SERMON FOR REFORMATION SUNDAY, OCTOBER 27, 2019.

As Reformation Day approached I decided to read something in keeping with the season. I dug through the many books I had acquired but never read during my teaching years and chose one entitled The Reformation of Feeling: Shaping the Religious Emotions in Early Modern Germany (Susan C. Karant-Nunn, Oxford University Press, 2010). It has given me a lot to think about. The life of faith is developed through feelings as much, if not more so, as through the intellect. At the time of the Reformation, when the church was divided, the various Christian communities cultivated certain emotions among their members to create and sustain their distinct identity, in conscious contrast to that of their opponents. The author of the study looks at the preaching of Roman Catholic priests, Lutheran pastors and Calvinist ministers from the late 15th to the early 17th centuries. She focuses on sermons from Holy Week. No one could hear the Passion story without some kind of emotional response. How did these preachers shape that response? What feelings did they purposely cultivate in their hearers? How did they shape the faith of the community?

The sermons on Christ’s passion that Luther would have heard growing up were very graphic in their descriptions of the Lord’s physical suffering. Preachers elaborated at great length on the scriptural accounts — the sweating blood in the Garden of Gethsemane, the whipping and physical abuse after Jesus’ arrest, the crown of thorns, the nails of the crucifixion. They challenged the congregation to imagine and share Christ’s bodily torment. The faithful were to feel his raw pain and experience a healing flood of pity, sorrow, and guilt. As the author concludes: “Catholic preachers aimed first to move the hearer to repentance of sin by means of a vividly retold and partly embellished . . . description of every blow meted out to the Son of God. Identification with Christ’s bodily and mental torment as he anticipated the immediate future was to move people to sorrow precisely for their part in making this painful sacrifice necessary” (96). The pious, undone by the thought of their Lord’s ordeal, would lose control, moan, and weep. This intense focus on the wrongs inflicted upon Jesus included bitter denunciation of the Jews for their alleged treachery. The sins of all of humanity, past and present, caused the Lord’s death, yet the Jews were specifically despised as “Christ killers.” These Passion sermons were designed to elicit feelings of revulsion and hostility towards them. According to Matthew’s account (Matthew 27:24-25), when Pilate said, “I am innocent of this man’s blood, see to it ourselves,” the people as a whole answered, “His blood be on us and on our children!” The church understood this to mean all future generations, and Jewish communities throughout Europe paid bitterly for their alleged guilt.

Luther’s approach to the Passion was different. He did not linger over the details of Christ’s broken body or the Virgin Mary’s bereavement. He did not want his congregation to figuratively flagellate themselves and weep. He told the story in its unadorned scriptural terms and then sought to bring his hearers beyond it straight to the message of God’s love for them revealed in Christ’s obedience unto death for their sake. They are to confess their sin and fight the good fight of containing it, but ultimately the emotions Luther seeks to call forth are gratitude and joy — gratitude for the gift of salvation God has freely given them and a joyous confidence in the consolation offered by the Gospel. His focus is consistently on what God has done and is doing in Christ, not on some human effort to agonize with the Savior in his suffering. Because Luther’s preaching on the Passion and that of his followers placed little emphasis on Jesus’ physical ordeal, the role of the Jews in the story became far less prominent, and so also the cultivation of feelings of vindictiveness towards them.

Yet Luther’s restraint in his Passion sermons did not carry over to all of his theological work. He was part of a culture that had for centuries harbored no doubt as to the demonic nature of the Jews, not just the ones who rejected Jesus in his own day but all those who continued to await a different Messiah. In his younger years Luther could sympathize with them because he felt the church, which he judged to be in desperate need of reform, gave them very little reason to want to become Christians. But as the decades passed and the Jews held to their faith, even after the light of the true Gospel, in Luther’s view, had been restored, he denounced them in terms as brutal as those used by the old school Passion preachers. If only he had had an editor who would prudently have insured that these writings didn’t make it to publication. But he did not, and because of his towering position in German culture and world history, his venom cast its dark shadow across the centuries,

This may seem a strange part of our Lutheran heritage to focus on during the Festival of the Reformation. The young friar who presented those 95 theses for debate on October 31, 1517, was in body and spirit far from the bitter enemy of the Jews who emerged decades later. And the Reformation never was just about Luther. Yet his history marks our tradition at every turn, and his story, especially its dark chapters, is a powerful witness to the Gospel he proclaimed. It was always about letting God be God. Our relationship to our Creator and Redeemer involves no quid pro quo. It is not our diligent good works or pious actions that ground a claim on God. God claims us first, and to be saved by grace is the easy part, because the responsibility for it lies with God alone. But living in that grace from day to day and year to year is hard. We cannot direct God’s course of action. Surely the cross makes this clear. We can only meet God where God chooses to make Godself known. We must be prepared for those to be unlikely places, unimaginable, even offensive to us. For example, in the midst of persons who do not believe as we do, who remain who they are out of conviction, not diabolical stubbornness, and who continue to be our neighbors, whether we understand them or like them or not. They challenge us to be less sure of ourselves and to trust God more, believing that God will bring to pass what He has promised. Especially when we find ourselves losing confidence and tempted to take matters into our own hands. From our perspective the Reformation did indeed accomplish great things, but in his later years, Luther felt the movement was failing. He was angry and fearful, increasingly intolerant towards those who disagreed with him, and at times cruel. This man knew so well how faith in God’s loving purpose could change the heart and create new possibilities for life. The word of grace did it all, he said, while “I sat here drinking good Wittenberg beer with my friends.” But he was no better or worse than the rest of us — simultaneously a saint and a sinner. The saint made brave and hopeful by God’s grace; the sinner never free from faith’s opposite, despair. His public position and influence amplified the effects of his very human transgressions. How ironic that Luther, who, as a young monk, was defeated by his constant frenzied activity to secure his salvation, then as an old man made the same mistake when it came to God’s church.

As Luther lay dying in 1546, he wrote these words on a piece of paper: “We are all beggars. This is true.” He was back on solid ground, waiting empty-handed and needy before the cross of Jesus, waiting to be filled with grace, to become wholly saint at last and sinner no more. Amen.

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