Tag Archives: Martin Luther
Righteousness
I understand where all this comes from. It’s good to be personally holy, it’s good to be inclusive, it’s good to be active. I know what our denomination is trying to say by telling people that being Lutheran means doing God’s work. But I rankle when I hear it all the same.
To Be Made Free
God, he suddenly saw, did not send his Son to die for us in order to multiply the terrors of the law. God did not forgive our old sins in order to make us even more afraid of the sins that still lay ahead of us. God did not reveal his righteousness to the faithful in order to torment those faithful with a still higher standard of perfection than what they knew before. God’s righteousness is not the demand that we wring every last little imperfection from our crooked souls. Instead, it’s almost the opposite: God’s righteousness is the gift that makes us righteous, even though we are sinners, even though we are not just a little imperfect but are instead complete disasters, even though we know and want to know nothing at all about God and his love for us and for our neighbor.
Magic and Freedom
When we’re in an audience, we want to be led on, tricked, deceived by sleight of hand. In the real world, face to face, we don’t want that at all. We don’t want to be led on, tricked, manipulated. Instead we want to give ourselves freely to one another, and we want to receive the free gift of another person in return.
Righteous
This verse is like an explosion. How do we get right with God? How do we attain that righteousness with which God judges the world and condemns the wickedness of humanity? Do we have to humble ourselves before our husbands? Do we have to lord it over our wives? Do we have to follow “Biblical life principles”? Do we have to pray an hour every day? Will that get us to the righteousness of God?
In and Among Us
Now for Luther, the big problem was that people didn’t pray boldly enough. They didn’t expect good things from God, because they were afraid of God. He compares the person who asks for too little from God to a beggar. A rich and mighty emperor invites the beggar to ask for whatever he might desire, prepared to give him “great and princely gifts.” And if the beggar asks only for a dish of beggar’s broth, he would be “considered a rogue and a scoundrel who had made a mockery of his imperial majesty’s command and was unworthy to come into his presence.”
Doubting Thomas: Take and Eat
So how does Jesus answer Thomas’s doubt? He appears also to Thomas, and he invites the very violation that Thomas says he demands. And I like to imagine that he does it just as Professor Most suggests: gently, sadly, lovingly; seeking not simply to be Thomas’s Lord and God, but his protector and friend. Jesus had his hands and side pierced by his enemies, and now he invites a disciple to do the same thing. He has suffered to redeem the whole human race, and yet he is willing to suffer again in order to bring his friend to faith.
Good Friday: Flee or Stay
Here’s a cheerful question for Good Friday: Should Christians flee a deadly plague?
We may not have had occasion to ask ourselves this. We do have to think about how to manage our own viral infections and those of others. We watch helplessly as a stomach flu or cold rips through a whole household. More and more we are faced with outbreaks of things like Ebola or Zika, and we have to ask how to rightly respond to them.
But deadly plagues were a constant feature of life before modern sanitation and antibiotics. And so it happened that Martin Luther was asked, in 1527, whether a Christian was allowed to flee a city that had an outbreak of a deadly disease in a German city.
Ash Wednesday: Create in Me
(Note: I preached this sermon at Wicker Park Lutheran Church on Ash Wednesday, 2011) Sisters and brothers, grace to you and peace from God our Father and the Lord Jesus Christ. Amen. “Human love starts with the object,” Martin Luther wrote in an academic dispute in the year 1518. “The love of God does not […]
I Wrote a Book. Why Did I Write a Book?
When you write compulsively, people will tell you by way of encouragement or indulgence that you should write a book. The logic of it may not be quite clear, but it can be very persuasive all the same. I heard this and said it to myself over the years, lacking only a firm grasp on […]
My Back Pages: Saints and Sinners
(Note: I wrote this for The Daily in November, 2011. It is no longer extant, so I am republishing it here). In America today, we may not know what it means to be a saint, but it can’t be said that we lack for opinions on what a saint is not. Or at least who […]
Brutally Ordinary Things 