The Rev. Joseph Farnes
All Saints, Boise
Proper 5A
St Paul’s letter to the Romans was the center of the Protestant Reformation. On it the whole question of justification turned. Catholicism, at the time, taught that your works were essential to your salvation and being made right before God; the Protestants, as they developed their theology, said that it was purely by God’s good gift that we are made whole, that our works do not earn any kind of reward.
The Law, as the Protestants would put it, stood in for any kind of works. If we thought that fasting on Fridays, novenas, or buying indulgences made any kind of difference to God, then God was basically a vending machine for works. Put in x amount of works, push the button, get this reward. Works could be many things: certain prayers, donations given to the poor or to the church, the list goes on. This caused Martin Luther endless anxiety, because he wondered how many works he had to put into this system in order to be sure he would receive the gift of salvation; would he find himself standing before God on Judgment Day and find that he was a nickel short of salvation?
Catholics would point to the whole concept of Purgatory. Salvation assumes that few would leap right into heaven; Purgatory made space for most of us to be purged of our sins on our way to heaven, and that while it was noble to aspire to be a capital-S saint, there was still a way for “regular” folks to get to heaven. God recognizes the messiness of life, and good works are signs that our heart still move in the right direction. God can work miracles, after all.
I imagine if that whole business of indulgences being sold hadn’t been going on, Luther’s anxiety might have been less explosive. But Luther was right in pointing out that the idea that we could buy time off in purgatory by giving money to the institutional church was blasphemous. Giving money to get my uncle out of Purgatory sounded much like a corrupt justice system – which we see in the headlines, where being rich gives access to appeals, favors, and pardons that are beyond the reach of the poor. The notion of good works earning our salvation was always going to lead back to viewing the Law as “do this, get a reward” kind of system.
And so the Protestant Reformation declared that all of this was a sham, and they went straight to the root: the Protestants said that there is absolutely nothing we can do to make God save us from ourselves and our sins. We cannot bribe God with prayer, fasting, or almsgiving. God gives salvation as a free gift, plain and simple. Salvation is through faith, they pointed out. God made a promise to Abraham, and that promise wasn’t dependent upon Abraham or his descendants doing good works. Salvation is a gift, it is grace, it is freely given because God is good. Everything stems from God good nature – God is not obligated to give, but chooses to.
In 1999, the Lutherans and the Catholics came to a common agreement around the doctrine of justification, ultimately saying: “Together we confess: By grace alone, in faith in Christ’s saving work and not because of any merit on our part, we are accepted by God and receive the Holy Spirit, who renews our hearts while equipping and calling us to good works.”[1]
We don’t earn our salvation; God is not bound by the Law to give us a reward in return for our works. Everything God gives is a free gift because God is good and God has promised. What we do with that gift is what we call the Christian life.
This seems like it should be a nice, tidy ending. “Hooray! We agree on this basic Christian doctrine now!” But, the truth is, the problem the Protestants were pointing out was bigger, and it would continue to plague Protestants and the world.
Protestantism in its early decades started to fracture not only around communion but also around what the Christian life entailed. If salvation was God’s free gift, then who was in and who was out? Who was saved, and who was not? If I couldn’t pick out my saintly neighbor and say, “Oh, she’s going right to heaven” and look at that terrible person down the road and smugly say, “Oh, he’s going straight to hell,” then what was the Christian life all about? If my prayers don’t get God to like me, then do I need to pray? If giving generously to the church or the poor doesn’t make a difference in my eternal destination, then do I really have to do that? If there’s no reward, then do I have to do it? Shouldn’t I just do whatever I want?
This has been a plague down the generations. When we’re young, it makes sense that we need a reward to help us get to do the right thing. We need something concrete to help us make a decision: parental approval, a treat. And then we move onto less-tangible things, like feeling good, and eventually we do it because we just simply think it’s the right thing to do.[2]
But our motivations can still be mixed. Partly that’s just out of being human. Our moral thinking is rarely tidy – we still have traces of our childhood desire to do right because others will be happy with us and maybe we can also get a cookie.
Yet we should still take the time to ask why we do what we do. Christian behavior in America would merit some reflection. Did we do it because we believed, or did we do it for something else? Generations of Christians have been persuaded that they needed to go to church to get in with the right people. We Episcopalians should be mindful that we once were the church of the well-resourced and well-connected, and that was a lot of desirable status to have access to. Generations of Christians have gone to church yet avoided the work of abolishing slavery, proclaiming the dignity of women, protecting the Indigenous nations, or aiding the causes of the working class because those were too “controversial” and the church was supposed to be piously neutral. Generations of Christians have gone to church to prove they were the right kind of people: respectable people, not moral deviants, and definitely not Communists. It’s interesting that there was a sudden drop in American Church attendance once the Soviet Union fell apart and the economic boom of the 90s started. The Protestant Reformation brought our attention to our motivation – do we do the right thing because we trust and celebrate God’s goodness, or do we want to get something out of it? Christian life is hard. Following Jesus is hard. Building community is hard. We need a spiritual, moral, and community foundation that leads us to discern the will of God not so we can get it right and get rewarded, but because we know that God is good and we are made in the image of God. God is perfect love, the Holy Spirit is at work in us, the eternal life of Jesus Christ flows in us now and forevermore – if we have this free gift now and always, do we really need something more? Amen.
[1] Joint Declaration on the Doctrine of Justification, article 15
[2] See Lawrence Kohlberg’s Stages of Moral Development.