A Verse That Changed History

The story begins ordinarily enough. A son setting out on his own, despite his father’s wishes for a better life for him. Martin was 21-years old when he entered a monastery in July of 1505. His father had been determined to turn him into a lawyer. Martin joined the monastery to avoid his father’s plans and the idea worked. His father was angry, but powerless to do anything about his son’s decision.

The superiors in his religious order saw great promise in the young German and had Martin trained as a priest. Martin later wrote that he knew God only as a stern judge waiting to punish each person for all eternity for the slightest infraction.

The only sliver of hope Martin found available was that God had authorized the church to forgive sins. Martin obsessively confessed his sins. As a good monk, there was not much to discuss with a confessor, but Martin wracked his brain to recall any thoughts or actions which were less than perfect.

Martin went to confession as frequently as possible. Sometimes even as he was on his way back to his room from confession, he would remember some unconfessed sin and would rush back to confess once more.

His worn out confessor told Martin to read the writings of the mystics. In their writings Luther discovered that the essence of Christ’s teachings is that we are to love God. If we love God completely, then the rest of the details of life will sort themselves out.

The idea that we only need to love God brought up an even greater problem for Martin. Later he wrote of this time saying, “Although I lived a blameless life as a monk, I felt I was a sinner with an uneasy conscience before God. I also could not believe that I had pleased him with my works. Far from loving that righteous God who punished sinners, I actually hated him….”

In an effort to help the monk now ordained as a priest to work through his crisis, the head of his monastery, sent him to teach scripture in the University at Wittenberg. It was there in 1515, that Martin began preparation for a course on Paul’s Letter to the Romans. Martin struggled with the justice of God. Then he found, tucked away in the letter, Romans 3:28, “we hold that a person is justified by faith apart from works.”

To be justified means to be seen as just, righteous, right in God’s eyes. So Martin discovered that he did not have to do anything special to be made right in God’s eyes. Being righteous wasn’t something you do. Being righteous is something God gives just because God wants to do so. Believe in God. Claim that righteousness and then live into it. That’s all there is to it.

Martin discovered in Romans that each and every one of us is a sinner. Yet, God loved us while we were in sin, wants to justify us and then call us to live lives that reflect the love we have been shown.

Martin Luther wrote 95 statements and posted them for debate at Wittenberg Cathedral on The Eve of All Saints, October 31, 1517. The 95 Theses set off the Reformation of the church, changed the face of Christianity and the map of Europe.

Martin Luther suggested that the church’s practice of selling indulgences went against scripture. The church used a fundraising method in those days long out of practice in any Christian church. You would pay to get your dead relatives out of purgatory, a purifying holding area, and into heaven.

In Luther’s day, Pope Leo X was using indulgences sold in Germany to fund the completion of St. Peter’s Basilica in Rome. Luther wrote that indulgences were wrong. God sees someone as justified by faith alone, not by works, and certainly not by money. If the Pope could use his influence with God to get folks out of purgatory, Martin Luther reasoned that he should do so for love and not for money.

Luther was hauled before Emperor Charles V and asked to take it all back. Terrified to speak out against the Church and the Emperor, who he saw as God’s authority on earth, the monk asked for one day to think. The next day, Luther dropped the Latin which was the language of public debate and he spoke in German, “My conscience is a prisoner of God’s Word. I cannot and will not recant, for to disobey one’s conscience is neither just nor safe. Amen.”

Luther held firm to the teaching of scripture and his discovery that we are made right in God’s eyes by faith alone. This change the world. It took a while, but the Roman Catholic Church came to acknowledge he was right. In the year 2000, Pope John Paul II signed a joint statement with the Lutheran World Federation acknowledging that Martin Luther and Paul had it right, we are made right in God’s eyes by nothing more than faith, which is itself a gift from God.

Don’t get me wrong. Sin is real and God does not love the ways you do things that you know are wrong. Yet, while we are sinners, God loves us and reaches out to us.

This is good news now as much as when Martin Luther stumbled across it. God loves you. God is not simply standing by ready to punish you for everything you have ever done wrong. God stands ready to love you in spite of all that.

God is ready to move on into a new life with you. That’s the Amazing Grace that sounds so sweet. God is not a big meanie set to punish, but someone who loves you looking for you to return that love.

(The Rev. Frank Logue is pastor of King of Peace Episcopal Church in Kingsland.) 

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