The Rev. Frank Logue
King of Peace Episcopal Church
Kingsland, Georgia
June 2, 2002

A Verse That Changed History
Romans 3: 21-25a, 28 

Today’s reading from Romans ands “we hold that a person is justified by faith apart from works.” This verse is an innocent sounding group of words. Yet, it was this verse and similar verses in Romans which transformed world history in the 1500s.  

The story begins in July of 1505. That is when Martin, the then 21-year old hero of our tale, came up with a plan.[1] What Martin’s Father wanted most was for Martin to become a lawyer. What Martin wanted most was to not do what his father wanted. Martin took what was the obvious path in his day, joining a monastery to avoid his father’s plans. The scheme worked. His father was powerless to do anything about Martin’s decision.  

The superiors in his religious order saw great promise in the young German and had Martin trained as a priest. When he celebrated communion for the first time, Martin was overcome with emotion so strong that he could scarcely finish the service. He was terrified at the prospect of holding nothing less than the Body of Christ and was convinced more than ever that he was not worthy of the honor. 

Martin later wrote that he knew God only as a stern judge waiting to punish each person for all eternity for the slightest infraction. Martin did what many other monks of his day did. He punished his own body in an effort to teach himself not to sin. 

The only sliver of hope Martin found available was that God had authorized the church to forgive sins. Martin obsessively confessed his sins. 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 mystics where Luther discovered that the essence of Christ’s teachings is that we are to love God. If we love God completely, the rest of the details of life sort themselves out. This 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 priest work through his crisis, Martin’s confessor, who was the head of his monastery, sent him to teach scripture in the University at Wittenberg. It was 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 Romans, “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. For the monk, priest, professor we know as Martin Luther, this idea that faith alone justifies us before God was a powerful revelation.  

Martin knew that being justified by our faith alone did not take away sin. He discovered in Romans that each and every one of us is a sinner. God loved us while we were in sin, justified us and then calls us to live lives that reflect the love we have been shown. 

Inspired by his study of Romans, Martin looked at the world anew. He found that much of the way the church did business at the time had little to do with the free gift of love he read in scripture. Martin began to discuss his revelation with fellow professors at the University of Wittenberg. He published 97 theses, or statements that he saw as deriving from his study. He debated these statements with fellow faculty members. No one in the wider world noticed, but the theses did spark interesting campus discussions. 

Martin wrote another set of theses, 95 this time, and posted them for debate at Wittenberg Cathedral on The Eve of All Saints 1517. This second group of statements by the young professor should have caused no more debate than the first. However, the 95 these set off the Reformation of the church, changed the face of Christianity, the map of Europe, and set something of the character of these United States. That’s a lot of change for one proposal for a debate. 

Martin, who is best known today as the Reformer Martin Luther, said the church’s practice of selling indulgences went against scripture. The church used a fundraising method in those days of allowing someone to pay to get a dead relative out of purgatory. Purgatory, they taught, was a mini-Hell, a purifying holding area on the way to heaven. If you did not want someone to suffer to much on their way to God, you could pay the church to get them out early.  

In Martin Luther’s day, Pope Leo X was using indulgences sold in Germany to fund the completion of St. Peter’s Basilica in Rome. The German princes kept half the money and passed half on to Rome. Those in power profited from this arrangement. They had a catchy slogan in German, which translates into English as something like, “As soon as a coin in the coffer rings, the soul from purgatory springs.” 

Martin Luther wrote that indulgences were flat wrong. God sees someone as justified by faith alone, not by works, and certainly not by money. Luther said that the Pope should take care of the poor, from whom he was getting the indulgences, even if he had to sell St. Peter’s Basilica to do it. 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. 

Martin Luther may be a saint, but he was also brusk, rude, and sometimes crude. Luther had a knack for overstating his case and sometimes ticked off people who agreed with him. It wasn’t long before Luther was hauled before Emperor Charles V and asked to recant everything he had written. Terrified to speak out against the Church and the Emperor, who he saw as God’s authority on earth, Martin Luther asked for one day to think. The next day, when asked once more to deny everything he had claimed, Martin 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.” Then he walked out. 

The story continues of course. Somehow, Martin Luther negotiated the political and theological landscape of his day to live a full life. But we have taken the story far enough. Luther espoused all the right ideas at just the right time to spark change. But let’s take another look at what changed Martin Luther from a fearful monk into a bold reformer.  

The theologian Alistair McGrath gives a helpful comparison for Luther’s change of heart. In his book Christian Theology, McGrath writes, “Let us suppose that you are in prison, and are offered your freedom on the condition that you pay a heavy fine. The promise is real… This presents no difficulties, so long as you have the necessary resources….”  

Luther had always known that he owed a debt he could never pay. To follow the analogy McGrath gives, the offer of freedom was pointless for Luther, because he would never be able to scrounge up the cash to pay for it. Luther discovered in Romans the Good News that the debt was freely forgiven. It doesn’t matter how much you owe if the one you owe forgives the debt freely.  

This discovery changed the life of a young professor who then helped change the world. It took a while, but even the 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. God even gives us the faith to believe. Grace comes first. Then comes our response as we are called to act like a people loved by God. 

God loves you. God is not standing ready to punish you for everything you have ever done wrong. Instead, God stands ready to love you in spite of all that. That’s the Amazing Grace that sounds so sweet—God is not a big meanie hell-bent on punishing you. God loves you and is just looking for you to return that love.  

Amen.