospel of grace, right? Luther was right about the grace. But by and large he missed what comes next. In verse 11: there’s an important, “So then . . . .” And the verses which follow are all about healing the divide between Jew and Gentile, circumcised and uncircumcised, that climaxes in verse 15 with: “that the Messiah might create in himself one new humanity in place of the two, thus making peace . . . .” In short, Luther got the first part right, but he mainly missed the “so then” part about healing all division in the human family, creating “one new humanity.”
So the task of presenting a more faithful version of the Gospel is a huge one that Luther also intuited means finding it throughout the Bible. In short, it’s a week-to-week task of preaching: it begins with that point of grace bu then gets to what the Grace looks like, a healing of all the things that divide us. And that we are being saved from all the consequences of those divisions, all the bloodshed throughout history which we continue to face in our time.
So let’s begin with today’s readings from Scripture. Where do we see the Gospel as the grace of one new humanity? Let’s start with the gracious picture of the New Jerusalem in Revelation 21. The gates of the city are wide open to all. There’s a river flowing down the middle, with the Tree of Life on its banks, whose leaves are for the healing of the nations. But there’s an extraordinary verse often missed if we don’t see it in its wider context. Rev 21:24 reads: “The nations will walk by the Lamb’s light, and the kings of the earth will bring their glory into it.” To appreciate how amazing this verse is, we need to know where last we saw “the kings of the earth.” Roughly two chapters earlier. We read:
Then I saw the beast and the kings of the earth with their armies gathered to make war against the rider on the horse and against his army. And the beast was captured, and with it the false prophet who had performed in its presence the signs by which he deceived those who had received the mark of the beast and those who worshiped its image. [Including, I’m afraid the kings of the earth and all their followers.] These two were thrown alive into the lake of fire that burns with sulfur. And the rest [meaning the kings of the earth] were killed by the sword of the rider on the horse, the sword that came from his mouth; and all the birds were gorged with their flesh. (Rev 19:19-21)
The last we see of the kings of the earth is that they are “killed” because they followed the beast and false prophet. So how is it that they walk into the New Jerusalem two chapters later in Rev 21:24? Because their death is as metaphorical as “the sword of the rider on the horse, the sword that came from his mouth.” The sword which comes from the mouth is the testimony, the witness, of those who suffer the violence rather than dish it out — the Lamb Slain and his followers. The fate of those who follow the beast is not being slain by literal swords but being ‘slain’ by Gospel testimony, so that they might one day be able to enter into the New Jerusalem, where even the trees give leaves of healing for the nations — in our case, healing for white racism.
Who is the beast who causes all the division in the Book of Revelation? In Rev 12:9-10, we hear of Satan, “who accuses our friends day and night before our God (Rev. 12:9-10). “Satan” is actually a title meaning the Accuser. The one who brings the accusations which divide us, all those conspiracy theories. In today’s Gospel Reading, the Greek word behind the Holy Spirit as “Advocate” is Paraclete. That word Paraclete is a title for the Defender of the Accused.3 The Paraclete, the Holy Spirit, is the opposite of the Satan. Satan brings accusations which divide us. The Paraclete is the one who brings healing to all our human divisions, seeking to turn enemies into friends. Seeking to heal the human family.
The Holy Spirit brings a peace which the world cannot give (John 14:27). The world’s peace is based on what? It’s based on having a common enemy. On making clear accusations of who the bad people are, so that “we” can be united against “them.” God — through the Holy Spirit, the Paraclete, the Defender of the Accused — is working an opposite sort of peace. One that’s not based on accusation, but on helping us to seeing our connectedness as human beings, with the goal that we might finally be one human family.
Do you see how big this is? It’s something I’ve been addressing, to be honest, for the past year-and-a-half, mostly under the banner of “nationalism,”4 but now explicitly identifying the engine of nationalism as racism. That this is how we can come to identify the Gospel itself and why it’s such Good News.
Today, let’s end with a glimpse of what I think that looks like. I think my strength is trying to read Scripture in new ways which helps to bring out this message, this Good News, of becoming one new human family. I look to others to help see ‘what does that mean right now, right here.’ What can we do to help make this come true. One of my models is Rev. Dr. William Barber II, who has taken up the mantle of Martin Luther King, Jr’s project in the last couple years of his life, something King called the Poor People’s Campaign. It seeks to not only continue healing the racial divides but also the economic ones — something we’ll see more closely in our readings from Luke this Summer and Fall. But let me read a short passage from Barber’s book about their new Poor People’s Campaign:
The greatest threat to our coalition was not the power of our opposition. They could threaten us. They could hurt us. They might, in their blind hubris, even try to kill some of us. But they could not, in the end, deny us. Because ours was a moral struggle, we knew we would win if we didn’t give up.
. . . A nonviolent struggle has two possible ends: winning the opposition as friends or giving up the battle. Though our coalition included the full spectrum of North Carolina’s diversity, we had come to recognize a common vision for our future in the history of the South’s antiracist freedom movement. Our relationships with one another were not simply transactional [the opposite of grace] — a means to achieve our various organization’s goals. They had become transformational, lifting each of us to a new understanding of our interconnectedness as human beings and living members of one family. None of us would be free until all of us were free.5
Good News in a nutshell: We can’t lose as long as we don’t quit. Our Easter celebration is that in some ways the battle is already won, and so our goal is to make friends, even of those who would endlessly have us divide into friends and enemies. And the biggest Good News of all: God’s Spirit transforming our humanity so that we can find the true freedom of being one united human family. The Good News is of God truly and deeply healing us. Amen
Paul J. Nuechterlein
Bethania Lutheran Church,
Racine, WI, May 25, 2025
Notes
1. I find the arguments against Justification Theology (not necessarily against Luther himself but what became of his movement) of New Testament scholar Douglas Campbell to be persuasive and right on point. His first foray into the topic is his massive tome The Deliverance of God: An Apocalyptic Rereading of Justification in Paul (Eerdmans, 2009). He followed it up more recently with a smaller book meant for a wider audience, Beyond Justification: Liberating Paul’s Gospel (Cascade Books, 2024).
2. My favorite short piece on the Doctrine of Discovery is a YouTube video by indigenous scholar Mark Charles: https://youtu.be/N3oc84aLC-Q, “What Is the Doctrine of Discovery?” In a wider context of violence done in the name of Christ, see chapter 4, “The Genocide Card in Your Back Pocket,” in Brian McLaren’s The Great Spiritual Migration: How the World’s Largest Religion Is Seeking a Better Way to Be Christian (Convergent, 2016); the Doctrine of Discovery is addressed specifically on pages 76ff.
3. This basic insight into the Paraclete comes from the work of René Girard, beginning with chapter 15, “History and the Paraclete,” in The Scapegoat (Johns Hopkins, 1986), 198-212.
4. For a full catalogue of sermons on “nationalism,” see the index page “Preaching God’s Reign under the Shadow of Christian Nationalism.”
5. Rev. Dr. William J. Barber II, The Third Reconstruction: Moral Mondays, Fusion Politics, and the Rise of a New Justice Movement (Beacon Press, 2016), pp. 93-94; italics added.
