1.
Please pray with me. May the words of my mouth and the meditation
of our hearts be pleasing in your sight, O Lord, our rock and our
redeemer. Amen. The message from God’s Word today is taken
from Revelation 14:6-7 and is entitled, “The
Catholicity of the Gospel.” Dear
brothers and sisters in Christ.
2.
What do you
suppose Martin Luther would preach for a Reformation Day sermon? I’m confident that Luther’s sermon would
never be a pep rally, pumping up our Lutheran pride. We can easily fall into
that. We’re blessed to inherit the
wisdom God gave us through Luther. But, waving a denominational banner wasn’t
Luther’s intent. We recall his unwillingness that a new Church should be called
Lutheran or that any new Church be formed at all.
3.
On the
other hand, I don’t believe Luther would pull any punches. Even allowing for a
more delicate 21st century Luther, we’d assume he’d still name names
and point to contemporary threats to the faith. Remember his original version
of the hymn “Lord, Keep Us Steadfast in
Your Word”: in stanza 1, line 2 he wrote, “Restrain the murderous Pope and Turk.” Our Reformation sermons often include a brief
history lesson. I think Luther’s would too. It’s valuable to hear the familiar
story with relics and indulgences, Luther’s discovery of the Gospel, “the hammer blows that shook the world,”
Worms, Augsburg. Luther wasn’t shy about rehearsing the drama, even with
himself in the most noticeable role.
4.
Here’s
the sermon we do know Luther would continue to preach: Luther writes, “We teach that the beginning of salvation, nay, the whole burden of it,
is faith in Christ, who alone wipes away sins through his blood.” Before Martin Luther, the Prophet Jeremiah
wrote in Jeremiah 31:31 & 34, “Behold,
the days are coming, declares the Lord,
when I will make a new covenant with the house of Israel and the house of Judah
a covenant not according to the Law but according to the Gospel: “For I will
forgive their iniquity, and I will remember their sin no more.” That
covenant was the new covenant in Christ’s blood, confirmed by his death and
empowered by his resurrection. It’s this Gospel covenant that defines
Christianity. And Luther would agree.
This is what the faith is: salvation in Christ alone, for he alone forgives our
sins.
5.
This
Gospel covenant was at the center of the Reformation. The issue was this: does Jesus forgive our sins completely, or
do we need to add something to complete his covenant? Do certain works need
to be performed in order that we might attain grace? Do we need to have an
indulgence to help us? Do we need to add our own merits, and those of the saints,
to Christ’s merits, or is he enough for all of us? The new covenant the Lord
proclaims in Jeremiah mentions nothing of our merits; that has more to do with
the old covenant given at Sinai, the covenant Israel broke and we continually
break. The new covenant has nothing to do with our merits, with penitential
works, or with gaining indulgences based on someone else’s merits. The new
covenant is complete forgiveness in Christ.
6.
In
St. John’s apocalyptic vision recorded in Revelation 14:6 he writes, “Then I saw another angel flying directly
overhead, with an eternal gospel to proclaim to those who dwell on earth, to
every nation and tribe and language and people.” What John saw was the
Gospel being proclaimed through the Church. The angel is the heavenly figure of
all those messengers sent out to bear witness to this new covenant of
forgiveness, from the apostles, bishops, and martyrs of the Early Church right
down to the pastors and confessors of the faith today. This Gospel has never
ceased to be proclaimed in Christ’s Church. It’s an eternal Gospel against
which our Lord says even the gates of hell will not prevail.
7.
There
are times when hell seems to have prevailed. Luther came on the scene at such a
time. The Gospel of forgiveness was being obscured. It was so covered up that
most Christians had never heard it. Luther himself, a well-educated law student
who eventually became a monk, struggled in the faith because he didn’t know the
full message of the Gospel. The angel’s words seemed to have been swallowed up
by hell, drowned out by the pope, bishops, and preachers who were preaching a
different message. This message made
Christ’s Gospel only part of the equation, a mixing of the old covenant and the
new into something strange, something that made grace into works and works into
grace. It was a confusion of Law &
Gospel.
8.
But
the Gospel was never swallowed up. Hell couldn’t defeat it, and the Medieval
Church, though it had obscured the Gospel had not lost it completely. The
Gospel St. John’s angel proclaims is an eternal Gospel. It never ceases to be
proclaimed, even though it may seem that the whole Church is preaching
something else.
9.
That’s
why the Reformation wasn’t the start of something new. Luther and his followers
were no rebels, forsaking the Catholic Church to start a new, Protestant one.
When Luther’s colleague Andreas Karlstadt began to abandon Catholicism and
preached others into doing so too, Luther rushed back to Wittenberg, coming out
of hiding and risking his life, to put an end to the new measures Karlstadt had
begun. Luther knew that the answer wasn’t in abandoning the old Church. The
answer was in regaining the visible Church’s catholicity.
10.
If
that sounds confusing, let’s explain: Catholic literally means
“universal.” The Church catholic, or the “catholic
Church” in the true sense, is the collection of all believers in Christ
Jesus. It is the universal Church. It
wasn’t the pope that made the Church catholic.
It was the eternal Gospel of Christ. It’s this Gospel, believed by every
Christian in every place and time that defines the Church. The Gospel makes her
a catholic or universal Church.
11.
The
Roman Church may call itself catholic, but it really isn’t. It has some
elements shared by the whole Church catholic, such as liturgy, the Office of
the Ministry, and even preaching and sacraments, but it also has elements that
continue to obscure the Gospel. Rome turns the Gospel into Law and the Law into
Gospel. It even confuses the Lord’s Supper in this way, seeing the priest’s
celebration of Holy Communion as an act by which Christ offers himself again to
God as a non-bloody sacrifice. This
isn’t the Gospel. It’s not shared by the whole Church catholic
12.
True catholicity
is found when the Church proclaims what belongs to all Christians, that is
eternal Gospel of Christ. Everything else that is catholic about the Church
bears witness to this Gospel: the Office
of the Ministry, which proclaims this Gospel of Christ; the preaching and sacraments of Christ,
which bestow it; the liturgy, which
teaches and testifies to it and the traditions,
which hold it up. All of it is centered on this eternal Gospel. This is what
makes the Lutheran Church catholic.
13.
But there’s a
constant need for reformation in Christ’s Church, including the Lutheran Church.
Our sinful flesh isn’t content with Christ’s forgiveness. It longs to add
something of itself, whether it be good works of mercy and sacrifice,
self-chosen decisions to follow Jesus, efforts at self-sanctification,
continual devotion and prayer. Basically,
things that have the appearance of piety but are done to merit something before
God. Such efforts may make one feel holy, but in reality they’re nothing before
God, nothing but the self-chosen works of filthy sinners. How can such wretched
works improve on the holy and complete work Christ has already done? Such
efforts to add one’s merits to Christ’s aren’t Christian. Because the Christian trusts in Christ alone.
14.
The Church must constantly be on guard. She
must be constantly reforming herself. She must continually move back to what
makes her catholic, back to the eternal Gospel of Jesus. And so in our reforms
we don’t seek to bring forth new things, things that the Church has never
known, but always to return to the old, that is, to the Gospel and those things
that proclaim it.
15. When we have this
Gospel in its fullness, we have everything that Luther was looking for and that
Christians have ever needed. Because we
have forgiveness, life, and salvation in Christ Jesus through the new covenant
in his blood. In Christ we’re joined together across time and space with every
Christian that ever heard and believed that heavenly angel’s message. When
We Have the Gospel in Its Fullness, We Are Joined in the One, Holy, Catholic,
and Apostolic Church and Joined to Christ. Amen.
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