Here I Stand

Well today we are taking a break from our 1 Corinthians studybecause of an event that happened 500 years ago today, an eventwe call the protestant reformation. Historical anniversaries arealways moments for the world to look back and remember somethingsignificant that happened in history. In fact I was just curious andtyped into google trends how this works.

So every October you have these spikes where people do a littleresearch. A couple more spikes on famous people's birthdays andfinal exams. Then summer hits and everyone is out of school andgoes water skiing instead. And the cycle continues. Well this year,there is quite a bit more interest than normal because we hit the 500year mark.

So I'm excited to take a Sunday away from 1 Corinthians tocelebrate the reformation. We will plan on celebrating again inanother 500 years.

But what really are we celebrating? Is that even the right word? Thereformation produced protestants. The word was built our Englishword protest. We celebrating protestors, rebels of the church? Someprotesting can be legitimate and other protesting is just justificationfor the flesh to rebel. So what was it was that they were protestingand was it legitimate?

Luther's Backdrop

If you look at protests in history they are almost always madepossible when cultural pressures build and build and build and thensuddenly, the smallest little touch from a feather burst the bubble.The French Revolution, the recent Arab Spring would be well-knownexamples. From a 20,000 foot view, this is exactly what happened inthe reformation. A small town monk named Martin Luther was thatguy with a feather who providentially arrived when that bubble wasstretched to it's quivering limit and there was just the softest touchand the bubble that had been forming for hundreds of years burst. IfLuther wouldn't have been there, someone else would have.

Now what do I mean? What were the pressures? What were theissues of his day? Probably a thousand things you could say here,but for our sake this morning we will organize our thoughts aroundthe themes coming out of our 1 Corinthians series on strength andweakness:

1. Weakness of the Peasant

Luther grew up in the most religiously conservative segment ofsociety, the peasant. The Peasants were the working class. Theytilled the earth. Luther's father was a miner. He worked his whole lifeunderground, forcing the earth to yield it's treasures.

Peasants of course were poor. They were in servile relationship tothe lords. So being a peasant meant a certain amount of economicweakness.

But there was also educational weakness. Now I don't mean theydidn't have access to education. In fact, their education mirrored

their working life. It was hard. I found it pretty enlightening to thinkabout how schools went about instructing their children.

But despite their education, despite their discipline, they wereignorant of the one thing that really mattered, knowledge of the Bibleitself. Sure they had memorized pieces of it but they had no ideahow it fit into the whole, the context, the big picture. Nothing.

So because they did not have access to the truth, the common manhad a mixture of Christianity, strangely mixed German Paganism,superstition and folklore. For them the woods were populated withelves, fairies, gnomes, mermen, sprites, and witches. Lakes werepopulated by devils.

Strip a man of any meaningful education and empty his bankaccount - this is the very definition of weakness. And this was thepeasant.

2. Power of the Church

Now by contrast, it's almost impossible to imagine the power of theRoman Catholic church during the period of the middle ages but wewill try nonetheless. We can break their power down to a fewcategories.

Religious Power. The sacraments could literally save your soul.Mass, Baptism were not optional. They contained saving power. Itdidn't matter if you believed or not. That wasn't part of the equation.It was the eating of the bread that priest transformed into the bodyof Christ that saved your soul.Social Power. The perish priest who played this dominating roll invirtually every community, baptizing, marrying, hearing theirconfession, providing last rites at death, burying them. Everymeaningful event of life passed through the church so they hadtremendous social influence.Philanthropic Power. The church was the only social service thatexisted. State social services was an inconceivable concept. Itprovided all the social services for the poor, ran orphanages,provided education. That endears many.Educational Power. The common man met exactly one person intheir life who could read the Bible and that was their priest becausethe Bible was in Latin.Economic Power. They also owned 1/3 of the land in all of Europewhich made it the most powerful force in the world by any measure.The Roman Catholic church invented our modern system of takingout loans, charging interest, etc. They had incredible amounts ofcash.Political Power. The pope claimed authority over all the kings ofEurope as the successor of the Roman emperor.

So can you imagine. This would be like combining Rome,Washington DC and Wall street into a single office. So you have theweakness of the peasant over here and the Power of the Churchover here and it's pulling this thing drum tight and along come Lutherand lays his feather down and the whole thing erupts.

Here's how that happened.

Luther's Entrance Into Religion

The story begins as Luther, a university student studying law, wastraveling home from school when he was caught in a freakthunderstorm. A lighting bolt fell from heaven and struck him andsplintered a tree next to him. He cried out, "Saint Ann, save me! I willbecome a monk."Saint Ann, by the way, was the Patron Saint of themines and since he came from a mining family, this was like Luther'sspecial community saint.

Well, Luther survived. And much to the disappointment to his father,he left what would have been a lucrative career in law and enterd thenot so lucrative career of monking. He entered an AugustinianMonastery which was among the strictest that existed.

To give you some idea of what is meant by strict, we actually have adocument that gives us the schedule of the monks that lived in theMonastery where Luther enrolled himself.

So in these disciplined conditions he spent the next two years tryingto find peace with God. Luther had an unusually sensitive spirit inthis regard. He was desperate to make peace with God. Desperateto find assurance. Now to be sure, there were certainly culturalpressures that aggravated this already sensitive soul.

The medieval religion intentionally juxtaposed fear and hope. For ourbook club this month we read a biography of Martin Luther byRonald Bainton and there's a great quote in his book that says, "Thefear of hell was stoked, not because men lived in fear of it, butprecisely because they did not." So now you've amped up fear, butstirs up this emotional reaction of despair, so now you have to offersome hope. And that came in the form of purgatory. Your sin isserious, but perhaps you can burn off that impurity for a fewthousand years.

So you have these two knobs to manipulate people. Thetemperature of hell and the mercy of the father. Now to illustrate howthese messages of fear and mercy were communicated, here's awoodcarving that apparently was very famous in Luther's Day. Itcame from a bestselling book entitled "The Art of Dying" written inLatin.

The Art of Dying

Now in this carving you have here, demons tempt the dying manwith crowns (a medieval allegory to earthly pride) under thedisapproving gaze of Mary, Christ and God.

This book was published in a time in European history where therewas a lot of disruption and upheaval, the most significant of whichwas the great plague in which 1/3 of the population of Europe died,about 20 million people. There were countless wars. So many hadsuffered terribly. Death was not a concept. Death was on the mind.

So the question on everyone's mind is, what happens when youdie? And this book tries to help. Since in my study it seemed thatthis book was so widely known and was so influential I wanted tospend some time in it. I found some Latin versions online but thereweren't any translations available. After a stupid amount of time, Ifinally tracked one down on microphiche from the University ofOttowa.

It was so interesting I ended up reading the whole thing. And it reallyhelped me understand something fundamental about the reformationthat had hitherto escaped me. Here was my path of discovery.

So the book is structured in 6 chapters with the premise being thatat the hours of death you will find these incredibly strong temptationsto abandon the faith. So in every chapter we are presented with anaccusation from the devil you will face at the time of death and thenyou have some advice on how to resist that attack.

So being biased that this was the source of much fear and incorrecttheology I was expecting to find total heresy and I open up the bookand the first line says,

No I'm not sure I can find much wrong with that. Keep reading.

Wow, this is pretty good stuff.

But then in other places I found myself just cringing and even angry

at this author who is confusing and casting doubt into the hearts andminds of those who are wondering how to die well.

In a section speaking of pride, he says, Everyone who dies istempted to pride. So here's the remedy.

So he goes through all temptations with mixture of great solid gospelaffirmations and what amounts to works based salvation. Finally hecloses with these finally instructions. It's a pretty good summary ofeverything he says. Here's what you need to do in the last momentsof death:

And that will protect you in your hour of death.

Now what I want to illustrate here is something really important tounderstand about the reformation. The Roman Catholic churchemphasizes the importance of faith. Absolutely! They totally agree

that Jesus has saving power. They totally agree that the Bible isrock solid source of authority.

But the battle cry of the reformation was not faith, it was FAITHALONE. It was not grace it was GRACE alone. It was not scripture itwas SCRIPTURE ALONE. In these final instructions on death youcan see the piling on of sources of saving power. Pray to Mary, thesign of the cross, angels, and sure, we have no problem with faith inGod, we will add that too.

And what does that produce? One word. UNCERTAINTY.

You have these carvings showing devils dragging men by their hairkicking and screaming into hell.You have fears of devils in lakes and streams.You have fears of purgatory. You have all this uncertainty.

You are never quite sure if you've got enough of the right thing tosave you. The battle cry of the reformation was you need one thingand if you have it your saved. FAITH IN JESUS CHRIST.

So you have to understand when Luther entered the Monastery hewas thoroughly conditioned by books and teaching just like this one.He took this deadly serious. Why did Luther become a Monk? Forthe same reason everyone became a monk - to save his soul! Whenhe was struck by lighting it reminded him very seriously about thereality of death. He wanted peace with God. He spent hours inconfession. He would torment his body.

He said of his own self-abasement:

He tried to quiet his soul through self effort. All of Luther's efforts didnothing to assuage his guilt and conscience. He would frustrate hispriest as he confessed for hours and left uncertain that maybe hehad forgotten to confess a sin. Perhaps he was unaware of somesin that would condemn him. Did he give enough? Did he chastisehis body enough?

So what does a good Monk do? He tried harder! Through a series ofcircumstances he was presented with the opportunity to visit Rome.Now this was important to Luther because Rome was the greateststorehouse for relics. A relic was simply a physical object that hadsomething to do with the story of Christianity, and people collectedthese things and by looking at them you would receive some sort ofspiritual benefit. Rome was the collection.

Bones of 40 popes and 76,000 martyrs.Rome had a piece of Moses’ burning bushRome had the chains of St. Paul andThe scissors with which Emperor Domitian clipped the hair of St.

John.The walls in a nearby street had white stains? How did they getthere? They were created by stones which had been picked up bythe angry mob and thrown at St. Peter but the moment they lefttheir hands the stones turned to snowballs hit the wall and stainingit.Another church had a coin Judas used for betraying our Lord. Itsvalue had greatly increased, because now you could take fourteenhundred years off purgatory by merely looking at it.

So Luther visited with an especially eager anticipation. He wasclimbing the very stairs upon which Pilate condemned Jesus. Hewas on hands and knees repeating the Lord's prayer for each oneand kissing each step for good measure in the hope of delivering asoul from purgatory. Luther regretted that his own father and motherwere not yet dead and in purgatory so that he might transfer some ofthis merit on them. Instead he determined to release hisGrandfather. The stairs were climbed, the Pater Noster wererepeated, the steps were kissed and what happened when hereached the top he experienced something that blew his mind. Whathappened? NOTHING! And waves of doubt began to crush him,“Who knows whether it is so?”

You see what you have to understand about Martin Luther is thatthe whole revolt against the Roman Catholic church came as aresult of trying to follow the very way prescribed by her.

He tried to quiet his soul through self-effort, through the merits ofrelics, through confession, and the doubt never went away!

He began to violently despair. He wrote,

Now Luther thought to himself. Is this really the God I worship?

The way he began to discover the true God came unexpectedly.Luther was browsing around in a library and saw this giant book. Hehad no idea that the Bible had even been collected into a single

volume. Of course it captured his interest. What he was looking atwas the Latin Vulgate translated by Jerome in 380AD.

You have to remember in Luther's day that the Bible was very, veryrare. Pre-printing press every single copy would have to be done byhand on very expensive paper. Tremendously expensive. To get anidea, a hand copied Bible might cost $30,000-50,000 in ourcurrency and would take 10 months. We talk all the time aboutreading your Bible. We are a Bible church. We can hardly evenconceive an arrangement where we would even have church withoutbringing a Bible, comparing what we hear to the Bible.

So Luther was looking at a Bible and so he began to read it.

He asked himself, who is this God? How does one find peace withhim? Many things he read were confusing to him. I'm summarizingquickly here but he came across a verse that would rock him to thecore.

Here's some of his own words as he reflect upon it.

Full Scale Conflict

What Luther was reading was not squaring with what he was seeingon the ground. And it was the practice of indulgences that wasparticularly aggravating to him.

Now it's helpful to explain the whole system of indulgences.

The assumption built in is that everyone needs to have a certainlevel of goodness to stand before God. Every sin we commit has tobe dealt with and punished one at a time.

How did we deal with each sin? Well, we need to divide sin into it'stwo parts - guilt and punishment. The priest could absolve you ofguilt but you still had to pay the punishment of that sin through eitherpenance in this life or purgatory in the next life.

Most of us are horribly in debt. But as it turns out, certain peoplewere so good they actually did more good than they needed for theirown entrance into heaven. So there's a surplus of good that getspooled up in what is called the merit of the Saints and the Pope canissues indulgences that transfer that surplus good to others.

At first indulgences were conferred on those who sacrificed or riskedtheir lives in fighting against the infidel, and then were extended tothose who, unable to go to the Holy Land, and finally extended tothose who made contributions to the church because after all thiswhole forgiveness thing ain't cheap.

By the time it hit the streets in Luther's day you had this elaboratesystem that applied to both the living and the dead, was graduated insuch a way that you purchased at a percentage of your income soboth the poor and rich would sacrifice with a similar sting.

Essentially this enabled people to purchase insurance to escape theflames of hell. Now the natural question comes, well how much do Ineed? The ingeniousness of the system was that you could neverknow the length of your sentence. After all, your life isn't over yet.

You could sin more and then of course it's up to God and God aloneto set the terms. Who are we to know that? So you couldn't knowhow long your sentence would last but the length of the reductionwas known to down to the year and the day.

So maybe you have 100,000 years in purgatory awaiting you, youknow with that affair and all, but this indulgence is going to take careof 80,331 years of it. So it's gonna cost you, but that's worth it, don'tyou think?

Now in his hometown of Wittenberg a collection of indulgences weresent by the pope to Fredrick the Wise so that the power of relicscould be experienced by those not wealthy enough to travel toRome.

And you have the same kinds of goofy relics but the interesting thingabout this collection was that if you viewed it you could reduce yourstay in purgatory by 1,902,202 years and 270 days.

Now just that number could invoke terror in the minds of people. Ihave no idea how long my sentence is, but this indulgence willreduce it by almost 2 million years. Wow.

Luther began to speak out first moderately then more strongly in hissermons against this. How can a pope take away sins? That's God'sjob. And if he could why didn't he just do it for everyone right away?Should it kind of be, you know, illegal to sell forgiveness? Doesn'tthat defeat the whole point?

The deliberate sell of indulgences as a way to make money reallyamped up when a Friar by the name of Johaan Tetzel came toWitenberg selling indulgences. He was trying to raise money for St

Peter's Basilica, the location where St. Peter was martyred by Nero.

This was an incredibly ambitious project. It would be a monstrousstructure that could hold 60,000 people at once. And for the record,this sucker was not cheap. In modern dollars the estimates rangefrom 600 million to several billion.

So you need a way to raise money and in order to do that you've gotto take the manipulation knob and peg it. He was caching in all hiscoupons. Friar Tetzel came into a neighboring town and here is whathe preached:

Listen now, God and St. Peter call you. Consider the salvation ofyour souls and those of your loved ones departed. You priest, younoble, you merchant, you virgin, you matron, you youth, you oldman, enter now into your church, which is the Church of St. Peter.Visit the most holy cross erected before you and ever imploring you.Have you considered that you are lashed in a furious tempest amidthe temptations and dangers of the world, and that you do not knowwhether you can reach the haven, not of your mortal body, but ofyour immortal soul? Consider that all who are contrite and haveconfessed and made contribution will receive complete remission ofall their sins. Listen to the voices of your dear dead relatives andfriends, beseeching you and saying, “Pity us, pity us. We are in diretorment from which you can redeem us for a pittance.” Do you notwish to? Open your ears. Hear the father saying to his son, the

mother to her daughter, “We bore you, nourished you, brought youup, left you our fortunes, and you are so cruel and hard that nowyou are not willing for so little to set us free. Will you let us lie here inflames? will you delay our promised glory?” Remember that you areable to release them, for As soon as the coin in the coffer rings, Thesoul from purgatory springs. Will you not then for a quarter of a florinreceive these letters of indulgence through which you are able tolead a divine and immortal soul into the fatherland of paradise?

Two things to note: 1. The manipulation factor was off the chartshere. 2. So John Tezel was selling an extremely rare indulgence, thecomplete remission of sins. No matter what you have done, nomatter what you do for the rest of your life, you have a certifieddocument from the pope himself, with his seal, certifiying that youwill bypass purgatory and go strait to heaven.

Now is that not appealing to the flesh or what? But the more Lutherread the Bible, the more he saw the wicked motives of the churchthe more he spoke out. These poor peoples were being sold scrapsof toilet paper (he used stronger language than that). The more hestudied the Bible he discovered that God wanted faith not works.

And thanks to the printing press, this whole Bible study thing wasgetting easier. In fact in 1516 a scholar named Erasumus had justfinished publishing the first Greek New Testament. It had existed inpieces and fragments but never had there been an attempt to pull itall together in a single manuscript.

So Luther takes his freshly printed Greek NT with ink still wet andbegins comparing the Greek manuscripts with Jerome's Latinvulgate translation which by now is over a thousand years old.

He came upon the Greek word metanoia which is the word forrepentance. And if you've been in the church for any length of timeyou know this is an importance word. Repentance in Greek means afundamental change of mind. It's a change of values. It's aconfession of wrongly held beliefs. We are familiar with this concept.But the Vulgate translated it, "do penance." He says, "That's notright!"

Penance as they understood it was an act of self-abasement,mortification or devotion performed to show sorrow for sin. So forexample a monk might "do penance" by sleeping outside without ablanket to show sorrow over his sin.

Now think of how significant a difference this makes in certainverses of the Bible,

"Repent for the Kingdom of Heaven is at hand." vs "Do Penance(get busy whipping yourself, giving to the church, visiting relics)" forthe kingdom of heaven is at hand.

So seeing the abuses, feeling disparity. He famously wrote 95 thesisand nailed them to the Castle church door at Witenberg. Also, justfor the record, this was not ruining property. The church board waskind of like the bulletin board at starbucks where people could justpost community information.

His intension here was to have a debate. He wasn't trying to start arevolution. It wasn't dramatic in any way. In fact, he wasn't evenappealing to the masses. The thesis were written in Latin whichwould have necessarily excluded most of the population. He wasn'ttrying to break off from the church. Now to be sure they were forgedin passion and anger but he was hoping to wake people up, correct

some of the abuses he was seeing.

Well someone got ahold of them, translated it into German andthanks to Guttenberg's newly invented printing press, begandistributing them to the masses. Eventually it made its way to Rome.This small town Friar, he was truly a nobody, this document worksits way to the top.

Now here's a few of the articles and you can imagine when you readthem that the pope was not happy. Again, take this time to educateyourself. Just read them. It's so intersting. I have heard the 95 thesismy whole life but never actually read them. They are very good.

This started a series of debates where Luther was forced deeperand deeper into the Scriptures and his views came to be seen asincreasingly more and more radical.

Christian were saved by faith alone

The sacraments did not have the power to save souls.Then far from being infalible the church and the pope made errorsall the time.He said the priesthood was a human invention and then peopledidn't even need a priest instead Luther described a priesthood ofall believers.

So this went from a call to repeal indulgences to a revolution. Aspromised I'm going to speed up the details of his life going forwardhere. Luther's work becomes increasingly more public. Hisarguments ressonate with the common man and he becomessomewhat of a folk hero.

You have the Heidelberg Disputation where Luther is asked todefend himself.That didn't go well so Luther appears before Cardinal Cajetan inAugsburg, and is asked to recant. Luther appeals to GeneralCouncil, he absolutely refuses to recant.Then you have the Leipzig Debate between Luther and John Eck.Debates in those days were very different than today. This debatewent on for 18 days. Luther refused to budge.Finally the big guns are called in, Leo X issues papal bull, givingLuther sixty days to recant or be excommunicated.

The word bull is short for bulla which is Latin for seal. The point isthis is an official document. Here's an example of a Papal Bull from1637.

You can see the lead seal at the bottom. Luther is not intimidated.He speaks out more and more freely publishing three treaties. Forexample in the The Freedom of the Christian, "Even the antichristhimself, if he were to come, could think of nothing to add to thispapacies wickedness."

Luther burns the papal bull and a copy of Canon Law

Thomas Linsey a historian said, "It is scarcely possible for us in the20th century to imagine the thrill that went through all of Germanyand all of Europe that a poor monk had just burnt a papal bull." Canpeople do that?

Probably the most famous showdown was when Luther appearsbefore Diet of Worms. He was received as a hero as he walked intothe town. Here a small town friar monk appears before thecardinals, bishops, and the pope himself. Also present was theemperor of the Roman empire. All his books were laid out beforethem. Do you recant?

Luther somewhat evasively answers the question. And they askhim, speak plainly. Do you recant.

I ask you, Martin—answer candidly and without horns—do you or doyou not repudiate your books and the errors which they contain?”Luther replied,

Charles V issues the Edict of Worms, declaring Luther a publicoutlaw, sentanced him to death as a criminal and making it illegal tohave Luther’s books.They gave him 21 days safe passage back to Wittenberg.On the way home Frederick the Wise kidnaps and hides Luther atthe Wartburg Castle for eleven months gives him a new name FriarTuck, grows a beard.Luther translates New Testament into German in 5 months. Hewanted the Bible to be "in the hands, eyes, hearts and ears of thepeople."Luther publishes Large Catechism, April, and Small Catechism.Eventually you had a social revolution. Luther gave a voice to longstanding greviences between clergy and the common man.

Peasant revolt. Revolt of the knights.Luther begins getting ill. Some think it a result of constant bodilyabuse. He had dietary disorders, etc. He boasted of how loudly hecould fart.Buried under the pulpit at Wartberg.

Take Aways1. God's Word has Power. May we always love this book. This book is

the source of truth.

Luther talked a lot about the externality of the word. The objectivenature of the Word of God. It exists above us. Spirit is inside us.Clay toy.

2. Salvation is through grace alone by faith alone.

The world says, the more you do the more you will be loved.

So many people look in the mirror. Does God love me? Of course hedoes. Better than that person. Or the opposite. Does God love me?Of course not. What is there to love?

Throw down the mirror. It comes from Christ. I can't earn or achieveit. I can only receive it.

3. Studying the reformation can remind us that we inherit far morethan we realize. We did not invented the church.

I think my generation and even more so the millenials behind me,who think that the church is something we invented. We arestanding on the shoulders of those who have gone before us. Somuch has been handed to us. Men and women died and wereburned at the stake to defend and uphold truths we preach as

obvious and assumed. And today we want to look at how God useda depressed, broken, sinful, powerful, interesting man to open up theworld to us.

4. Standing against the culture is not easy.

the one always made by heretics. You do nothing but renew theerrors of Wyclif and Hus. How will the Jews, how will the Turks,exult to hear Christians discussing whether they have been wrongall these years! Martin, how can you assume that you are the onlyone to understand the sense of Scripture? Would you put yourjudgment above that of so many famous men and claim that youknow more than they all? You have no right to call into question themost holy orthodox faith, instituted by Christ the perfect lawgiver,proclaimed throughout the world by the apostles, sealed by the redblood of the martyrs, confirmed by the sacred councils, defined bythe Church in which all our fathers believed until death and gave tous as an inheritance, and which now we are forbidden

Important Announcement

Speaking of not easy, we need to remember something veryimportant. The reformation is taking place all the time all over theworld.

Remember I showed you the graph at the beginning showing therising interest in reformation.

Well, here's where those hits are coming from.

The people that care about Martin Luther are those who have beenimpacted by the gospel. North Korea doesn't care about MartinLuther, but there are Martin Luther's in North Korea.

Saudia Arabia doesn't care about Martin Luther but there are MartinLuthers in Saudia Arabia.

Next week all across America churches will be praying for thepersecuted church. And we will take time in our service to do exactlythis. We will mix the service up just a little bit and just pray for theMartin Luther's of the world who not 500 years ago, but today aretrying to have the gospel break into their culture.

We will close by singing "A Mighty Fortress is Our God" Luther'smost famous Hymn.

He was weak.He was sickOpened his home to those who were dying of black plagueYoungest son was on the brink of deathHe writes this Psalm out of Psalm 46