Hilton Head Island, SC – October 30, 2022
The Chapel Without Walls
Habakkuk 2:1-5; Romans 1:16-23
A Sermon by John M. Miller
Texts – The righteous shall live by his faith. – Habakkuk 2:4b. For in it the righteousness of God is revealed through faith for faith; as it is written, “He who through faith is righteous shall live.” – Romans 1:17 (RSV)
The Middle Ages were a time of widespread superstition among most of the common people and even many of the affluent and well-educated. Evil spirits and demonic forces were thought to be everywhere, waiting to wreak havoc on unsuspecting, innocent victims.
It was believed that the night on which these devilish beings made their heaviest assault on hapless Christians was All Hallows Eve. We are more familiar with the term “Halloween.” All Hallows Eve or Halloween always occurs on October 31st. October 31st is the night before All Saints Day, which is always November 1. The Roman Catholic Church recognizes various saints throughout the year, but on All Saints Day, all of the saints of the Church are recognized and praised. All Saints Day is therefore the biggest celebration of saints, because all those who have been declared official saints of the Church are remembered with gratitude and thanksgiving.
The French word “Renaissance” means “re-birth.” The Renaissance began about 1450 CE. Instead of looking to medieval civilization for their inspiration, people started to look back to the classical period, when Greece and Roman culture was the primary influence on European life. In many respects, the Renaissance also was the genesis of the Protestant Reformation.
Martin Luther was a young monk associated with a monastic community of Augustinians in Wittenberg, Germany. He taught New Testament theology in the university there. Luther had become increasingly dismayed with trends that had evolved in the Catholic Church. He believed that the papacy had become corrupt. He was particularly upset by a means of raising funds to pay for St. Peter’s Cathedral in Rome, which was under construction during most of Luther’s lifetime.
In those days it was believed that when people died, they went directly to one of three divinely-determined locations: heaven, hell, or purgatory. The concept of purgatory is not biblical, but through the centuries it came to be perceived as a kind of way-station for those who were neither sufficiently saintly to go to heaven when they died nor sufficiently lost so as to be sent immediately to hell. Thus God consigned them to purgatory for a fixed number of years or centuries, after which they would be allowed into heaven.
However, the Church had come up with a means for sinners to escape purgatory sooner than would otherwise be their fate. They could pay for an ecclesiastical instrument that was called an indulgence. In the crassest terms (and Protestants have always tended to make it sound as crass as possible), the more you paid to the Church to become liberated from purgatory, the faster it happened. This appeared to Luther as though God indulged wealthy sinners more readily than poor ones. That especially got under his Teutonic skin.
Luther had been thinking about this issue for some time. He resolved to try to promote an academic debate to sort out whether this and many other Church stances were valid. Therefore he posted his famous “Ninety-Five Theses” on the door of the castle church in Wittenberg on All Hallows Eve, knowing that all the influential churchmen of the city would go through the door the next morning. Little did the brilliant scholar know what the ultimate result of his brash challenge would turn out to be. One thing led to another, and by Luther’s audacity and courage the Protestant Reformation was soon catapulted into existence.
Another of the questions that stuck in Luther’s theological craw was the relationship between what we now describe as “faith and works.” The word “works” connotes actions that the biblical law requires. For example, the Ten Commandments say that we should attend worship regularly (“Honor the sabbath day to keep it holy”), we should always tell the truth (“Do not bear false witness”), and so on. The Torah also says we should assist the orphan and widow to ease their difficult lives. The Church taught that salvation transpires from our righteous deeds in following the mandates of the religious law, as well as by our faith.
Luther insisted that salvation comes by faith alone, and not by works of the law. To corroborate that position biblically, he pointed both to the to the prophet Habakkuk and to the apostle Paul. Although Habakkuk is one of the so-called Minor Prophets, and his prophecy is only three chapters in length, it has a verse that was particularly dear to Luther’s heart: “Behold, he whose soul is not righteous within him shall fail, but the righteous shall live by his faith” (2:4). Paul quoted it in the first chapter of his letter to the Romans, when he said, “As it is written, ‘He who through faith is righteous shall live’” (1:17).
Countless Christians believe what Luther believed, namely, that faithful adherence to the proper theological ideas or doctrines is the only thing that saves us. Countless others believe that proper actions are what save us. Still others seem unable to grasp what this whole controversy is about.
The Church, including all branches of Christianity, is a flawed, fallible, and at times flimsy institution. It is easy for Protestants to castigate the Roman Catholic Church in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, but nearly everything else in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries was also in major disarray. In the late medieval period there was appalling corruption in government, economics, and culture, as well as religion. Without doubt Christianity needed to be reformed, but so did society, and that is what the Renaissance was about. The Reformation, which began fifty years later, was a concerted attempt to reform religion. Nonetheless, it was not a flawless operation. At times the Reformation was bloody and brutal.
People then believed in demons and evil spirits, but there were no demons or evil spirits, because there are no demons or evil spirits. Halloween overemphasizes the dark side of human behavior. There is a dark side, to be certain, but all Christians are saints, and it unhelpful and probably even unhealthy to focus too heavily or too long on the mistakes of humanity. All Saints Day, which will be celebrated by the liturgical churches two days from now, expresses thanks to God for the most exemplary of saints. Nevertheless all Christians, even the most sordid, are saints in their own way, because all of us have been sanctified by God.
It is devilish to give any attention at all to the devil. There is no devil, even though Martin Luther claimed that he once threw an inkwell at the purported Prince of Demons. He was convinced that happened, but I am convinced it didn’t. Luther was one of the most influential men is Christian history, yet he too had his failings. His language was uncommonly coarse (he would fit in very well in the twenty-first century), he may have imbibed too much of the golden liquid for which Germany is famous, and he was decidedly antisemitic and anti-Muslim. In that he was not alone; it was a time of anti-everything by somebody or another. The doctrinal inflexibility of Luther was a major factor in the Thirty Years War, which was waged between Protestants and Catholics. It began half a century after Luther died. In it thousands of soldiers and civilians on both sides were killed, and a few thousand others were executed for witchcraft. This was occurring at the same time alleged witches were being burned at the stake in Salem, Massachusetts. The early seventeenth century was a bleak period of history on both sides of the Atlantic.
The Catholic Church needed to be purged of its heavy-handed practices, but Protestants also engaged in actions that were surely an offense to both God and humanity. There was glory in the Reformation, but there also was gore.
Today is Reformation Sunday. The Reformation is being singled out for praise in thousands of churches all over the world, especially in those of the Lutheran tradition. This is both understandable and commendable. Yet it does not represent unsullied good, because the Reformation succeeded at the cost of many thousands of early deaths and the imposition of stringent punishments of Catholics by Protestants and of Protestants by Catholics. Sometimes one is tempted to declare of those tumultuous years what Mr. Shakespeare said of the Montagues and Capulets: “A plague on both your houses.”
Luther was the first of the most influential Protestant reformers. He and John Calvin both possessed extraordinary talents and intellects of great breadth. Each wrote the texts for hymns, but Luther wrote not only the text but the tune for A mighty fortress is our God. The Jewish-Christian composer, Felix Mendelssohn, wrote his Reformation Symphony on the occasion of the 300th anniversary of the publication of Luther’s Augsburg Confession. Strains of the famous Dresden Amen are heard in the first three movements, and the fourth movement features Mendelssohn’s variations on A mighty fortress. The symphony was not popular when the composer wrote it, perhaps because some thought it was anti-Catholic, which it wasn’t. It gained popularity when religion became less polarized. As an example, it was performed a few years ago by the Hilton Head Symphony Orchestra to resounding acclaim. The fourth movement stirs the spirit of those who think the Protestant Reformation was a necessary antithesis to the excesses of Roman Catholicism five centuries ago, of whom I am one. However, the many requiem masses of other composers also stir my spirit. I am ecumenically stirred by many types of church music.
Luther hated the biblical Letter of James. James, the brother of Jesus, who became head of the church in Jerusalem after Jesus died, is the man whom tradition says wrote the letter. Luther detested it because the writer said, “Faith without works is dead.” That contradicted the notion of justification by faith alone, which was Luther’s cardinal doctrine.
I used to get more wound up by what I considered to be improper thoughts and ideas than by improper behavior. Now I get more wound up by bad behavior, and less by what I consider faulty thinking. That may be either a blessing or a curse as a result of getting old. Humans can be pugnacious about ideas, but fortunately we seldom engage in fisticuffs because of it, or worse, bloodshed. It is when bad behavior turns violent that humanity plunges to its lowest depths. And from January 6, 2021 to the Great Gate of Kyiv, which used to be pronounced the Great Gate of “Kee-eff,” we’re seeing more and more really bad behavior. Millions of Christians around the world support autocratic politicians who are forcefully eliminating the freedoms of their own fellow citizens. They are applauding atrocious political behavior.
The entire Bible is a patchwork quilt of thoughts and ideas. Habakkuk, Romans, and James are legitimately included in it, as is Esther, which never once mentions God, and Revelation, which is an early second-century allegory which will probably never be properly understood in its entirety by anybody, although many think they can interpret every mind-bending puzzle presented in it.
Thank God for God, and for Jesus. Were it not for them, what we believe might be fundamentally little more than ignorant superstitions. Superstition was the sort of cockamamie thinking that led to the Renaissance and the Reformation. By the eighteenth century, John Locke, Edmund Burke, William Pitt, George Washington, John Adams, Thomas Jefferson, and James Madison came along. At last we were out of the bad times and into much better times.
These times are getting dark again. But, again, thank God for God, and for Jesus. It is possible we will survive our bad times relatively unscathed. We always have before. It could happen once more. And, as the old aphorism declares, Ecclesia Reformata Semper Reformanda: “The reformed Church is always reforming.”