Sunday of the Reformation Sermon -- Romans 3:19-28

October 26, 2008 at Calvary Evangelical Lutheran Church - Mechanicsburg, PA

“The righteousness of God has been manifested apart from the law, although the Torah and the Prophets bear witness to it—the righteousness of God through faith in Jesus Christ for all who believe.”

Again, we of the Lutheran Confession of the Christian faith commemorate the events of the Reformation. It is not simply a repetition of what Luther and the other Reformers accomplished or a celebration of human achievement. Rather, the day is truly about what the Lord God continued to manifest among us: the apostolic witness to what Christ did for our salvation and how that is passed down to us.

That witness to what Christ accomplished is what we heard in the Epistle Reading for this day. St. Paul’s writing to the Romans described the divine work that was done on our behalf. It is a commentary first on the condition of sin that plagues all humanity since the Fall: “All have sinned and fall short of the glory of God.” But it also testifies to what has been done for this fallen humanity: “[All] are justified by His grace as a gift, through the redemption that is in Christ Jesus, whom God put forward as a propitiation by His blood, to be received by faith.”

This apostolic witness of St. Paul is not meant for the Roman Christians alone. Rather, it is a testimony meant for every man, woman, and child to hear. For what the apostle writes leaves out no one. He says: “By works of the law no human being will be justified in [God’s] sight, since through the law comes knowledge of sin.” That must be understood by all of us and taken to heart, because it runs contrary to how we operate in our society. We know that we don’t meet expectations that others have of us. But in our relationships with others—whether it be our family, friends, employers, or the civil realm—we have ways to make satisfaction for those faults, ways to make good what we did wrong.

But this is not the case with the Lord God. He has expectations for us, and we know them well. Very few of us are not familiar with the Decalogue, with the divine law. The commandments stare us in the face and they outline our expected behavior. And when we compare our lives to those commandments, we see our failures. This is what St. Paul says: “Through the law comes knowledge of sin.” Our faults are made known to us. God’s finger points squarely at each of us, while He declares our transgressions: You have trusted other things instead of Me; you have dragged My Name into all sorts of lies; you have allowed your minds to be concerned with other interests instead of My Word; and your behavior toward your fellow human beings shows little to no concern for them.

And when that “knowledge of sin” is put in front of us, we can’t ignore it. It stands true and is unrelenting. As St. Paul writes: “We know that whatever the law says it speaks to those who are under the law, so that every mouth may be stopped, and the whole world may be held accountable to God.” That accountability makes us search high and low for ways to make up for our transgressions. But where can we find a way to make good what we did wrong? We can turn back to that law, to the standard of expected behavior that the Lord God instituted, but all it will do is again show us our failures, how “[we] have sinned and fall short of the glory of God.”

What we need instead is to see a way in which our faults and transgressions are not counted against us, how something or someone has achieved what we could not. That is the apostolic witness: “The righteousness of God has been manifested apart from the law, although the Torah and the Prophets bear witness to it—the righteousness of God through faith in Jesus Christ for all who believe.” Righteousness that is not dependent upon our actions: that is what we need and that is what St. Paul, along with all the Prophets and Apostles, makes known.

At the heart of the Reformation Movement was the witness of that divinely-given righteousness and the trust in it, even to the point of losing “goods, fame, child, and wife.” What Luther and the Reformers trusted in and faithfully confessed was the witness that St. Paul gave about the work of Christ to the Romans: “[All] are justified by His grace as a gift, through the redemption that is in Christ Jesus, whom God put forward as a propitiation by His blood, to be received by faith.” Sinful human beings cannot make up for their errors; rather, they are made righteous by having the merits of Christ’s sacrificial death applied to them by hearing His Word, receiving His Baptism, and partaking of His Supper. These are not actions that achieve our righteousness, but how we receive by faith the effects of what Jesus has done for us.

This was not a new message, either in St. Paul’s time or Luther’s. Rather, it was a return to what was known from the time of Moses. That is the significance of the apostle’s words: “the Torah and the Prophets bear witness to it.” The testimony of the Old Testament was clear: everything that the people of Israel received was given out of divine graciousness. Even the covenant with all its requirements of sacrifice was based upon the favor given by the Lord God to His people that He delivered out of bondage. And the reminder that the Prophets brought to the Lord God’s delivered people was to return to that favor and to expect the One who would make atonement for the sins of the entire world.

That is what St. Paul wants his audience, even us who hear his words centuries later, to trust in. The same witness was given by the Reformers, and again we don’t emphasize their lives as much as what they confessed and made known. In the Small Catechism, Luther doesn’t hide the fact that our redemption is the effect of Christ’s atoning death, the language of being “purchased and won.” The Augsburg Confession, the essential statement of the Lutheran faith, speaks clearly about how sinners are made righteous: “[They] are justified as a gift on account of Christ through faith when they believe that they are received into grace and that their sins are forgiven on account of Christ, who by His death made satisfaction for our sins.”

Why we are here as an assembly of Christ’s disciples is that we believe what the Prophets and Apostles bore witness to, what was handed down through generations of believers to our day. Our parish’s existence is owed to that fact. Even though our mouths are stopped when the Lord God’s law is spoken to us, we are given voice to worship Him when we hear about our justification by Christ’s actions. As we gather together, we make known that which happened to us. We confess it in the words of the ancient creeds and liturgy. We confess it in our hymns and anthems. We confess it in our discussions about who we are and the way of life that has been divinely given to us.

Confess it we must, because it is true. “The Torah and the Prophets bear witness to it,” as do the Apostles and their spiritual descendants. Confess it we must, because it is the only thing that provides a remedy, a satisfaction for our transgressions. Confess it we must, because as vital as that truth is, it can be easily lost. That is what this commemoration of Reformation Day reminds us. It is so very easy to revert back to the thinking that we must, and that we actually can, do something to make up for our guilt. We want to do so, since we know the obligation we have to obey God’s law. We also know the seriousness of our sins.

But not only do we understand the gravity of our situation, we also have the motivation for wanting to contribute to our salvation, to attribute it to our own goodness. Such thoughts must be the least thing from our mind. Rather, we should think of ourselves as Luther did on his death-bed: “We are beggars. That is true.” We are beggars who have been generously given something that we could never attain, never earn. That is what St. Paul reminds the Romans and us about our salvation: “Then what becomes of our boasting? It is excluded. By what kind of law? By a law of works? No, but by the law of faith.”

As another year has passed since the events of the 16^th Century, we are given another year in which we can proclaim the gracious and life-giving deeds of Christ while admitting our faults and shortcomings. We do so as it has been made known to us, as we stay true to the prophetic and apostolic witness of the Scriptures, and as we stay true to the teachings drawn from them that have been handed down to us from the first days of the Church through the Reformers and to our day.

Let us stay true to that confession and make it known in our day and time, not boasting about our works, but gladly attributing our salvation to Christ and Him alone. For what we have heard, we so believe: “The righteousness of God has been manifested apart from the law, although the Torah and the Prophets bear witness to it—the righteousness of God through faith in Jesus Christ for all who believe.”

T In the Name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit.