Today is reformation Sunday. We may wonder if what was going on a little over five hundred years ago has any real relevance to our own lives. I’d like to start with some modern day descriptions of some issues and then I want to go back to Martin Luther, and see if somehow we can find those connections.

This week I finished reading a book about the Taliban. Remember them—they were the people who, over a decade ago, took over Afghanistan. The Taliban had a call from God, so they said, to bring that country into conformity to what God had told them everyone in Afghanistan should be doing. The first thing they did was to close all the schools because they did not feel like girls should be educated and since seventy percent of the teachers in the school system happened to be women, they didn’t want the boys learning from women because that was what God had told them. They made the women dress in these things I refer to as tents—basically from head to toe so that no one would be able to see them.  I don’t know why they bothered to do that because women weren’t allowed out in public anyway. Further into their controlling of the country they started punishing women for wearing heels that clicked when they walked down the street.  They weren’t supposed to be attracting men with the noise that they were making with their heels. They had the men of that country grow beards long enough so that you could take your fist and hold on to them. And if the men did not grow beards like that, because they didn’t want to or simply because they didn’t have enough facial hair to do that, they would publicly flog or beat them. If you were caught stealing something they would cut off your hand.  If you were caught lying they would cut out your tongue. All of this was on direct order from God. That is what they said God had told the Taliban that they should be doing.

Also, I finished reading a book recently about some communities in northern Arizona; Colorado City around Fredonia. They feel that God has called some prophets up there, and those prophets have made it very clear that if people are going to avoid hell that they must do what God tells the prophets to tell them to do. This means mostly that older men get many wives starting at the age of twelve or thirteen, which means all the men that are left over get kicked out of the community because you only need one man for ten wives or something like that. God has also told them that they are to take money from our tax dollars to help support all the children that result from these plural marriages. The welfare checks that are received in the community are four times the average population. Because, after all, when one man has several wives and about 65 children it’s a little hard to feed them. Those who have opposed the vision of these prophets have often been murdered and killed.

I just got back from Mexico.  I went down to Carborca to our sister church down there. 95% of the Mexican population lives in abject poverty.  That is hard for us to even fathom. The vast majority of people make a dollar a day to work nine hours if you happen to have a job in Mexico. I would remind you that food costs about the same in Mexico as it does here. So now you figure how they are surviving. But there is a small group of people that are the very top of Mexican society.  As you drive through Carborca you see all these little shanty houses and every now and then you come upon these huge compounds. I learned that the windows face into the courtyard to these compounds because they don’t want people that drive by shooting at them. They are owned by drug lords and don’t want other drug lords trying to kill them.  Laced in the walls of these compound buildings is lead to keep bullets from coming in. Now these are huge estates set up fortified to protect the ruling elite drug lords from these masses of people that they have under their thumbs. The church, who has been the dominant church in Mexico for centuries and who the vast majority of the population still holds allegiance to and in part holds onto its power and its influence because it has kept the people under subjugation, is paid off by that rich narrow elite at the top in order that it may continue to exist. So we live in a modern age in which there are examples within the Christian, Islamic, and Jewish communities of radical fundamentalists who have heard a word from God that they would super impose upon others because of their own need for power and the need to hold onto that power. None of the branches of the Abrahamic faith have been left off in our modern times. There are both Catholic and Protestant people within the Christian religion who somehow see power and controlling of the people to be more important than the central message of the gospel. One wonders, in our modern age, if the reformation of Martin Luther has anything to say to us.

Now I want to go back to 1500’s. That period of time the church in Europe owned seventy percent of the land. That meant that in an agricultural society the church reined supreme. It, along with the elite leaders of that day and age, controlled everything that happened. There was nothing that moved without the church’s influence or its ability to control people’s lives, both temporal and spiritual. The vast majority of the people were illiterate because the church did not want them read. They weren’t allowed to read the Bible because they might think their own thoughts about the Bible. And the heavy emphasis on the church, at that time, was that God was a damning and a judging God and unless people did what the church, as an institution, told them to do they would go straight to hell. There was an intricate hierarchy within the church that had to be obeyed and without its authority, people could have no connection with God.

Martin Luther was a devout man. He was a religious zealot that many psychiatrists have had a fun time reading about. Martin Luther was an Augustinian monk.  He spent his life worrying about the mistakes that he made and about the sins that committed.  He tried to work with all of his effort so that God might not judge him so harshly, so that he could prevent himself from going to hell. He was obsessed with trying to cleanse himself of all of his sin. We are told a true story that when he went to his confessor that his confessor told him to go and commit some real sins before he came back and talked to him because he was getting on his nerves. One day Martin Luther had a revelation that transformed his life. Reading the same passage of Romans that Carol has read us today, he came to understand something. That the God that was revealed in the New Testament, the God that was revealed through Jesus, was the God that came to show God’s grace and not God’s condemnation. Martin Luther came to understand that the human condition was such that none of us were perfect. That all of us fall short in our human brokenness to ever be able to work hard enough to merit God’s approval. They came up with a phrase, which in those days was written in Latin, the universal language. That phrase is the title of my sermon; Sola gracius, Sola fida. Solely by grace though faith do we know God’s salvation in our lives. What Martin Luther came to understand for himself, in that one phrase, was to shake Europe to its very knees. He came to understand that who we were with God was not dependent one iota in how hard we worked to please God.  That had nothing to do with it.  It was our trust and our faith from God’s grace that came to us without merit and through the price of God’s own suffering through Jesus that we come to know our salvation in God. The message of the faith was that it was through God’s love and mercy that we come to know God through Jesus. That’s how we become connected with God. And this was in a day and age when the church, as an institution, had corrupted itself and saw its temporal power as being the most important part of its very existence. Luther reminded the people of his own day of what he referred to as “the priesthood of all believers”. That means you, as well as I, are a priest before God. That everyone that puts their faith and trust in Jesus has a direct link with God and that no institution had a right to interfere with that.

I would say today that, whatever denomination of Christianity there is, whatever local congregation claims the name of Jesus, that the high mark of the reformation and of Martin Luther, the high goal and the high ethic we should live by is Sola gracius, Sola fida. How much of the centerpiece of what we know as a gathered community is that the grace of God revealed through Jesus comes to us freely and not by merit. Even in the good works that we do, do we do them as a response to God’s grace or because of our own need for human perfection? Does this church exist, as an institution, simply to alleviate our superstitious fears of what it would mean to be without it? Or does its central purpose exist that Jesus’ grace revealed freely might be offered to the world to become its center and most important edict. Those are the questions that the reformation asked of us. And, in a day and age when Jewish, Muslim and Christian radicals tell us that we will go to hell unless we follow what their prophet tells us, we need to be reminded of the central tenets of the reformation faith. That God has called us as individuals and that our link with God is straight and not through the channels of any human institution. We must ask ourselves as we listen to the modern day prophets of our own day—what are the fruits of their message? Do they produce the grace and the love and the justice of God in our own day that is necessary for the continuation of the human race? Or do they teach narrowness of mind and superstition and pain and hurt and agony against the brother or sister who is different? Do they teach us fear and the judgment of God, or do they do like Martin Luther—teach us of the ever-flowing free grace of God that is in our lives? Those are the measures by which we should read the modern prophets of our own day.

Now, after a fairly intense sermon, I want to end it with something a little more playful and personal. The truth is Martin Luther is my favorite reformer of all the reformers. John Calvin was the most dire person I’ve ever read about. He was so serious that I doubt I would ever want to sit down and have a conversation with him. John Wesley, the founder of Methodism, was so intense that his wife couldn’t even live with him. Martin Luther, once he had received that new revelation of who God was in his life, learned how to live life fully. He did a very good German Lutheran thing, which wasn’t a very good Methodist thing, by the way. Most of his teaching he did around his dining room table with his young students drinking beer. One of the things Martin Luther did was he went to monasteries and he would break them open and he would take the brothers from the monasteries over to the nunneries and he would line up with the monks with the nuns and he would marry them to each other so that they could go and live the full life of marriage. One day he was doing that and there was a nun left over. There was one more nun than there was a monk. So he married this woman. She became his wife. They had a long marriage and many children and they were very happy together. What I’m saying is that out of all the reformers, Martin Luther knew how to live life to its fullest. He knew the freedom and grace that God had given and he lived it in tangible ways. He is a living example to us today to always look back to that primitive gospel that has been given to us. And to wean our faith down to the basic essentials. And to know that God has revealed himself to us through Jesus. In our human imperfections and our sinfulness that we can never earn God’s grace, but to accept that grace as a total unmerited gift. Remember Sola Gracius, Sola Fida.