A continuation of the holy gospel according to Luke. Jesus said to his disciples let your belts be fastened around your waists and your lamps be burning. Ready. Be like men awaiting their master's return from a wedding so that when he arrives and knocks, you will open for him at once. It will go well with those servants whom the master finds wide awake when he returns.
I tell you, he will put on an apron, seat them at his own table, and proceed to wait upon. Should he happen to come at midnight or before sunrise and find them prepared, it will go well with them. And this is the gospel of the lord. Praise be to god. In the name of the father and of the son and of the holy spirit, amen.
If at times I have antimadvertent to the destruction of the holy word of our lord, the good news, the gospel, by breaking it up into these little tiny segments that we do morning after morning, what else can you do? Then, you take a letter of Saint Paul, such as we've been reading to the Romans, and break that up and read a paragraph or a paragraph and a half. It's even worse because it can be so downright misleading. Now I ask you to remember this. This epistle, this letter that we have been reading to the Romans from Saint Paul, there is one sentence in there that changed Martin Luther's life, and it is no exaggeration to say that Martin Luther changed the face of Europe and to even the face of Western Christendom.
That's no exaggeration. He wasn't alone. There were other forces. But by and large, he's at the top of the pyramid. And maybe you could say it's the pyramid upside down, either way you want to look at it.
But Luther was, a a all dispute, a moving efficient cause of what we call the Protestant Reformation. Calvin, Knox, all the rest of them. I'm not talking about England. That's a different story. But what we call Protestantism or Lutheranism or any words of that sort, they that goes back to Martin Luther.
And what changed his life was one sentence from this letter where Saint Paul said, I remarked upon it the other morning, where Saint Paul says, my just man lives by faith. And good old Martin put in one little word in Latin, meaning only. So it came out this was Luther's great revelation. I I mean this in a literal sense. We don't know precisely what happened.
He never said. But we know be from what he says that something very dramatic happened to him one day, at a very special day, at a certain time, no guesswork about it, that opened to him a whole new universe that solved all his conscientious doubts, all his confusion, and that had to do with this letter of Paul to the Romans and especially that one sentence that my just man lives by faith, and Luther added alone. This whole letter is about faith, and you can and justice in English. You can't just take one sentence out of it. You can't take one paragraph out of it.
You you have to take it in its totality. And this is just a letter. This is you can read this in minutes if you say this letter to the Romans. And it's not to us, it's not translucently clear. I'm not saying that at all.
Because what Paul is telling us, it it has to do with a whole drama of man's creation, of original sin, of man's fall and condemnation, of his justification. How? Through God, through his son Jesus Christ, the redemption. But these things are tremendous concepts. They are beyond our imagining.
And such words as justice, condemnation, sin, and especially that word justice is a toughie to try to figure out just what is Paul talking about here. It isn't simple. It's a letter. It's like a telephone conversation that you only hear from the one end. And so I recommend this letter to you fervently.
I recommend a lot of things, don't I? But you know, it's I feel I feel like I'm a conspirator in a tragedy in in encouraging people to take little excerpts and make something of them because that on that are has been built have been built the worst heresies in the church. And I'll give you one startling example. That's this business of how are we saved. And Martin Luther says we're saved by faith alone.
How do you know it? Paul says it to the Romans. Where does he say? Well, right there before you. Except there's no word only there.
No word only. Now I am not about to stand in this pulpit and resolve this problem, which is the great problem on the one hand that I am saved through the merits and grace of Jesus Christ, and I cannot be saved without it. You don't hear much about that these days. Yet that this is the theme that Martin Luther pushed, and he was right there. You can't deny that.
Paul says it time and again. I can't save myself. Now you think of this in terms of the of the thrust of what we call the churches today. Where is the thrust towards faith in god? There's it's much more benevolence towards man, including women.
The whole thrust. And yet, Paul says, you're going to you can't be saved without the grace and faith of Jesus Christ. And Martin Luther was right in that regard, absolutely right. And we think of him, you know, as isolated. And then you have to think of him in the Renaissance down in Italy, the Roman church which was going to pot.
Anybody would have predicted that it was on the verge of calamity, that its end had come, who knew anything that was going on. When you had men sweeping up, and of course, were Italians coming up from Italy, going up into into Northern Europe, Well, right away, you had conflict. They could have been with the they could have been splendid saints, and there would have been prejudice against them in Northern Europe coming down there from the Renaissance Italy. And here they're coming up there and spreading the good word, as we say, selling indulgences. And you can you can, gloss that over all you want, but that's the way it appeared.
And the whole emphasis was do this, do that, give your money there, build this church, do that, and you'll be saved. And Luther stood up and says, you're not going to be saved by what you do. You can only be saved by what Christ did for you. And then, of course, when when someone quietly said, look, Martin, you know, Saint James says that faith without good works is dead. Well, Luther just conveniently said, oh, that's a spurious gospel.
Throw that out. I mean, epistle. So he threw out that little letter of James, but he didn't throw out the problem because the problem consist continued to exist. How are we saved? We cannot be saved without the grace of Jesus Christ.
Thomas More went all over this when he was a prisoner in the tower, And he tried. He was remember, at his time, England was not Protestant. Just keep this in mind. Henry was a good, god fearing Catholic, a daily communicant. So when Thomas More, in the tower, because at the request of his great and good friend Henry, waiting to have waiting to be executed, he faced up to this problem and tried to to put some sense into this great conflict which separated the Protestants on the one hand and Catholics on the other.
That is those who are following Luther, that you can only be saved by faith alone and that good works, forget it, can't save you. And on the other hand, the Catholic position which says you can be you cannot be saved by your good works. You can be saved only by the faith of Jesus Christ and his grace, but faith without good works is dead. And there you have How do you resolve these two things? How do you put them together?
It's the problem that has come down. Augustine faced it faced it under the under Pelagius and the Pelagian heresy. We we have it with us all the time because now you're coming in with all the problems of free will, man's responsibility, man's autonomy, that God doesn't save man against his own will. If that is true, then man's will has something to do with his salvation. He can't escape it.
He cannot escape it. So all I can say in summary of a problem that has been with us for centuries, centuries, centuries, centuries is that I cannot be saved by anything that I do of myself. It is impossible. I can only be saved by the faith and the in Jesus Christ and his grace, which is a free gift. And on the other hand, I have to keep the words of James before me because it's our lord.
He he certainly didn't deny the meritoriousness of good works. My golly, just think of what our lord said about good what you're supposed to do, how you're supposed to live. And so I have to say that all the faith I may have, faith without good works is dead. So we come to this conclusion that I and my salvation depends absolutely and essentially on God, but in some measure, be it ever so little, be it ever so scant, in some measure, it depends on myself. I have a contribution to make to my salvation, and that puts the fear of the lord in me.
In the name of the father, son, and the holy spirit. Amen.