We have three ELCA colleges in Iowa (five, if you count the two Augustanas at our northwest and southeast corners), and this morning you sit not two miles from the one that only the Danes and Des Moinesians know about. So I bring you greetings from the other ELCA school, Grand View University. If you use E. 14th Street as your route into or out of the city on your travels today, you’ll find yourself in the middle of a healthy and vibrant college that revels in its Danish Grundtvigian tradition of seeing to it that an education is accessible to all. If you’re people who care for justice in the world, and you are, then you should find a place for Grand View in your hearts.
You’re in town today to put your faith to work in advocating for your neighbors or, if you’re a legislator, in opening your ears to your fellow sojourners in the faith. Whether you are the mouth or the ear in the body of Christ today, though, you’re in great danger of slipping into unfaith. For as soon as you are aware of your good intentions, your highly ethical motives, or your being on the right side of the scales of justice, then the Old Eve and Old Adam in you raise their heads out of the baptismal pool and find reason to bray about their accomplishments. We are at the gate leading to holding up our own holy name, our will, and our vision for the kingdom, rather than praying that God’s name be hallowed, that God’s will be done, and that God’s kingdom come. The problem with caring so deeply that you’re willing to take a stand, is that you might just be wrong and, even if you’re right, your rightness may very well lead you into the realm of pride and other great and shameful sins. So although it’s with a hard word that I begin today, there will yet be plenty of good and gracious news to come.
Late in his life, when his collected works in Latin began to be published, Martin Luther had the opportunity in that 16th century version of his “Greatest Hits” to look back on all that had happened in what we’ve come to call the Reformation. In that autobiographical snippet Luther said it didn’t begin with the Ninety-Five Theses and the fight against indulgences that we’ll celebrate with next year’s Luther jubilee. Instead, Luther took his readers back to his time as a friar when he’d been taught the visible works that would make for justice and righteousness in the world and before God. Luther would come to distrust both his own ability to do what is just, right, meet, and salutary and the entire system that assumed it had the market on righteousness cornered.
We can see it at work in Luther’s lectures on Romans a couple years before the explosion of the Theses. Luther would get to his classroom each morning ready to begin his lecture at 6:00 a.m. (a time which allows me to brook no complaining from students in eight o’clock classes). His notes were written on pages of the printed biblical text with wide spacing and generous margins. He moved through Romans verse by verse. Right away we can see Luther questioning anything that looked like a plan for justice or righteousness, either in the world or in the church. He became dubious of anything that sought progress toward goodness through virtuous actions.
By the time of Luther’s predecessor Saint Thomas Aquinas in the 13th century, theology had become thoroughly steeped in the thinking of Aristotle, the philosopher of Greece’s Golden Age. Aristotle argued that all human actions and ideas are aimed at what is good. Doctors want good health. Bridle-makers want good control of your horse. And we, of course, want good living conditions and good opportunity for all people in Iowa. Aristotle’s stance was that we advance toward goodness on a route from vice to virtue. We choose to act virtuously, we do good in the world, and we avoid the bad. Our philosophical friend said that we won’t ever achieve complete goodness, but we’re always on our way. Our life needs to be one that makes a habit of virtue.
I’ve decided to learn a piano piece this semester. I had a year of lessons in sixth grade and about three weeks in college. I’ve basically taught myself to play, but I’m not satisfied with my ability. I don’t even have a single piece memorized. So I’ve decided that I’m going to learn a piece so well that I can sit down at any piano without music and play it. I’ve chosen Robert Schumann’s lovely little piece “Träumerei.” I’m fortunate that the Theology and Philosophy Department is housed in the same building as the Music Department with all its studios and practice rooms. Every day when I get to my office, I grab my single page of music and walk across the atrium to the piano studio. There I sit down at a Steinway and play through my piece three times. I’m getting really good, but I’m still reliant on the music. I want to get to the point where I no longer have to think about the notes and simply play. That’s what Aristotle aimed for in his discussion of ethics and virtue. We ought to practice what is virtuous so that we no longer have to think about the ins and outs of goodness, but we’ll simply do the right thing. And we’ll get better and better and better. Every day. In every way. It’ll be a movement of progress into a better world than existed in our unenlightened, unvirtuous past.
That’s a way of thinking that the church picked up and ran with like a Denver Broncos running back, and it’s deeply embedded in the ethos of the American way. We see ourselves as progressing to the better if not to the fully good. We strive to pull ourselves up by our own ethical bootstraps. We set ourselves up as individual cities on the hill, shining out with the virtue of our own light. By Luther’s day, the church in which he’d been reared had an entire structure built on engaging in the virtues of its sacramental practices. Even though it pushed Luther to come to a position directly counter to it theologically, it also opened up a critique that extended to all our projects to create what is just and right in the world. In contrast to Aristotle and all the Christian theologians who were influenced by his thinking, Luther would come to argue that you don’t become good by doing good works. Instead God alone makes you good by freeing you with the gospel. Luther likened people of faith to good trees that automatically bear good fruit without thinking whether they ought to or not. (More on that in a bit.)
The very first day of Luther’s lecturing on Romans, he went on the attack. Here’s how he began: “The chief purpose of [Paul’s letter to the Romans] is to break down, to pluck up, and to destroy all the wisdom and righteousness of the flesh. This includes all the works which in the eyes of people or even in our own eyes may be great works.” What Luther was getting at is what lies at the core of what we’ll be celebrating in the coming year-long jubilee. For Luther, Christ is the one, the only one, who brings salvation and who ushers in the acceptable and eternal year of jubilee when the poor, the cast down, and the disconsolate are given succor, when justice rains down like water, and when sinners’ robes are washed in his blood. If Jesus is the way, the truth, and the life, if it is his cross by which the world’s stripes are healed, then all other comers must be rejected.
In short, for Luther, your good works and valued contributions to a better Iowa on behalf of your neighbors can’t have any bearing on your salvation. Luther was well aware of how the works of the flesh Paul lists in Galatians keep us from entering the kingdom of God. But in his Romans commentary and throughout the next 31 years of Luther’s life and career – even to his final written words, “We are beggars” – Luther showed us that being good religious boys and girls is just as likely to land us in God’s condemnation as being spiritual truants and delinquents will. So Luther in Romans rejected the path of our spiritual journey from vice to virtue. Bad deeds show our rejection of God and our fall away from Eden. But reliance on our good deeds is, for Luther, an equal rejection of God, for there, too, we have no need of Christ, self-reliant and holy and just that we are. So Luther argued that what God seeks instead is “an exodus from virtues to the grace of Christ.”
In the City Church in Wittenberg, Germany, you can find an altarpiece painted by Luther’s friend Lucas Cranach. The top three panels depict baptism, the Lord’s Supper, and the Office of the Keys, that is, the announcement of forgiveness to those who repent of their sins. The panel beneath those three, though, shows a congregation at worship on the left listening to the preacher in a pulpit on the right. The preacher is Luther, and standing between him and his congregation is Christ on the cross with a white cloth symbolizing the Resurrection floating in the air around him. If you have a smart phone you can Google “Wittenberg altarpiece” right now and see a picture. Lucas Cranach understood what Luther was after. For Luther, Christ is all in all. Christ is the one who brings in God’s gracious rule on the cross and whose Resurrection seals the deal. All Luther has to do is point to Christ, forsaking everything else that presents itself as something that can save us.
This is exactly what Paul is up to in his Galatians letter. When Paul says we are justified by faith apart from works of the law, he’s setting up two categories. There’s Jesus Christ who saves, and there’s everything else that doesn’t save – even the best, most virtuous and just things we can think of. When you have that down, you will discover endless freedom. Paul urges the Galatians to cling to that when he says, “For freedom Christ has set us free. Do not submit again to a yoke of slavery.” All of which is fine, except for the fact that we’re here today to do what I regard as truly important, virtuous, and good works. You’ve been called to love your neighbors as yourself, for crying out loud. And you’re champing at the bit to do that important advocating.
Each semester in my “Christian Faith and Life” course, I require students to form groups to plan and implement a service project. At the same time, they have to read Galatians and Luther’s treatise on Christian freedom. In their final papers they have to deal with the same question before us: If our good works like their service projects have no bearing whatsoever on our salvation, then why would anyone ever fight for justice, to house the homeless, to feed the hungry, to garner living wages for the poor? Will we only do that if we’ve got a whip snapping at our withers? Will college students only do good works if a professor demands it of them in order to merit a good grade in the course? Will human beings only care for their neighbors if it gets them in the pearly gates and out of the fire and brimstone of the devil’s realm?
In “Freedom of a Christian,” five years after his Romans lectures, Luther held up the one thing that makes it all work: the Word of God. This gospel word has come to you. I know this because, one, you’re here listening to me, for only the faithful would subject themselves to a mid-morning lecture when they could be having coffee at Scenic Route Bakery two blocks away, and, two, you actually have hearts for this business of caring for your neighbors. At Grand View University we like to make a distinction between an education based on transaction and one that arises from transformation. You can see college as a transaction in which you put in your time and effort and in turn receive a good grade. You parlay that and all your other courses into college transcript and a degree and engage in another transaction where you trade it for a job. Which leads you to trade your time and effort in a job for a salary and benefits, which in turn gets traded for a suburban home and riding lawnmower along with an end to school loan payments when you’re 70. That’s a lot of transacting, and it all starts with seeing college as the first in a pearly string of transactions that extends to our graves.
But what college is really about is a transformation. I teach one of our first-year seminars, and have had the same batch of 20 freshmen in class all school year. And I see the transformation at work in them already. And it has little to do with the grade they’ve received on their latest lab report, paper, or test. We don’t take freshmen and move them from the vice of being unschooled and unaware of important facts and figures. Instead, in relationships with their peers, with professors and staff, and with countless thinkers that have emerged over the ages in human history, they grow in their understanding of their relationship to ideas, to thinkers, to the world’s structures, to empires, to the oppressed and downtrodden and disenfranchised, and, of course, to God. Luther used the word “conscience” for this awareness of your relationships with those around you. I’d argue that what we do at Grand View is to grow consciences bent on engagement with the world. And because we’re a college of the church, we’re privileged to also give witness to the gospel that quells troubled consciences with Christ’s mercy and calls students into lives of service as God’s hands at work.
Lutherans on the Hill is a day of transformation. It’s not a tit-for-tat lobbying effort. It happens because you yourselves have been transformed by the gospel. And speaking to one another about these matters of import is what the reformers called “the mutual conversation and consolation of the saints.” When you go to the Capitol for those conversations, you are revealing how you’ve been transformed. You’re showing that you’ve heard God’s word. You’re showing that your eyes have been opened; the scales have fallen away to be able to see your neighbor’s need. The Holy Spirit, whom John’s gospel calls “The Advocate,” has brought you to such faith that your life has begun to take the shape of the cross. It has made you sympathetic, literally sharing suffering with another. Your transformation at the behest of the Spirit to work faith when and where it wills extends Christ’s transformation of the world beyond the dictatorship of the self out into the world.
That’s how the Holy Spirit has operated since the day of Pentecost. Whenever people of God have attempted to enclose themselves in a safe circle, the Spirit has broken it open. It happened to Peter and the disciples that day in Jerusalem, to Lydia and Dorcas, Augustine and Monica, Abelard and Heloise, Martin Luther and Martin Luther King. The Spirit will not rest though you be idle. Even now, Paul reminds us, we are being made anew, fit for worship and service.
The language we use to talk about this centers around the word “vocation.” This language verges on a gnostic secret that we Lutherans seem leery to speak of and whose contrasting picture of the Christian life we’re reluctant to let the world in on. What we’re up to in educating our students at Grand View and what you as the church are here to do today is vocation. This doctrine of vocation that was near and dear to Luther is too little heralded in Lutheran circles and much less in the wider world. Although good works like advocacy aren’t a criterion for salvation, they are an essential element of the Christian life.
In “Freedom of a Christian,” Luther asserted that Christians do good works for two reasons. The first is your neighbor’s need. The poor and dispossessed, the homeless and hungry, as well as less exotic folk like your children, your aging parents, your fellow drivers on I-80, and the SOB down the street whose dumpster tipped over in the wind, all need your good works. God uses your actions to make the world safe, secure, orderly, just, and fair. You’re going to wind up with a howling newborn if there’s no diaper change and feeding at 2:00 a.m. You’ll drive through a neighborhood strewn with biodegrading recyclables if you don’t gather up what’s tipped out of the dumpster. You’ll have an underclass crying out for justice if you don’t see to it that issues of equality, opportunity, and wealth aren’t addressed. The Advocate has empowered you with the will and the words that make a difference today. Your faithful participation in the democracy is salt, leaven, and light.
The other reason Luther said we do good works is to control the flesh. He doesn’t mean that our souls are good but our bodies are bad. Instead he’s using Paul’s distinction between the spirit and the flesh, that is, between our God-given trust in Christ and our eternally sinful desire to justify ourselves and work to our own benefit. If you can’t accomplish salvation and have to leave it to your Lord on the cross, you can, however, have quite a hand in God’s work of restricting the sinful half of simul iustus et peccator, the “simultaneously saint and sinner” description Luther labeled us with. As my students might say, we do good works because it sucks to do them. The Old Sinner in us hates to do good works like you’re up to today.
When I ask my students to do a service project, I always tell them about a Catholic boys high school in Cleveland, Ohio. A small group of boys who’d been challenged to do works of charity as people of faith decided they would serve as pallbearers for the indigent and for those in need, for people who’d died without any family or friends around. They called themselves the Arimathea Society after Joseph of Arimathea whose tomb Jesus was buried in. And now they have about two hundred guys in tan pants and blue blazers who honor their neighbors by carrying them to their graves. That’s a mighty act of faith, yet though I praise it to heck and back not a single group of my students has ever been willing to come close to anything as frightening as graves and dead bodies. They can’t bring themselves to do it, but think of the transformation if they did.
I, for one, am an everlasting introvert, and to think about button-holing a legislator I don’t personally know to talk about an issue vital to my neighbor’s interest is a nightmare scenario. But when faith happens in me, I begin to see how the sinner in me is what lies beneath my reluctance, and, given what Christ has done for me on the cross, I don’t want my sinful nature to gain the upper hand. So I do counter-intuitive counter-introverted stuff like talking to strangers, like naming the truth about society’s ills, like speaking the name of Christ in a world that doesn’t want to hear it.
Now everything I’ve said is well and good, but there’s one more thing to think about today. It has to do with Jesus’ parable of the sheep and the goats in Matthew 25. You know the one: the Son of Man comes in glory and separates his sheep from his goats. To the sheep he says, “I was hungry and you fed me. I was naked and you clothed me. I was bereft of music and you gave me an iTunes gift card. Etc. Etc.” The goats, though, get a declaration that they did no such thing. Both the sheep and the goats are dumbfounded. They say, “When, Lord? When did that happen?” Here’s the thing: If you made a decision to come to Des Moines for Lutheran Day on the Hill today, then you’re not quite at the sheeply spot where the Lord wants you to be yet. When Jesus calls the disciples in the gospels by saying, “Follow me,” not a single evangelist says the disciples sat down to make a rational faith-based decision. They simply dropped their nets, put down their tax-collection account records, left their families, and went after the one who had called them. You’re on your way, to be sure, but God is even now making you into someone who doesn’t even need to think about your neighbor’s needs or about curtailing the fleshly sinful side of you.
God is already creating a new you that bears the fruit of the Spirit: love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, generosity, faithfulness, gentleness, and self-control. In Galatians Paul says these things need no law to tell you to do them. And I’d add that they need no rational thinking either. Christ calls you to your vocations without thought or intention. The Advocate is remaking you into little advocates who bring the gospel to bear in the world with no goodness aforethought. And the way it happens is exactly how Luther said it does – by means of the gospel. If you’re to work freely in the world, you simply need to be freed. So let me do what I’m called to do as one of the church’s public proclaimers. Let me give you the word that the Advocate reshapes, revives, and resurrects you with: For Christ’s sake you are forgiven. With no contribution of your own, our Lord has you tucked into his spear wound to bear you into eternity with him. On Jesus’ account, there’s nothing that can separate you from the love of God. You’re free. Hey, look! There’s a neighbor in need. And over there there’s a legislator. Let’s see what kinds of advocates you’ve been made to be right here and right now.
