The grace of our Lord Jesus Christ, the love of God, the fellowship of the Holy Spirit be with you all. Amen. Please be seated.
In the movie Catch Me If You Can by Steven Spielberg, 2002, the character played by Leonardo DiCaprio impersonates various professionals in their industries. The first impersonation he did was to become a pilot of a Pan Am flight. Then he became — or presented himself as — a medical doctor. And after falling in love with a hospital worker, he became an attorney and a Lutheran. When the FBI catches up with him at his engagement party, Frank confesses to his bride-to-be, Brenda: “I’m not a doctor. I never went to medical school, nor did I ever graduate from Harvard. And I’m not a Lutheran either.” She’s shocked. She tries to respond. She stutters and finally says, “Frank, you’re not a Lutheran?”
In the movie Raising Helen, Kate Hudson plays the role of Helen Harris’s aunt to two small children, Henry and Sarah. And the Kate Hudson character goes about trying to find a school, a suitable school, to put her children in. She comes across a Lutheran school and decides to fill out an application and enroll her niece and nephew into the elementary school. So the pastor of the Lutheran sponsoring church and principal of the Lutheran school comes to visit the family to get to know them prior to the approval of the application. So the Harris family tries to pass itself off as lifelong Lutherans, hoping to improve their chances to get into the Lutheran school. Sarah, the little girl, has a habit of naming everything, including her stuffed animals, “hippo.” And when asked why she names everything “hippo,” she says, “Because it’s the only word I can spell.” So as the family now is preparing for the pastor’s arrival, they’re all discussing what it means to be a Lutheran. They’re now Lutheran — they don’t know what one is, but they’re Lutheran. And so the little girl, Sarah, says, “Well, hippo wants to become a Lutheran too,” to which the Kate Hudson character replies, “Well, then hippo a Lutheran.”
In Clint Eastwood’s movie Gran Torino, Eastwood’s character Walt Kowalski asked his newly made Hmong friend, Sue Lor, how he came to be sponsored in the United States of America. Sue Lor told him, “The Lutherans brought us over,” to which Walt Kowalski, Eastwood’s character, replies, “The Lutherans get blamed for everything.”
There’s a lot of talk, if you look around, about Lutheran. Just people don’t know what a Lutheran is. By the way, that includes most Lutherans. I’ve been blamed a few times for the “big Lutheran sin.” A long time ago a man came up to me and said, “Up until you Lutherans showed up, we were all united in the Christian religion. We were all good Catholics. Then you guys had to come and wreck it all.”
See, Billy Graham once called the Lutheran Church in America “the Sleeping Giant,” and he was convinced that if the Lutherans could ever wake up and get their act together and become kind of really aggressive — I’m going to use the word Lutheran — that is, out evangelizing and converting and the like, that that would be the signal of a great spiritual revival that would be sweeping across the United States. Today, in my view, Lutherans really haven’t woken up on that score.
So how is it that we became known as Lutherans — and pretty much Lutheran by everybody else’s definition — but what does it really mean to be called, or to go by, the name Lutheran? And after all, Luther denounced the name. He didn’t want even one church on the planet to bear his name, Lutheran. But the name Lutheran was coined as a pejorative by the papal theologian Johann Eck, sometime between 1520 and 1522. It was also used by Pope Adrian VI, the successor to Leo X, who excommunicated Luther. The intent was to give the impression that Lutheran and Lutheranism was a heresy named after Luther, the way that Arianism became a heresy — a known heresy, declared heresy — from the teacher Arius, or Montanism named after Montanus.
So the word Lutheran was pejorative. It denoted a set of teachings that fell into a heretical category according to the Roman Church of the day. As for the word Lutheran, you know it never appears in the 600 pages of the Book of Concord. The word instead, “Evangelical,” is used as a name to describe either our churches or our doctrines. It’s used eight times in the Book of Concord. The word “Catholic,” which means universal, appears 13 times in the Book of Concord. What we call the Lutheran Church is referred to as the true and genuine Catholic Church in the signature block of the treatise of the Formula of Concord. Johann Gerhard, a Lutheran theologian and a hymn writer who lived from 1582–1637, said: “We do not call ourselves Lutheran, but are so styled by our enemies, and we permit it as a token of our consent with the pure teaching of the Word of God, which was rightly set forth by Luther. We suffer ourselves to bear his name, not as one who invented a new faith, but one who restored the old faith and purified the doctrine of the church.”
On the title page of the Formula of Concord, the Lutheran church is called “The Church of the Augsburg Confession,” and is repeatedly used within the Formula as that title. There are still some Lutheran churches today in Europe that go by the name “The Church of the Augsburg Confession” and do not attach the word Lutheran in any way to the doctrines which we describe now as Lutheran. So while Lutheran was originally meant to denote a heresy, Lutherans took it as a symbol of our fidelity to the Word of God, restored by God through his instrument, Dr. Luther.
And what is the beating heart of this so-called heresy? It’s this. It’s the chief article of the Christian faith: that men cannot be justified before God by their own strength, merit, or works, but are freely justified for Christ’s sake, through faith, when they believe that they are received into favor and that their sins are forgiven for Christ’s sake, who by his death has made satisfaction for our sins. This faith God imputes for righteousness in his sight. That’s Romans 3 and 4, which is what they’re basically paraphrasing.
Thus our epistle lesson this morning: “For by works of the law no human being will be justified in his sight, since through the law comes knowledge of sin. But now the righteousness of God has been manifested apart from the law, although the law and the prophets bear witness to it — the righteousness of God through faith in Jesus Christ for all who believe.” That’s the central article of the Christian faith. And it’s that central article that must always be protected and clearly, boldly confessed before the world.
All other church doctrines, churchly practices, liturgies, hymns, songs, prayers, and traditions of a Christian congregation must be formulated and carried out without contradiction to this central article of faith. To impugn this article is to begin a domino effect of corrupting the doctrine and practice of the Christian faith, as is what happened in the church of the Middle Ages. Upon this article — we call it Article IV of the Augsburg Confession, the article of justification — upon this doctrine the church rises or it falls. Upon this article of faith one is a Christian or one is not.
That’s why serious pastors and churches are so careful and selective — some would say we’re nitpicky or legalistic — but it’s why we’re so selective about what is said and done in a proper church service, and how the work of the church is to be carried out in the world and among its own members. The Bible’s distinction between law, which cannot save, and the gospel, which saves, is the central teaching of the Bible revealed in the words of the text. This is what God enabled Luther to rediscover.
In the language of the gospel lesson, the Word of God in which we are to abide is the faith that came through Luther and the reformers who followed thereafter: “If you abide in my word, then you are truly my disciples, and you shall know the truth, and the truth shall make you free.” Those words are words of certainty. You shall know the truth. Hold firmly to the doctrine of justification, and line up all other churchly doctrines and practices according to it, and you will know the truth — and that truth is what sets you free: free from sin, death, and the power of the devil.
Between the time of John the Baptist and Luther, the church endured great persecution and martyrdom — from Nero, Domitian, Trajan, Decius, Valerian, Diocletian, and others. Eventually the empire of Rome crumbled and fell in decay, as all nations eventually do. But the church — the church endured, and it grew, and it fended off various false doctrines concerning the Trinity and the two natures of Christ, once they got the creeds formulated and dispersed throughout Christendom. In the West after that, the church survived the Turks and the other Islamic armies that were threatening even Germany at the time — these armies that violently opposed the Christian religion and wanted the Christian faith wiped from the face of the earth. Yet the church endured.
You see, because the greatest threat to the church’s future in every generation doesn’t come from outside of her walls. The greatest threat to the church always comes from within — from false teachers in the church who depart from the clear meaning of the biblical text of the Holy Scripture. These are the teachers who do not abide in Christ’s Word and who do not know and live in the truth, and thus are held captive to sin, death, and the power of the devil.
When the churches of Galatia were being threatened by a “different gospel,” a gospel of works-righteousness, Paul wrote this: “I’m astonished that so many of you are deserting the one who called you to live in the grace of Christ and are turning to a different gospel” — which he says is really no gospel at all. “Evidently some people are throwing you into confusion and trying to pervert the gospel of Christ. But even if we or an angel from heaven should preach another gospel than the one we preach to you, let him be under God’s curse.” And then he repeats that one more time.
Where did Paul get such an intolerant disposition towards people who pervert the gospel, who infringe upon that Fourth Article, the article of justification? Where did he get that attitude? From Christ himself. Matthew 7:15: “Beware of false prophets, who come to you in sheep’s clothing but inwardly are ravenous wolves. You will know them by their fruit.”
But the blame doesn’t rest solely on the churchly class, like the professors or pastors or teachers of various kinds. Laymen are often active participants in leading congregations and fellow Christians astray. 2 Timothy 4:3 indicts laymen in the perversion — in the desire to twist the gospel: “For the time will come when people will not put up with sound doctrine. Instead, to suit their own desires, they will gather around them a great number of teachers to say what their itching ears want to hear.”
Now do you know why there’s 4,500 different denominations in the Christian religion? Because somebody doesn’t hold the central doctrine consistently, and their ears want to hear something else. Their ears want to hear a gospel that invests something in them and will, quote, “their alleged free will” or their good works or their good deeds — or now their good intents.
By the time Luther was born, forgiveness of sins was for sale, and it wasn’t cheap. Buying time off purgatory and hell was one of the most successful fundraisers ever launched by the church, and it still continues to bring in a lot of money. As Luther says, if you pay for forgiveness, the church is wealthy — but those who preach the free gospel of Jesus Christ will always be poor.
Life, you see, was constantly filled with doubt and fear for the status of one’s own soul and for the love of the departed soul. Thus the church tapped into that and turned it into a moneymaking machine of people with good intentions.
Now we Lutherans have a tendency to speak of Luther as if he was the only one on the planet at the time who understood the gospel. But the truth is, there were church fathers like Augustine, for example, or other ancient church fathers who understood the gospel. There were faithful father confessors in Luther’s time, like Luther’s own father in the faith, Johannes Staupitz, who counseled and spoke the gospel repeatedly to Luther, who was at the time a little thickheaded and couldn’t quite get it. But his father confessor pointed him in the right direction. As well as biblically literate and inquisitive monks who studied the text, understood the text, wrote about the text, and spoke the gospel to one another — the faithful few. God’s always maintained the true Christian church among the hidden. He’s always maintained the remnant among the many, even as the wider official church sunk deeper and deeper into a gospel that was no gospel at all.
Even as the official church perverted the teachings of the Bible, the faithful few remained. The Roman Church’s official position for centuries was a religion of works-righteousness combined with faith. It was a transaction: the sinner does this, and God will do this. The sinner does that, then God will give you time off of purgatory or hell. The end result: there was no gospel preached by the official church of Luther’s day at all.
So God raised up a prophet, one who spoke the word of truth, and through him called other churchmen across Europe and led them to a right understanding and application of the doctrine of justification. As a result, Luther, some of his students, and other churchmen earned permanent expulsion from the holy mother Church of Rome, and some were executed in the worst possible ways. Their separation, though, from the church had an upside to it: the Lutherans were now free, standing outside of the Roman Church, to preach grace and faith and forgiveness of sins apart from good works, for Christ’s sake alone. The price of God’s grace toward us could only be paid by the perfect life, death, and resurrection of Jesus Christ, his only-begotten Son.
Too many Christians in churches, including a great many that bear the name Luther in these days, have become complacent at best. Worse, they no longer believe what the Bible teaches about the fundamental articles of the faith, and are more interested in avoiding offending people than offending them, rightly so, by the law given in the pages of the Old and New Testament. They worry more about their popularity and marketability than they do actually speaking and acting in accordance to the truth.
It’s true what Paul wrote: God’s word of law stops every mouth and makes the whole world accountable to God, because by works of the law none of mankind can be justified in God’s sight.
The Reformation was not about Luther. We don’t celebrate a cult of personality, though there’s a great deal to be honored in him. It’s about the doctrine of the preaching. It’s about the separation — the right use — of those two great themes of the Old and New Testament: the theme of the law and the theme of the gospel. You mess up the theme of the law and the theme of the gospel, you mess up the article of justification. You mess up the article of justification, you mess up all your understanding of the Old and New Testament biblical text.
We celebrate the Reformation because it was about the most important thing in all the universe: Scripture alone, grace alone, faith alone, Christ alone, the glory to God alone. There is no grace in the law — not at all. There are only demands, and with the demands it reveals our sins. But in Christ, God’s grace is manifested. John 1:16 and 17: “For of his fullness we have all received grace upon grace. For the law was given through Moses; grace and truth were realized in Jesus Christ.” Or Romans 11:6: “If it is by grace, it is no longer on the basis of works, otherwise grace would no longer be grace.” Another way of saying, by the way, the gospel will no longer be the gospel. Ephesians 2: “For by grace you have been saved through faith, not of yourselves; it’s a gift from God, not as a result of works, so that no man may boast.”
These four truths — Scripture alone, grace alone, faith alone, Christ alone — are rightly understood and rightly applied. When that happens, all other doctrines and practices fall into place. The result is our freedom from sin, death, the power of the devil. The result is our heavenly mansion and our eternal rest.
What was at stake in Luther’s day continues to be at stake in our day. It always is, every time, in every generation. A rose by any other name is a rose. You can call it Lutheran or Evangelical or true Christian or true Roman Catholic or true Catholic or the Church of the Augsburg Confession or the Church of the Book of Concord — they’re all supposed to mean fundamentally one thing, as long as the church continues to abide in God’s Word of truth: the gospel of Jesus Christ sets you free.
We are the Church of the forgiveness of sins, the Church of life, and the Church of salvation. Thus your last hymn you’ll sing today: “Almighty God, Your Word is cast like a seed into the ground. Now let the dew of heaven descend and righteous fruits abound. Let not the foe of Christ and man this holy seed remove, but give it root in every heart to bring forth fruits of love. Let not the world’s deceitful cares the rising plant destroy, but let it yield a hundredfold fruits of peace and joy. Whenever the precious seed is sown, life-giving grace bestow, that all whose souls the truth receive its saving power may know.”
You belong to the Church of the gospel of Jesus Christ, because your sins are forgiven in him. Amen.
May the peace of God, which surpasses all understanding, keep your hearts and your minds in Christ Jesus. Amen.