If you tried to read the title of today’s sermon in your bulletin, you saw a lot of strange-looking chicken scratchings that didn’t look anything at all like words you could recognize: Εἶς μίαν ἁγίαν καθολικήν καὶ ἀποστολικήν ἐκκλησίαν. If you guessed that these words are in the Greek language, you would be right. A few minutes you actually spoke all but one of those words – in English, of course – but I’m not going to translate them quite yet.
Because first I want to talk about the prophet Jeremiah. Roughly 600 years before the birth of Jesus and more than 2,000 years before the Reformation, Jeremiah said: “Behold, the days are coming, declares the Lord, when I will make a new covenant with the house of Israel and the house of Judah.” This new covenant will be based not on the Law but on the Gospel, for as God proclaimed through the mouth of His prophet: “I will forgive their iniquity, and I will remember their sin no more.” This covenant is, of course, the new covenant in Christ’s blood, as Jesus will tell His disciples on Maundy Thursday: “this is my blood of the covenant, which is poured out for many for the forgiveness of sins.”
It is this Gospel covenant that defines Christianity. Simply put, this is what the Christian faith is: salvation in Christ alone, for He alone forgives our sins.
This Gospel covenant ultimately became the defining issue of the Reformation which we celebrate on this day. The questions, for Martin Luther and for many other reformers, all boiled down to this: does Jesus forgive sins completely, or do we need to do something to complete this covenant? Are we required to perform certain penitential works so that we might obtain God’s grace? Do we need indulgences to help us out? Do we need to add our own merits as well as merits of the saints to Christ’s own merits, or is what He has done enough for all of us? This new covenant that God proclaimed in Jeremiah says absolutely nothing about our efforts or our merits or penitential works or even buying indulgences that are supposedly based on someone else’s merits. This new covenant is nothing less than complete and total forgiveness in Christ. Remember what God said: “I will forgive their iniquity, and I will remember their sin no more.”
In our first reading today from the 14th chapter of the Book of Revelation, we heard St. John proclaim: “Then I saw another angel flying directly overhead, with an eternal gospel to proclaim to those who dwell on earth, to every nation and tribe and language and people.” What John saw was the Gospel being proclaimed through Christ’s Holy Church. The Gospel has never ceased to be proclaimed in Christ’s Church. It is an everlasting Gospel against which our Lord says that even the gates of hell will not prevail.
But there are times when it seems like hell actually has prevailed. That certainly was the case 500 years ago. The Gospel of forgiveness of sins through Christ, the very foundation of the Christian Church, was being obscured. It was so obscured that most Christians had never even heard it, at least not in its fullness. Those of us who have watched the Luther movie in our Bible Class during these past weeks heard him say that even as a monk and priest he had never read the Gospel – which was typical of many monks and priests in his day. The angel’s words seemed to have been swallowed up by hell, drowned out by popes and bishops and priests who were preaching a very different message – a message that made Christ’s Gospel just part of the equation, a strange conglomeration that turned grace into works and works into grace.
But the Gospel was never truly nor entirely swallowed up. Hell could not defeat it. The Gospel that the prophet Jeremiah proclaimed and that St. John’s angel proclaimed in Revelation chapter 14 is an everlasting Gospel. It never ceases to be proclaimed, even though it may seem that almost everyone else is proclaiming something different.
The Reformation that we celebrate today was never meant to be the start of something new. Luther and his followers were not a bunch of radical rebels, looking to overturn the Roman Catholic church to start a new Protestant – a new Lutheran – church. Luther desperately wanted Roman Catholic church leaders to recognize the errors and false teachings and return to the pure Gospel given to us in Holy Scripture. Throughout the history of the past 2,000 years there have always been those who proclaimed false teachings – and unfortunately, there are still many who proclaim false teachings.
Luther knew that there is but one true Church of God – one true Church of Christ – which can always properly be called the Church catholic. The answer for reform was to regain the catholicity of the Church of Christ on earth.
Yes, you heard me right – I just used the word “catholic” and I am applying it to us good and faithful Lutherans. Let me explain. The word “catholic” – with a lower-case “c” rather than a capital letter at the start of the word – literally means “universal.” In its true and uncorrupted sense, the catholic Church – again with a lowercase “c” – is the collection of all believers in Christ, the universal Church. It is not a pope that makes the Church catholic; it is the Gospel, believed by every Christian of all times and all places, which makes the Church universal – which makes the Church catholic.
I know that Lutherans don’t like to use the word “catholic,” and by now some of you may be more than a little confused. After all, we proudly proclaim that we are members of the Lutheran Church Missouri Synod, and rightly so. But we – all of us – are members of the universal or catholic Church even though we are most certainly not members of the Roman Catholic Church. The Roman Church may call itself catholic, but it truly is not universal. Attend a Roman Catholic service and the liturgy will sound very familiar to you, and there are other familiar elements as well – the Office of the Ministry, and even preaching and the Sacraments. But it also has elements that are most definitely not shared with the universal catholic Church, because 500 years after the Reformation the Roman Church continues to obscure the Gospel. Rome still turns the Gospel into Law and still turns the Law into Gospel. Rome gives lip service to God’s words from Jeremiah – “For I will forgive their iniquity, and I will remember their sin no more” – but their actions prove otherwise.
True catholicity is found only insofar as the Church believes and proclaims what belongs to all Christians – the everlasting Gospel of Christ. Not the Gospel as it has been twisted and interpreted by men and by councils, but the Gospel exactly and only as Christ has given it to us. This is what makes the Lutheran Church catholic. Rome still teaches that you must do something to complete your salvation. Lutherans teach and believe what Scripture says: “For by grace you have been saved through faith. And this is not your own doing; it is the gift of God, not a result of works, so that no one may boast.” And in the words that Jesus spoke to St. Paul: “My grace is sufficient for you.”
I mentioned earlier that I wanted to talk about the prophet Jeremiah. And that’s because the words I read from Jeremiah point to the one on whom our focus must ultimately be placed on this Reformation Day Sunday and every day of our lives. We focus not on Martin Luther, but on Jesus Christ. In today’s Gospel lesson from John chapter 8, we heard these words of Jesus: “If you abide in my word, you are truly my disciples, and you will know the truth, and the truth will set you free.” If we abide in Christ’s words, we are set free from false teachings. If we abide in Christ’s words, we have the Sacraments of Baptism and the Lord’s Supper exactly as Christ has given them to us and not as mere men want to give them to us. If we abide in Christ’s words, then and only then do we have the new covenant in Christ’s blood, the covenant that simply proclaims to us and all believers of the Church catholic: “I will forgive their iniquity, and I will remember their sin no more.”
I still haven’t translated the title of today’s sermon: Εἶς μίαν ἁγίαν καθολικήν καὶ ἀποστολικήν ἐκκλησίαν. Following today’s Gospel reading we joined to confess our faith in the words of the Nicene Creed, a confession written in Greek by the Council of Nicaea in 325 A.D. and confessed by Christians ever since. Near the end of the Creed we said these words: “I believe in one holy Christian and apostolic Church,” but a translation of the original words would say this: “I believe in one holy catholic and apostolic Church.” Once again, the word “catholic” would have a lower-case “c” – it refers to the universal Church of Christ and not specifically to the Roman Catholic Church. In fact, your hymnal has a footnote following the Nicene Creed, a footnote that reads as follows: “The ancient text reads ‘catholic,’ meaning the whole Church as it confesses the wholeness of Christian doctrine.”
The wholeness of Christian doctrine. That’s why Luther and so many others like him fought so long and hard to reform the Church, to return to the wholeness of Christian doctrine as proclaimed in the Gospel of Jesus Christ. And that is what Jesus was saying when he spoke these words of our Gospel lesson: “If you abide in my word, you are truly my disciples, and you will know the truth, and the truth will set you free.”
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