October 29, Salvation by Grace Through Faith

“Salvation by grace through faith,” was the rally cry for the Protestant Reformation.  The problem is, what does it mean?  I doubt that you use it often, or even any of the words.  How often do words like grace, faith, and salvation come up in conversations outside church?  Pretty rarely I’m guessing.  If the idea really has become obsolete then we might just as well let it gather dust in the pages of history books from 500 years ago. 

But the idea has not become obsolete.  And in fact it remains every bit as relevant today as it did then.  If we turn back the clock 500 years we’ll find dynamics very similar to what we experience today, only today they are a lot more subtle.

            500 years ago in Europe most every person was a Christian, they considered themselves to be sinful and that they would fall under God’s wrath.  They knew that when they died they were going to get it for every sin and misdeed they committed while they were alive.  Many people saw God as a harsh and demanding taskmaster.  They worked hard hoping that their good deeds would outweigh their bad deeds.

Through a series of practices the church helped people to ease their consciences.  Priests would hear confessions and offer suggestions to make up for the misdeeds.  Sometimes a misdeed could easily be made up for.  If you stole a loaf of bread from a baker’s cart and you confessed it to the priest, the priest would tell you that to make up for the sin you had to go back to the baker, apologize and pay for the bread.   But some sins weren’t so easy to make up for.  Let’s say you neglected the steps to your house and they became rotten.  Then your neighbor visited, the steps collapsed and he broke his leg.  How are you going to make up for that?  You can’t really go out and break your leg to be in solidarity with your neighbor!  So the priest would suggest a substitute action.  That substitute action was called an indulgence.  It all started out innocently enough, but by the late Middle Ages indulgences had become a commodity that were bought and sold.  Hard working poor people, afraid for the safety of their souls, worked even harder to make up for their sins.  Some sacrificed food, medicine and other necessities in order to have money to buy indulgencies; telling themselves they were making a sacrifice in this limited lifetime in order to buy an eternity of happiness.

            In all fairness I must say that this practice was not abused in most places, but in some, especially Germany, greedy church and political leaders discovered that selling indulgences for money was a cash cow.  It is this excess that inspired people like Martin Luther to risk their lives to stop it.  Their central cry became, “Salvation by grace through faith.”

            So how does any of that relate to today?  Indeed people no longer sacrifice their health and wellbeing to buy tickets to reduce the punishment for their sins from churches.  But I like the phrase from John Calvin, another of the great reformers, “The human heart is a factory for idols.”  Let me paraphrase Calvin here:  The human mind is stuffed with presumption that it understands the world around it.  It then imagines a god to suit what it sees.  The mind labors in dullness, sinks in its own ignorance, and vainly creates an empty phantom in the place of God.  To this another evil is added.  The god whom the person created inwardly is embodied outwardly.  The mind, in this way, conceives the idol, and the hand gives it birth.

            Or maybe to use more modern language: We think we understand the world, and thus we think we understand God.  We then try to live up to what we think we understand.  Calvin said the heart was a factory for idols.  Everyone has a god.  I don’t care if you’re the staunchest atheist in the world, you still have a god.  Every person looks around at the world, does the best he or she can to make sense of it, and then tries to live within the sense that he or she has made.  The thing or the place you look to for contentment, for safety, for approval, and for wholeness is your god.

            All too often people think of God as some ethereal force subtly at work at the edges of the universe.  Or perhaps they think of God as a mere concept leftover from the ignorant past that should be done away with if humanity is to ever get ahead.  But that is the wrong conception of God.  Again, where you look for approval, safety and contentment is your god.

            The dynamics of American life today have a lot of parallels to what Luther found in the 16^th Century.  Today most people do not fear God, but they do have one.  I call it the god of being a good person.  And people will drive themselves to exhaustion in service to it.

            What does being a good person look like?  Well, you have to work hard.  You want to be as educated as you can be to contribute at your highest potential.  Very little laziness is allowed in good people.  A good person is: a responsible employee, and a good spouse, and a good parent, and a good neighbor, and if you have elderly parents, a good son or daughter.  A good person pays bills on time, has a good credit score, and lives on a balanced budget.  A good person has a well-maintained and reasonably clean and tidy home.  A good person gets to his or her kids sporting events and other school activities.  A good person eats healthily, and is environmentally conscious.  A good person donates to charities and does service projects.  After all, don’t we force our kids to do service projects so they can grow up to be good people?  The list can go on and on.  To sum it up: in order to be a good person you have to do it, do it all, do it all well, make it look effortless, and look good while doing it.

            The god of being a good person will consume everything you are.  It’ll leave you run down and exhausted.  The god of being a good person does not forgive, for you feel guilty at every failure.  You feel responsible for every mistake your child makes.  You feel that other people around you who also worship the god of being a good person shame you if you run into financial difficulties or have a nervous breakdown, or your child gets into trouble with the law or any number of things.  Facebook, Instagram, Twitter and others put it in front of your face every day the things that other good people are doing.  Why aren’t you just as good?

            As a pastor I can’t tell you how many times I’ve heard people say, “I know it’s important but I just don’t have time to do things for the church.”  But I know the feeling, for I am no better.  I try to be a good spouse and a good father and a good son to my mother and a good neighbor, and environmentally conscious, and help out with the Boy Scouts, and on and on it goes.  As for finding time to give to the church… well I can be thankful I’m on the payroll of the church; otherwise I too would have no time to spare for it!

            500 years have passed but nothing has changed.  People still worship an all-demanding, unforgiving god.  Perhaps the church isn’t involved this time and wracked with corruption to boot, but the religion of being a good person is brutal.  And in the religion of being a good person what is the path to salvation?  I hear it all the time when I do the funeral of a person who wasn’t active in a church:  “She didn’t belong to a church but she was a good person.  I’m sure God loves her.”  Ha!  That sounds to me like the religion of being a good person has a salvation plan – works righteousness.  You earn your way to heaven by being a… no surprise, good person.  If you weren’t a good person?  Well, we just don’t talk about that.

            We are in just as desperate need for the message of salvation by grace through faith today as people were 500 years ago!

            Salvation by grace through faith first acknowledges there is a God, the real God; not some god imagined up by our own limited knowledge.  God is God.  We talked about this a bit last week.  God’s ways are beyond our ways.  God’s knowledge is beyond our knowledge.  We do well to remember that.

            Secondly, salvation by grace through faith acknowledges the ultimate nature of God.  God is not a demanding taskmaster making us take on the impossible task of earning our way to salvation.  God is gracious.

            What does grace really mean?  It’s not a prayer you say before a meal or a woman’s name.  It isn’t even the 15 days your insurance company gives you after your bill is due.  Grace means unmerited favor.  It means you get something you don’t deserve.

            God’s grace to us does many things; too many to list here lest we be here all day and our German lunch will get cold.  I want to conclude with just one thing God’s grace does: it saves us from destroying ourselves.

            God loves you.  God holds you safe and secure even when you don’t feel it, even when your faith feels weak; and even when you don’t believe in God, God still holds you.  God favors you even if you don’t deserve it.  And God does the work to save you.  You aren’t strong enough to do it no matter how hard you try.  So may the reformation message of salvation by grace through faith resonate solidly in your heart, and let you live in true freedom so that you can enjoy being a human (imagine that!), and find delight in what God has done.